A Horse Called NCLB

Abstract

WHEN the horse dies, many school reformers advise riders to dismount. Don't buy a new whip, don't form a committee to study the horse, and don't blame horses. In other words, when things are not working, change them. The same advice should be given to those who are riding a crazy horse that is galloping at full speed toward a cliff. Get off and find a mount that will get you where you want to go -- presumably not the bottom of a precipice, with you in a mangled heap. The trouble is that one particularly crazy horse -- test-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act -- is being ridden by advocates for poor children and guardians of rigorous for all as if it were a Kentucky Derby winner instead of a maniac steed bent on self-destruction. Let's be brutally honest. The early evidence of the impact of NCLB's test-based accountability on the states indicates that it is undermining many good policies, fostering some bad ones, and creating resentments that will not ease until better policies are developed and put in place. The growing criticism of the policies does not mean that people reject the goals of the legislation or the goals of accountability per se. Rather, the criticism stems from a realization that current standardized, high-stakes testing narrows the whole enterprise of education and could halt the development of truly significant improvements in teaching and learning. Undoubtedly, Richard Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education speaks for many when he contends that internal accountability must precede external accountability. That is, the people inside a low- performing school, for example, must know what to do to improve student achievement and have a coherent system of beliefs and practices before any significant change can take place. Without substantial investments in schools' capacity, test-based accountability will probably aggravate existing inequalities, Elmore wrote in the spring 2002 issue of Education Next. High-performing schools essentially reflect the social capital students bring to school. Low-performing schools most often cannot rely on these supports but, instead, must turn to their own organizational capacity, Elmore notes. While NCLB provides more money for these low-performing schools, it cannot match the intensity of effort applied to the accountability side of the issue, so the low-income schools will slip even further behind. Once, when fairness was considered important, the movement for higher standards and better assessments was coupled with opportunity-to-learn standards. This last item dropped off the agenda when state governors realized that it came with a hefty price tag, especially in the form of increased investment in teacher quality and improved working conditions that few state leaders were willing to support. Nor were local leaders altogether willing to work with teacher unions to find a way to distribute experienced and highly qualified teachers to the neediest schools. There is a reason why educators who don't know what to do are clustered in low-income schools. It is because policy makers have put them there -- and now are demanding that they be held more accountable for improvement than those who teach in more affluent schools. At the same time, NCLB assumes -- falsely -- that states have the capacity to fulfill its testing requirements. Not even half the states came close to meeting the NCLB mandate of testing every year at grades 3 through 8 when the legislation was passed. As the Clinton Administration was leaving office, it had found fewer than half of the states in compliance with the 1994 changes in Title I, changes that nudged, rather than bludgeoned, the states toward performance standards and assessments. Some states were doing quite well, but NCLB created new demands. Maryland, for example, could not afford to keep making improvements in its performance-based system of testing and still comply with NCLB. …