No Child Left Behind
Who’s At Risk?
TOC Cover Story
“One of the things we support is the replacement of the reliance on standardized tests on English and math to a broader test with multiple indicators that better show what kids know and can do.”
-Bob Schaeffer, FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
Heavily criticized when it was first implemented five years ago, No Child Left Behind has become a metaphor for what’s wrong with U.S. public education. Despite its pariah-like status among many in education, it remains the proverbial “baby in the bathtub” that shouldn’t be discarded even though problems persist.
Its original intent was quite lofty: to hold schools accountable and ensure that every child in America is proficient in reading and math by 2014. Not many argue against the goals, yet the way the law has gone about accomplishing its goals has caused many an educator to dread the mere mention of its name.
According to most estimates, NCLB is still about $56 billion short of the funding needed to make it work; in addition, it puts so much emphasis on standardized testing that schools are being forced to reduce a child’s entire learning experience to test preparation. Furthermore, NCLB enforces compliance through horrific sanctions placed on schools that do not meet the standards for annual progress. The result is that you have 50 states with 50 different sets of processes to measure student achievement.
A bill to reauthorize NCLB sits in draft stage in the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, a panel chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who along with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, helped shepherd the Bush administration education initiative to passage in 2002. Draft language sponsored by Miller and fellow California Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, the ranking Republican on the House committee, has been cheered by advocates for finally addressing some of the root issues that made NCLB a complete mess. Other groups, such as the California Teachers Union roundly criticized Miller for merit-pay provisions that they say will make NCLB even worse. Most advocates say there are good aspects in the reauthorization bill that must be retained, but everything else should be tossed out like dirty bathwater.
As we look back to 2002 when NCLB was implemented as the reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, President George W. Bush promised that it would improve student performance, particularly among “disadvantaged children,” and reduce the achievement gap. Today, a myriad of critics say that while NCLB promotes accountability, but it has done little to eliminate the achievement gap and basically failed to improve public schools in the way the president said it would.
CLOSING THE GAP
“We found that there was really no evidence that the achievement gap had been reduced by NCLB,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which released a ground-breaking study in 2006 that showed little progress since NCLB.
Orfield notes that under NCLB, “the educational offerings have really been radically limited in the schools that are under the sanctions, so you are not really learning much more than the things that are tested.”
The achievement gap between students of color and white students, which shrank during the late 1960s and again during the late 1980s because of desegregation and increased learning opportunities opened through civil rights policies seems to have become stuck recently, according to the Civil Rights Project.
While President Bush and other supporters point to data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report card showing recent gains by fourth- and eighth-graders as proof that NCLB is working, Orfield cites data from his own study in challenging that view.
“States almost always report gains on educational assessment,” Orfield said. “The truth is if you put enough pressure on any single instrument, you’re going to get gains on it for a few years at least. Turns out [those gains] are more gains on how to take that test than they are gains that can be measured by any other independent measure.”
The National Education Association noted that while recent NAEP data does show a slight reduction of the achievement gap between white and black students, it showed no real change in the gap between white and Hispanic students.
While critical of some provisions and newer language in the reauthorization bill, the Education Trust policy group argues that recent NAEP data does show signs that NCLB is working.
“The compelling evidence out of the NAEP is that if you look at the students at the low end of achievement – say the percentage of students that are in the below basic category, that is students who don’t have basic literacy and numeric skills – we have made dramatic progress in terms of moving students out of that category,” said Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at the Education Trust.
Hall, an original supporter of NCLB, said the law should only take partial credit for scores regardless of which way the data points. “The first point to be very clear about is that laws don’t teach children, teachers teach children. So it’s never accurate to say that NCLB has caused the achievement gap to narrow or to widen,” said Hall. “What would be accurate to say is that NCLB has created a focus and attention to raising achievement for all children and particularly achievement gaps that separate low-income kids and kids of color from their peers.”
Testing and More Testing
The history of standardized testing is dotted with racist and elitist dogma outlined in exemplary books such as Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Relatively few people are familiar with the work of Roy. O. Freedle, the former Educational Testing Service (ETS) researcher who developed the R-SAT, which showed verbal score increases of up to 300 points for racial minorities taking the SAT test.
Many believe standardized testing remains a front for keeping “outsiders” from gaining full access to the American mainstream. A key area of contention for educators and advocates alike, is NCLB’s unrelenting focus on standardized testing to measure progress of schools and students.
“One of the things we support is the replacement of the reliance on standardized tests on English and math to a broader test with multiple indicators that better show what kids know and can do,” said Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
Schaeffer argues that NCLB misses the boat on closing the achievement gap. His organization’s Web site points out that and if you look at gains made by black students before NCLB, they outpace any gains since its implementation.
“NCLB does nothing to address the achievement gap, either to identify its causes or come up with useful solutions. All it does is test and test and test and report the same problems. It’s diagnostic and not solution-oriented. We need to go into schools that are not performing well and find out where the shortcomings are and fix them, not continue to measure them.”
Asked whether FairTest supported reauthorization of NCLB, Schaeffer said it does provided some changes are made.
“Obviously we’d like an overhaul of NCLB so that it helps education and actually fulfils its goals,” Schaeffer said. “We believe that NCLB obsession with overtesting narrows curriculum that dumbs-down teaching to little more than test-coaching and actually drives the kids it’s supposed to help out of school.”
The Remedy is More Than Just Tests
“We kind of looked at each piece of that legislation, and there are many pieces of it that we can support,” said Ann Levett, executive director of the Comer School Development Program (SDP) at Yale University. “The pieces that determine whether a school is doing a good job or not is so flawed that we’re just having problems with supporting it. Using a single criterion – the state test – to determine whether a school is passing or failing youngsters just defies what we stand for and doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she said.
Pioneered by child-psychiatrist James P. Comer in the early 1970’s and now being used in hundreds of schools around the nation, SDP is one of only three comprehensive school-reform models that met the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At-Risk (CRESPAR) highest standards of evidence.
SDP, through incorporating community and parental support, has been shown to improve grades, test scores and behavior among students by focusing on “development” of the entire child.
“We know that children grow and develop in a way that requires multiple means of measurement and multiple means of progress, and we don’t see that evident in the current legislation,” added Levett.
Regardless of the progress being made or potential for increased test scores, schools unprepared to deal with young people as whole beings are treading on shaky ground, Levett said.
“If you only give attention to the cognitive development, you are ignoring social development, which you and I know is critical to one being successful in life,” Levett said. “Even psychological development, how does passing one test in the whole 180 days of school figure into promoting strong psychological development? If I pass it great, but what else happens the other 179 days of the year?”
Rather than simply gearing children up for one test, it’s more important to measure progress incrementally based on where a child starts, Levett said. “Any good teacher will tell you what is important is where the children are when they come in and where they are when they leave. That’s the measure that we should be looking at.
The Future of No Child Left Behind
It’s clear from the initial draft of the House reauthorization bill as well as testimony from various advocates and educators that in many ways the new NCLB will likely include many of the provisions pushed for, including:
*Multiple Indicators for a school’s progress, not just state test scores
*Some increases in funding
*Teacher merit pay in one form or another
*Accountability for schools
*Increased clarity on “adequate yearly progress”
*More attention to graduation rates
This will definitely not be enough to satisfy all teachers, advocates or critics. It may not be enough to improve schools or the achievement gap, particularly if the single focus of schools is to avoid sanctions by drilling kids on its state standardized exams. Or if the additional money needed to fund it is not part of the package that becomes law. Crucial to what the new law will finally look like will be the involvement of those directly impacted by its changes Advocates say it’s important for all parties involved, particularly teachers, to impact the legislation so that someday soon the saying “Leave No Child Behind,” will be more a creed than a slogan.
“We think there is a lot of work to be done, but we do agree that people need to be held accountable for the achievement of all the kids,” Levett said. “That’s a piece I can’t disagree with.”
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Malik Russell is a freelance writer based in Oakland, Calif.
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