The Jefferson Journal

Chris Braunlich

Save Educational Standards

No Child Left Behind is a work in progress. The federal school-accountability program has real problems but is worth saving. Five basic reforms would help.

No Child Left Behind is back in the news, as the federal Department of Education has approved four requested waivers from the federal law and rejected four others.

Among the approved waivers are those allowing SOL test “retakes” to be used in determining whether a school or student made “Adequate Yearly Progress.”  Some of the rejected waivers, such as allowing the use of “other academic indicators” would have opened a huge loophole. Why other waivers, such as allowing the state to focus resources on failing students, were rejected is inexplicable.

In looking at those decisions, it's important to put aside Board of Education President Thomas Jackson’s somewhat partisan attack on the feds during this Virginia election year. 

Ignore, too, his charge that the feds are “dissing” Virginia by taking months to decide on the waivers, which is more likely a result of bureaucratic inertia:  those of us who served on local school boards can remember how long it would take the state to make decisions.

Instead, view the Virginia dust-up in the context of a national debate that has devolved into a black-white conflict with no shades of gray: You’re either for NCLB or against it, and both sides are rapidly digging in their heels.

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, has brought suit to throw out NCLB in court. The NEA doesn’t object to federal education laws -- it’s never before seen a federal law it didn’t love – it just doesn’t like this federal law.  As The New York Times noted in April, “The NEA has misrepresented the law to the public from the start.”

The Bush Administration isn’t helping matters either. It’s flatly refused to consider any course correction to the landmark education law, preferring instead to develop a patchwork of waivers.

But patchworks often don’t hold. And while the Administration and its allies are understandably concerned about the possibility of having the law gutted by those aiming to destroy educational standards, the risk is that intractability will lead to a discredited NCLB and ultimately to the implosion of educational standards throughout the country.

Virginia’s Standards of Learning system went through the same “birthing pains.” Eight years ago, the General Assembly and local school boards were filled with SOL opponents. But because smart governors and state board members kept the SOLs stabilized with mid-course corrections, today the system thrives and has impacted  positively on student learning.

Herewith, then, are five proposed reforms for NCLB coming from education reformers, aligned with the “conservative” side of the political spectrum, who have been NCLB supporters from the start. They recognize that no federal law is perfect on the day it passes, and four years into the life of NCLB it is time to consider the following changes:  

·   Redefine “failing” schools and “successful” schools. Under NCLB, schools missing any one of 29-35 benchmarks are treated the same as schools missing 20, creating too many “failing” schools. NCLB should create interim categories, so parents and educators have a better sense of where each school lies, and so that credibility of the law is retained.

 

·   Reverse the order the order in which supplemental educational services ( SES ) and public school choice must be provided. Currently, schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress two years in a row must offer students in those schools the option of attending another public school. At three years, students may seek publicly-financed private tutoring ( SES ).

 

Given the fact that, in many districts, there are more SES providers than additional public schools, NCLB should provide private tutoring before public school choice. The U.S. Department of Education’s failure to act on this requested waiver was one of the items that most angered Jackson. And he’s right. The feds should make the change now.

 

·   Consider mobility. Currently, a student’s scores are counted in a school’s scores even if that student only recently transferred to the school. In schools where mobility rates can soar as high as 35 percent, it is hardly fair to judge a school’s performance in educating students who were actually educated in elsewhere. To be fully counted in the testing, a student should be enrolled at least 90 percent of the year; otherwise, his or her test scores should be pro-rated based on the time spent in the school.

 

·   Similarly, AYP calculations currently punish principals and schools attracting transfer students from low-performing schools under the public school choice provision – students that likely will pull down the “successful” school’s scores and putting that school, in turn, at risk of failing to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress. NCLB calculations should take these students into account – either by not including them for the first year or so, or by considering their academic improvement.

 

·   Finally, any NCLB reform needs to move further toward creation of a “value-added assessment” model that would measure progress. (See "Beyond SOLs," Sept. 7, 2004.) Incorporating such an assessment model will not only provide a better picture of which schools are doing their job, but also which teachers and which curricula are successful.

The New York Times said it best: “The No Child Left Behind law has been a success on many levels – particularly in reorienting the thinking of the school districts that used to average out success by letting the stellar achievements of middle-class students wipe out failures on the bottom.”

We cannot afford to go back to a time when poor students got lost in the shuffle. No Child Left Behind has its faults, but neither the drumbeat of opposition nor a legislative “line in the sand” should be allowed to risk derailing the law, the principles of educational standards and accountability, and what they can do for children at risk.

-- June 20, 2005

Chris Braunlich is a former member of the Fairfax County School Board and Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, the leading non-partisan public policy foundation in Virginia.

You can e-mail him here:

c.braunlich@att.net