Is Your Child's School Effective?: Don't Rely on NCLB to Tell You.

Checked: No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, Title I: Yearly Florida A+ Plan: School Grades No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal school-accountability law, is widely held to have accomplished one good thing: require states to publish test-score results in math and reading for each school in grades 3 through 8 and again in grade 10. The results appear to be telling parents whether their child's school is doing a better job than the one across town, in the neighboring city, or across the state. But accountability works only if the yardstick used to measure performance is reasonably accurate. Unfortunately, the yardstick required by the federal law is not. Our analysis of its workings in Florida reveals it to be badly flawed and not as accurate as the measuring stick employed by the state of Florida for similar purposes. To her credit, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has apparently recognized the need to fix the NCLB yardstick. In November 2005, she announced a pilot program that would allow a few selected states to incorporate student growth into their AYP grading scheme. Although 20 states initially requested to participate, only 2--Tennessee and North Carolina--have so far been given the go-ahead, and the modifications they have been allowed to make are relatively minor. Meanwhile, the yardstick to be used by the other 48 remains as defective as ever. Part of the problem is that NCLB makes only crude distinctions between schools achieving performance benchmarks and schools not doing so. Florida's grading system divides schools into five different categories, just as teachers do when they grade students on a scale from A to F. (See Figure 1 for the number of schools that received each mark.) Another part of the problem is that the federal approach pays only a passing nod to the improvement made by individual students, while Florida's own method takes into account how much specific students have learned in a given year--exactly what parents care about. It is not that Governor Jeb Bush (and his legislature) got it exactly right, while his brother (and Congress) ran amuck. But there is little doubt that NCLB needs repairing, something that Congress can do when the federal law is reauthorized. Measuring Quality Finding the right yardstick is no easy task. Not everyone agrees on what makes for a good school. Some reject test scores, while others care more about building students' character than boosting their academic achievement. But Congress took a clear stance on the issue in NCLB when it determined that a school with subpar student test scores in reading and math is not doing its job. Most Americans would agree that schools should aim to ensure that all students are proficient in these core subjects. NCLB requires states to divide schools into those making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward the goal of having all of their students proficient in math and reading by 2014 and those that aren't. While the term progress would seem to imply that the law considers how much students are learning over time, the federal system in fact is based on a series of snapshots that fail to track individual students from one year to the next. Instead, to make AYP, schools must meet statewide targets for the percentage of students each year who are proficient. Those targets are gradually increased until they reach 100 percent in 2014. The percentage of proficient students within various subgroups, broken out by ethnicity, income, disability, and English-language-learner status, must also meet these same targets. If a school does not make AYP for two consecutive years, parents are given the choice of another school and, after five failing years the school is to be restructured. But does the AYP yardstick actually distinguish between higher- and lower-quality schools? The answer to this question is best obtained by looking at how much students at the school know at the end of the year, as compared to how much those same students knew one year previously. …