Held Back: No Child Left Behind Needs Some Work

PASSED BY CONGRESS late 2001 and signed by President George W. one year after his inauguration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the most ambitious federal education statute ever. It overhauled and expanded Washington's role education, rewrote the rules, and set out to boost pupil achievement, narrow a host of learning gaps, and assure every student a highly qualified teacher. The law's main engine, however, is an historic attempt to impose a results-based accountability regime on schools across the land. After five years of experience with a statute that aims to produce (in math and reading, mainly grades 3-8) by 2014, and with reauthorization looming, it's time to draw some conclusions about how NCLB has unfolded on the ground--and how it ought to be changed. Though NCLB is routinely labeled a Bush law--in no small part because the White House has proclaimed it a great domestic achievement while prominent Democrats have been far more equivocal--in fact its provisions are a Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of administration proposals, New Democrat schemes, liberal nostrums, and proposals and cautions introduced by countless other constituencies, all superimposed upon programmatic habits, architecture, and rules that had accumulated like reefs federal education policy since LBJ worked the Oval Office. Indeed, from the outset it was clear that implementing this mish-mash would recall the phrase that the late Daniel P. Moynihan used to describe LBJ'S multifaceted community action program: maximum feasible misunderstanding. Accountability NCLB'S ACCOUNTABILITY ENGINE is driven by two pistons: insisting that states adopt systematic standards and testing for schools and districts; then intervening ineffective schools and districts while also providing immediate relief for their pupils. Congress charged states with defining and adopting the standards and tests while spelling out considerable detail the remedies that states and districts are responsible for providing. Yes, the statute contains hundreds of other provisions. But if its two main pistons aren't firing well, this complex engine won't budge the massive barge that is American schooling--much less render it a more agile craft. On the assessment front, NCLB requires that all schools annually test all their students grades 3-8 reading and math and that every state measure whether its schools are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward universal proficiency those core subjects by 2014. Each school must meet steadily rising goals every demographic subgroup: by race, disability, English language status, and so on. Schools are then evaluated on the past year's achievement of each category which they enroll a minimum number of students (that number being determined by the state, subject to federal approval). If a school fails to any of those categories for two consecutive years, it is judged to be in need of improvement; if that school receives federal Title 1 dollars, it is then subject to a cascade of sanctions and interventions that grow more draconian with each additional year of failure. The testing issues that arise from NCLB have received extensive attention. State and federal officials and platoons of academics have spent five years debating cut scores, proficiency targets, confidence intervals, and so forth. Receiving far less attention has been the remedies side of the equation. Here we address NCLB'S own version of the seven-year itch, whereby a Title 1 school that fails to make AYP is subject to a parade of stiffening interventions designed to change it and give new options to its students. The remedies WHAT DO THE remedies actually entail? If a federally aided school (Title 1 school) fails to make AYP for two consecutive years, its students are supposed to be offered public school choice, enabling them to attend other schools their district. …