How Well Has NCLB Worked? How Do We Get the Revisions We Want?

Abstract

LOOK south from the corner of the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., and the front door of the White House is squarely in the center of your view. Look north, and you can see a corner of the National Education Association building on 16th Street. Around the corner is the entrance to the offices of the Washington Post. Glance from side to side, and you see a stretch of the infamous K Street, the land of the lobbyists. One block west and one south is a stop for the Blue Line Metro, which can take you directly to the middle of the House of Representatives buildings. This hotel has always been a strategic and sometimes history-making place. In one of its ballrooms, the late Terry Sanford, then governor of and later senator from North Carolina, announced an unusual compact for education: the agreement to form the Education Commission of the States. Before other venues closer to the Capitol were built, this was a favorite site for the conferences of education groups, the release of major reports, and no doubt some deal making in the lobby bar. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It was a fitting place for Phi Delta Kappa International to hold its 2006 Summit on Public Education, the formal culmination of a year of events celebrating the centennial of PDK, the professional association in education. In this cradle of policy making, politics, and media, PDK appropriately turned its attention to one of the most extraordinary happenings in education policy of the last century--the No Child Left Behind Act. The law was conceived by the White House and passed by Congress on a nonpartisan basis. Since it first took effect in 2002, it has been the focus of intense lobbying by many groups wanting to change it. Now, after more than four years, it stands accused of not doing very much, very fast, for the children attending schools just a few blocks from the hotel, the kind of struggling and often neglected students the law is intended to help the most. This juxtaposition of good intentions and stark realities characterized much of the discussion, both formal and informal, at the Summit. A panel of national policy experts, prodded and kept on track by questions from John Merrow, education correspondent for PBS' NewsHour, opened the conversations with a mixture of praise, some misgivings, and a few suggestions for changes in a law that is not going to go away. The panelists were a lot nicer than many in the audience wanted them to be. In breakout sessions focused on what the panelists had said, PDK members and others voiced frustration at how the law is playing out in their classrooms, school districts, and higher education institutions. The panelists, for example, counted the greater attention paid to children in special education as a plus in the law. That's true, participants said in the small-group discussions, but the law's accountability provisions work against the best interests of these children. Panel member Sandy Kress, an architect of the legislation for President Bush and former school board president in Dallas, said passionately that the law allows no excuses for the achievement gap. I think part of what gets No Child Left Behind into trouble is, it means [what it says]. There are teeth to it, more teeth to it than anywhere in any previous act of legislation. Those in the small-group discussions agreed but argued that the accountability provisions are in need of a good cleaning. The panelists welcomed the fact that ensuring good teachers for classrooms in high-poverty schools was on the table. But even the panelists did not equate the law's definition of highly qualified with real competence, and Summit participants, many of them teachers, decried the law's effect on excellent teachers who had been made to feel that they are failures because of NCLB's statistical definition of adequate yearly progress (AYP). The panelists and Summit participants certainly agreed that NCLB has provoked a national discussion about public education and has made public the significant achievement gap among the nation's students. …