No Child Left Behind Three Years Later
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14- Despite repeated statements by Bush administration officials about how the “No Child Left Behind” education overhaul legislation is reducing the achievement gap in America, many researchers and educators are still critical of the law.
“I don’t think it has been effective and I don’t think it will be effective,” said Neal McCluskey, an education policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. “The problem is that the No Child Left Behind Act tries to force one model on all schools.”
The act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires all schools that receive funding under Title I, which directs federal funds to schools and school districts with high percentages of low-income families, to develop and implement an accountability system of annual testing in reading and math through eighth grade and at least once during high school.
The crux of the problem, critics say, is the law’s requirement that schools must show “adequate yearly progress,” as defined by the state, in an effort to close the current racial and economic achievement gaps or they will be labeled “in need of improvement.” Under the law, also known as NCLB for short, all students must be considered “proficient,” according to the state definition, by the 2013-2014 school year.
“The focus of NCLB is really on improving student achievement and closing those achievement gaps” between low income and minority students, said Alexa Marrero, spokeswoman for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Overall achievement is going up and even more quickly we’re seeing achievement gains among those students who historically may have been allowed to fall between the cracks.”
According to July 2005 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, elementary school student achievement is at an all time high in both reading and math while the achievement gap at this level continues to narrow. The report also revealed that reading and math scores for African-American and Hispanic nine-year-olds have reached an all time high and that 43 states either improved academically or remained steady with the previous year in fourth and eight grade reading and math.
Democrats and other critics, however, are not convinced that the results accurately reflect the effects of the law.
“We’re still pretty early into the law,” said Tom Kiley, spokesman for Rep. George Miller (D- Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “But we’ve seen some encouraging results,” he said, adding that “there’s still a long way to go.”
Under the law, all students must be considered “proficient,” with each state deciding what that means, in both math and reading by the 2013-2014 school year. In addition, states must set annual goals for the number of students who will perform “proficiently” on the exams that year. If the state does not meet those goals, it is labeled as “in need of improvement.” After two years of not meeting the adequate yearly progress goals, the state must offer parents the choice to send their children to other public schools in the district.
“What do you do when you have a school that everyone wants to leave?” Rick Trombly, a spokesperson for the National Education Association in New Hampshire, asked. He and other critics worry that in such a scenario, neighboring districts would cherry-pick the best students from the failing school. “Is that what you want to do-take the ‘best’ students and then leave everyone else? That seems to me like a recipe for all children left behind.”
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, one school in New Hampshire offered parents public school choice during the 2003-2004 school year because of the law. During the 2004-2005 school year, 72 New Hampshire schools were designated as “in need of improvement,” according to the New Hampshire Department of Education.
As a result of the requirements, McCluskey and others argue, some states set lower standards so students will be able to more easily meet the annual goals.
For example the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a think tank that supports education reform, reported that the gains states made in their annual tests were not always matched in the national assessments.
According to the analysis, states like Alabama, California, Idaho, Arizona, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky, each reported that an additional five to 11 percent of eighth grade students became proficient in reading between 2003 and 2005 in their state results. These gains disappeared, however, when results from the national test, known for short as the NAEP, were examined.
“The much-discussed ‘race to the bottom’ appears to have begun,” Fordham Foundation President Chester E. Finn Jr., a Reagan administration education official, said in a press release. “If states ease their standards, construct simple-minded tests, or set low passing scores, they can mislead their own citizens and educators into thinking that just about everyone is proficient. Congress had the wisdom to insist that NAEP function as an ‘external audit’ of state (and national) progress toward proficiency under NCLB. Now we see just how important this is.” Marrero said that while this is a concern that has been raised, it is “unfair and misleading to assume that states and teachers in schools would have incentives for their students not to do well.”
But according to the preliminary results of a study conducted by the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and Social Sciences at Dartmouth College, superintendents in New Hampshire and Vermont believe that high stakes testing, such as that in the law, have prompted changes in curriculum.
“A majority of them have indicated that changes are occurring in the curriculum towards the tested subjects of math and reading and away from the non-tested subjects,” said Scott Carrell, research associate and director of the Policy Research Shop at Dartmouth College.
As a result of such curricular changes, McCluskey said, the law could remove flexibility from schools and administrators that is essential for districts to address the varying needs of their students.
“Individual schools have varied populations and varied needs and they should be able to tailor their curriculum to their school,” he said.
McCluskey and other critics argue that statewide standardized testing, as well as the teacher examinations that are required under the law, push states and individual school districts to “teach to the test,” focusing their time and attention on passing the mandated tests rather than on ensuring that all students are learning all of the material they will need to succeed in college and life.
Teaching to the test is not in itself a bad thing, McCluskey said, provided that the test in question is rigorous. But if the test has been watered down, it becomes a serious educational problem.
Others attribute teaching to the test to a lack of creativity.
“A lot of the requirements of No Child Left Behind can actually be integrated into extracurricular activities,” said Jo Ann Webb, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, adding that “unless you have those fundamental skills, you’re going to have deficiencies in other areas.”
Michael Cohen, former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education in the Clinton administration and current president of Achieve, a bipartisan, non-profit organization that helps to ensure all young people are prepared for postsecondary education, work and citizenship, said, “The best way to improve test scores is to teach kids a rigorous curriculum in interesting and engaging ways.”
When teachers are unable to teach such well-rounded curriculums, they then focus too heavily on the tested areas, Cohen said.
Student tests are not the only ones causing controversy.
Because teachers are required to pass exams that demonstrate their content-knowledge in the areas they teach, McCluskey said, districts are losing valuable potential teachers from the private sector who have extensive knowledge and the desire to teach but lack a degree or the time and money to take the necessary coursework and pass the exams.
“You get the teachers who have nothing else to do but teach,” he said. “There’s no incentives for people who might be really good teachers to go into teaching”
Under the law, teachers must be deemed a “highly qualified teacher” or the district is required to notify parents that their children are being taught by teachers who do not meet the requirements of the law. While states have flexibility to determine what qualifies a veteran teacher as “highly qualified,” the law requires that all new teachers must have a bachelor’s degree and pass a state developed teacher examination.
Trombly said these requirements are especially harmful in New Hampshire because they impede local involvement in schools.
“New Hampshire’s tradition of local involvement, community involvement, in public education really served us well in the past,” he said. “Individual districts could meet the needs of their particular students in a way that best fit their district. NCLB really sets a one size should fit all standards.”
Trombly added that “New Hampshire’s teacher certification process,” which he said is both “rigorous and strenuous,” is “what makes our teachers highly qualified.” In addition, Trombly said he believes labeling a teacher as “non-highly qualified” is “truly detrimental to what is really going on in the classroom.”
And on a national level, controversy remains about the level of funding the law is receiving. Practically since President Bush signed the legislation, critics have accused the administration and Congress of underfunding it.
The Democrats’ Kiley said the program is “woefully underfunded and it has been ever since its enactment,” adding that the program would require an additional $40 billion to be considered fully funded.
According to the GOP’s Marrero federal funding for education has increased by about 50 percent since 2001 and “the federal investment is specifically focused on these goals for No Child Left Behind and certainly there has been adequate funding to achieve those goals,” adding that “the primary source for education is state and local sources” with federal funding only accounting for between seven and nine percent.
But even some critics of the law say that full funding is not the answer.
“There’s plenty of money and there’s been plenty of spending in education,” McCluskey said, adding that while per pupil expenditures have increased dramatically, “achievement has flat-lined.”
Like McCluskey, Cohen said that though additional funding could be beneficial, it would not solve all of the law’s problems.
“More and better services can be provided for kids with more money and that’s important but, that doesn’t solve the most significant and thorny problems that are built into the design of NCLB,” Cohen said.
One of the biggest design problems with the law, according to Cohen, is that the accountability provisions treat a school that is progressing greatly, but not quite reaching its annual goal, the same as a school where little or no progress has been made. Under the law, both schools would be labeled “in need of improvement.”
Instead, many experts believe that a “growth model,” which would monitor the progress made by the same group of students from one year to the next, rather than comparing two different groups of children year after year as the law does now, would be more effective.
Last month, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced a pilot program that will allow up to ten interested and qualified states to submit proposals for the development of growth models for the 2005-2006 school year. States must show that they have the additional funding and the data processing to track all of the students.
Trombly said that “under the law, we had districts in New Hampshire that actually improved their performance on the measures, but because they didn’t improve enough, they were deemed failing.”
