Happy Birthday No Child Left Behind!

You are five years old, as of this week. Around this age, if you were in any of the public schools I taught in, you probably wouldn't know how to read. And then in a few years, you might get held over in the third grade because you couldn't pass the damn standardized tests, and then you'd get older and older, and since the woman hired to give you "extra help" services like reading remediation would end up doing class coverages for absent teachers and eventually probably filling the position of someone who quits in October, you'd continue to fail the third grade until they decided you were too big and too angry for third grade, and to just push you along a few years until finally, you were so behind and so frustrated with school, that you'd decide to drop out. Below, please find my extensive rant about NCLB and why I hope it does not make it to its sixth birthday.

In my favorite course this semester, which was a seminar on the issues in education research, we read two books about the infamous No Child Left Behind [NCLB] legislation. Both of them were a compilation of various essays on different aspects of the bill, and the first one, titled "Many Children Left Behind," [ed. Deborah Meier] was anti-NCLB, while the second one, titled "Within Our Reach" [ed. John Chubb] was about how NCLB, with some modifications, could be an excellent path towards improving our nation's public schools.

In sum, NCLB promises to achieve 100% proficiency in ELA and math by the 2013-2014 school-year, through increased standardized testing accountability, ensuring that all students have access to quality teachers, and adequate funding across school districts. Critics of the bill explain the infeasibility of this promise, citing the bill’s under-funding, the detrimental effects of “teaching to the test,” and the overly punitive nature of the financial penalties placed on schools that do not reach the unrealistic performance targets set in place by NCLB.

There are numerous paradoxes central to the stated goals of this legislation, from the fact that it aims for 100% proficiency on norm-referenced exams (which by their very nature require 50% of students to fall below the norm), to the “diversity penalty” which basically makes it more difficult for schools with more diverse populations to reach performance targets, since the failure of even one group means the school as a whole has "failed." As a result of NCLB, some schools which were not previously considered in need of improvement have been re-classified as failing, and many schools have engaged in dishonest practices such as under-reporting drop-out rates, or denying enrollment to students who would potentially bring down their testing average.

On the other hand, those in support of NCLB claim that with some improvements, the bill could prove successful in repairing the public school system. Chubb, et al., make four key recommendations for the improvement of NCLB. First, they suggest that state standards should be aligned to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments so that there are uniform benchmarks in achievement for all schools nationwide. Second, they feel that the present system of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) needs to be augmented so that all schools are following a trajectory that will allow them to meet 100% proficiency by 2013-2014. Third, the authors recommend that the mandate of a “highly qualified teacher” in all classrooms be adjusted to redefine what constitutes “highly qualified” to include possession of a bachelors degree and either an undergraduate major in the subject they teach, passage of a rigorous content examination in their subject area, or, in the case of veteran teachers, statistical analysis that shows they have achieved adequate gains in proficiency for their students. Finally, these authors recommend that NCLB establish independent agencies to arbitrate (and inform parents about) school choice transfers and supplementary educational services (SES) for students in failing schools.

While these recommendations do appear to strengthen some of the existing weaknesses and failures of NCLB, they do not address a number of the concerns critics have with the bill. For one, standardized testing is not necessarily an accurate measure of student achievement. Chubb maintains that present methods of testing take into account fairness, bias, and validity, but fails to cite any evidence to support this other than referring the reader to another chapter in the book, which also does not explain how testing agencies eliminate bias and increase fairness in testing. Secondly, the authors do not recognize that punitive sanctions detract from existing shortages in funding for schools in poor districts, or that the bill is grossly under-funded to begin with. While Meier, et al. claim, “current requests for funding NCLB… fall as much as $12 billion short of the requirements of the legislation,” Chubb, et al. say, “the direct costs of NCLB are fully funded, as the Government Accounting Office concluded in May 2004.” The former data came from a professional of educational finance who [presumably] did research on the subject, while the latter data came from a governmental source, which may have vested interest in claiming the bill is adequately funded.

Chubb, et al. give the impression that schools that have previously not met performance targets are failing to do so because there have not been sanctions in place, or for lack of trying to do so. Is it possible that the reason schools do not set performance targets that would put them on a trajectory towards 100% proficiency by 2013-2014 is because they know it is not feasible? NCLB does not, at any point, suggest HOW schools in underserved communities should go about addressing the plethora of social issues that these communities face, such as inadequate housing and healthcare, unemployment, and families with limited occupational and educational attainment, factors that have been connected to student achievement by researchers for decades. Merely “demanding proficiency” does not make it so, and the threat of sanctions is a tactic designed to scare schools into compliance, without recognizing the reasons these schools are struggling to achieve. NCLB aims to increase the federal government’s power to punish schools for poor performance, while avoiding any federal responsibility for how to achieve this performance, or how to pay for it, given the existing inequities of public school funding and the other social issues plaguing underserved communities.

I would suggest that perhaps the "real goal" of NCLB is to discredit the public school system so entirely that the government can say "see, even with all of this money and reform effort, public schools just CAN'T WORK, and therefore we should privatize the whole system!!" Because to be honest, if you were seeking to discredit the public schools, what would be a better way to do that than to set up a host of completely unreachable goals and requirements, and then when they are not reached, point to their failure as evidence that a new approach [privatization] is necessary. The bill is filled with privatization pushes already--from the fact that test-prep is a HUGE industry that clearly in high demand when testing is high-stakes, to the sanctions that require schools not meeting their performance targets to offer tutoring services, which are often offered through private companies. The bill was initially proposed with school voucher options, but those were removed because the bill wouldn't pass with vouchers included.

In any case, I'm signed up to take a Public Policy course this semester, and I'm thinking that NCLB might have to be my policy-of-choice to analyze [since clearly I can ramble on about it endlessly].

Stay tuned for next week, when I will be visiting my sixth graders again...