Fate of No Child Left Behind…
This piece I wrote about Bush’s education legacy, No Child Left Behind, appears today in Politico. The power of this unpopular law lies in its data requirements which force schools to divulge how they are doing with subsets of children, as in poor and minority students. Although the law requires states to keep numbers by gender, the accountability provisions don’t include outcomes by male/female. As a result, those gender numbers rarely surface and educators pay no attention to them.
I realize that adding another layer of bureaucracy to a law already considered burdensome is not in the realm of the politically possible. But should it happen, thousands of boys quietly struggling in school would suddenly become a front-and-center issue for schools.
January 24th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I just linked from the Politico, via This Week in Education, so the debate has probably moved on but I can’t miss opportunity to comment.
The sum total of evidence in your piece was your experience visiting schools. Yes I know you also have obtained a lot of evidence on all sides during your years as a journalist, and it is your blog post, but the lack of evidence is a common pattern. As lawyers say, “when you don’t have the evidence argue the law …”
I can tell you from personal experience that the stories of the harm causes by NCLB are not fantasy. Reading the evidence from my perspective in a hardcore neighborhood high school, I can see how some good must have come from NCLB. But in the secondary schools I know, it would have been better to pay people to dig holes and bury the additional money in it. NCLB did not mandate destructive policies, but it incentivized them.
Speaking about numbers. Under an honest accounting following the rules of NCLB the percentage of students passing tests have increased dramatically. The NUMBERS of students passing continue to decline. For instance, the percentage of Algebra students passing under NCLB have doubled - even after the change in cut scores caused the pass rate to triple. But the number of students passing has continued to decline by 1/3rd.
Why? I have 150 students, with about 50 on IEPs or 504s or ELL. I’ve had 75 or so students tranfer into my class this year and about an equal number transfer out. So about 150 students, if they are still in a school in the spring, will not have have their scores count. I won’t have close to 75 or so students by testing time who aren’t excluded by highly mobile rules. And half of those remaining students will be excluded because they are on IEPs or ELL.
At best, NCLB testing will capture the performance of less than 1/6th of the students who I have taught this year. You can dismiss my school as an outlier since it is the lowest performing urban school in the state. But, we would have never become this dysfunctional without the damage done by NCLB. We in neighborhood high schools have become the alternative schools for the people who couldn’t make it in charter and other selective schools, suburbs across the county, and the toughest middle schools. Our incoming students have always been four or five years below grade level. But NCLB has still made that bad situation worse.
Wouldn’t be better to invest resources that help the 5/6ths of my students who often were the most vulnerable? For instance, why not track absenteeism in elementary years and fund home visits before children become hopelessly behind? For instance, why not take one curriculum facilator, whose sole purpose is to make NCLB numbers look better, and fund a graduation coach who could assist those mobile students during their transistions? Why not transfer resources from bogus “credit recovery programs” designed to make dropout numbers disappear, and invest in credit recovery programs to serve kids? Why not transfer resources from test prep and “remediation” to high quality summer programs that enrich children who don’t get vacations and trips to the museums?
Part of the answer to all of the above is NCLB. The people who run my district are not evil or saints. Before NCLB we had no discretionary money and if we had, it would not have been invested flawlessly. NCLB has pumped a lot of new money into the system, but after it was invested in the standard Cover Your Ass programs, little or none was left over for addressing real problems.
You are right about disaggregating data for poor children of color. But if we want to actually help those kids as opposed to just highlighting the problem, adopt Diane Ravitch’s proposals, set high standards, close loopholes, abandon sanctions, and trust in transparency.