States Feel the Crunch of NCLB

Abstract

STOP THE wishful thinking! No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not going away. In fact, it might not even undergo more than minor modifications before it comes up for reauthorization in a couple of years. The nomination of Margaret Spellings to replace Rod Paige as U.S. secretary of education foretells not only a single-minded focus on test-based accountability but also an extension of the notion in full force into the high schools. The incoming Bush Administration will probably continue the attempt of the outgoing Bush Administration to use reauthorization of the Perkins Act as leverage to hold high schools even more accountable for academic (that is, test-based) progress. Moreover, an alliance of interesting partners, from liberal to conservative, supports this kind of high school reform. All sorts of metaphors and similes come to mind -- adding insult to injury, sitting a gorilla on a house of cards, or stretching beyond belief. Marc Tucker and Tom Toch said it graphically in a recent Washington Monthly article, which was adapted for the September Kappan: Like 220 volts of current being forced through a 110-volt kitchen appliance, the system is becoming overloaded, and the is rising. The system they refer to is not local schools. Most reformers recognize that schools that persist in failure are too overwhelmed to know what they need to do. No, the system that's starting to smoke is our disparate collection of state education agencies, which, on the assumption that they actually know what to do, have been charged with making NCLB work. Much of the responsibility for improving schools has shifted from local school boards to state education agencies, without much thought as to the consequences. As a U.S. Department of Education official, Michael Cohen watched many states finagle their way around the 1994 mandates that preceded NCLB. The 1994 changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) embodied a bargain Lamar Alexander made with educators when he was governor of Tennessee and president of the National Governors' Association: we give you flexibility; you give us results. At a meeting this past September, Cohen ruefully said that the bargain should have been: we give you capacity; you give us results. Capacity is the magic word, and many states just don't have it. Those that do are losing their leadership because of the onus of NCLB. Both the 1994 and the 2001 remakes of ESEA ignored the paucity of investment in state-level leadership capacity since the federal government totally lost interest at the beginning of the Reagan Administration. When ESEA was first passed in the 1960s, it contained a separate funding stream to develop the leadership of state education agencies so that they could carry out the changes required under the law. Over the years, federally supported staff members became the core -- or at least a major part -- of the staffs of state agencies. But federal support waned and finally disappeared under the block grant consolidation of programs pushed by the first Reagan Administration. Typically, state legislatures did not replenish the lost support for their state education departments. But, as long as demands upon the agencies were limited to such things as developing minimal competency testing, few policy makers paid much notice. The expertise of education agencies tended to focus more on pushing paper than on ambitious reforms. Some states began to realize the need for better leadership in their education agencies before 1994, but the changes to ESEA that year increased pressure on the agencies. State-level leaders were in the driver's seat. In Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, California, and several other states, there were people with ideas and enough energy to begin to craft good standards-based systems. …