Give NCLB a Better Chance to Succeed
by Lin Yang on April 2, 2008 in The Blackboard
When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) passed in 2002, it enjoyed tremendous bi-partisan support, with 47 Democrats and 43 Republicans in the Senate voting in its favor. Now, six years later, the law and its looming renewal process have become political taboo. When President Bush spoke about reauthorizing the law in his 2008 State of the Union Address, very few elected officials in the audience applauded his initiative. The debate from both sides has turned towards new ideas. Richard Rothstein, an education columnist and opponent of the law, sees the potential for the next President to “start from scratch in education policy, without the deadweight of a failed, inherited NCLB law.” Robert Gordon, a fellow at the Center for American Progress who supports NCLB, has acknowledged the impossibility of eliminating the achievement gap by 2014, and discusses other reforms in teacher recruitment and pay. Most of the Democratic candidates have called for fixing NCLB and de-emphasizing standardized testing, a position supported by one of their largest constituents, the teachers’ unions.
Unfortunately, the debate over whether schools can meet the goals of NCLB has been largely misguided, with both opponents and supporters engaged in a bitter fight over whose education philosophy is right. Those who support NCLB cite the need to keep schools, teachers, and individual students accountable for their achievement, using standardized tests as the yard stick for performance measurement. Their approach is to pressure schools to work harder and produce better results. Schools that cannot consistently produce high proficiency rates in tested subject matter will be re-structured, with the re-organization and re-staffing of the failing school and its students diverted to other schools. President Bush’s punishment tone was very clear, asking for Congress to approve more grants to allow children to attend private school, and “liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools.”
What staunch proponents of NCLB do not realize is that students are not failing simply because they go to inadequate schools. The achievement gap exists because disparities in school quality are compounded by a host of other disparities, including parenting, income, health care, and housing. However, advocates of wider social policy efforts fail to acknowledge how impossible it is to pass their menu of reforms in the current political climate. Equalizing parenting, income, health care, and housing options for all students amounts to a type of socialism that our society does not support. Even though some of these disparities do explain the current gap, we aspire to improve schools for low-income students so that they work against these other causes.
The two sides are talking past each other, and overlooking the positive groundwork laid by NCLB on standards and testing. Studies in business and management have shown that setting goals and measuring performance produces better results for organizations and increases the productivity of workers. For example, Latham and Locke, two management experts, conducted an experiment with logging crews in the early 1970s. The supervisors of half of the crews gave production goals to their workers, while the control group supervisors simply asked their workers to “do their best.” In the end, the productivity of the goal-setting group was significantly higher, and the absenteeism in the goal-setting group was significantly lower, than the control group. According to interviews with the loggers, introducing goals increased the challenge of the job. In addition, weekly recordkeeping provided the worker with a sense of achievement, recognition, and accomplishment, while also helping him keep track of his progress. This could apply to schools as well. Standards and testing serve not only as measurement tools, but can actively be used to challenge students, teachers, and administrators to work towards a common goal of maximizing proficiency.
The key is to get buy-in from school leaders, teachers, students, and parents, by setting up a system that uses diagnostics and test scores not only for accountability, but also as an aid to improve instruction. The current NCLB law falls short on both needs. It failed to gain support from necessary stakeholders by assuming schools that fall short are failing schools, pitting parents who want to move their kids to different schools against school leaders and teachers who blame parents for their child’s struggles. It also failed to create assessments that make sense. In order for testing to serve as feedback, they should occur more often throughout the year to measure the progress of each cohort, and inform a teacher to adjust his/her teaching effectively. The next NCLB law must mandate an extensive, real-time data system in which teachers can actually use to adjust instruction throughout the school year.
The current testing scheme also fails because the law allows states to test widely different standards. This became apparent when proficiency levels on the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) varied widely across states. For example, Mississippi 4th grade students scored a 90% proficiency rate on their 4th grade reading test in 2007, but only 22% on the NAEP. California 4th graders, on the other hand, scored 51% on their 4th grade reading test, and 28% on NAEP. From NAEP scores, it seems Mississippi schools need more help, although from a NCLB state testing standpoint, they are doing better than California. States can get away with NCLB compliance by lowering their standards so that they can meet proficiency requirements. When states that are doing worse look like they are doing better on paper, this defeats the purpose of using assessments to help improve instruction.
Finally, unlike monotonous jobs such as logging, goals and continuous feedback are not enough to improve education outcomes. Being a school leader or a teacher requires tremendous amounts of skill, dedication, leadership ability, and a passion to work with kids. As a result, meeting NCLB goals requires extensive human capital investment to train and maintain a professional workforce at the school and district levels. This investment involves recruiting the best and the brightest to become teachers, commensurate professional pay, purposeful professional development, and opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share best practices. In addition, professionalism also requires increased accountability. Administrators must have the power and the initiative to fire teachers, replace school leadership, or re-structure a school if they are ineffective.
We can strengthen NCLB by increasing human capital investment, adding extensive data systems, and implementing nationally standardized assessments. These add-ons recognize that high stakes testing is not the solution, but only a component in a wider education reform package. Ultimately, the goal of education reform is to disconnect the link between a student’s background and his/her education outcomes. NCLB does not seek to specifically move the average achievement level of any group, but rather to move as many members of a group as possible across a line of proficiency. If we can re-frame the mission of NCLB away from punishing failing schools, and towards creating as many opportunities for our children as possible, then teachers will rise to the challenge.
Written by Lin Yang · Filed Under The Blackboard
Lin Yang taught high school mathematics for two years in West Helena, Arkansas, as part of Teach for America's Mississippi Delta Corps. He is currently a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, concentrating in U.S. education policy.
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