You know how a balloon mortgage works: you pay a low interest rate at the beginning, but a few years out the rate soars. So you hope to refinance on more favorable terms - or offload the real estate onto someone else - before that painful day arrives.
As tomorrow's deadline hits for states to file their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability plans with the U.S. Education Department, some of them seem to be applying the principle of balloon mortgages to expected student achievement gains: we'll deliver a little in the next few years, and quite a lot down the road - but with any luck somebody else will be on duty when the "quite a lot" time hits.
Worse, based on early evidence, the Education Department is inexplicably assenting to this questionable approach. Bear with me.
You remember where "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) came from: in NCLB, Congress gave states a dozen years (until 2013-14, using 2001-2 as baseline) to boost every last one of their public school pupils to "proficiency" in reading and math. AYP is the gauge by which everyone will know which districts, schools and groups of children are truly making satisfactory gains. If they're not, a variety of interventions are supposed to be imposed. (Today, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a penetrating new study of such interventions, Ron Brady's excellent report, Can Failing Schools be Fixed? which shows that often they don't work as well as one would wish. You can find it on our website at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=2.)
NCLB, as you know, is a unique amalgam of uniformities and flexibilities. In many parts, states must all do the same thing. In others, they have a measure of freedom to innovate. The twelve-year timeline is fixed, for example, but each state sets its own standards of proficiency. States also choose their own tests (though all must participate in NAEP).
Perhaps the stickiest - and surely the most complex - NCLB wicket is specification of how much progress comprises adequacy during the twelve-year period. As recently as July, the Education Department insisted that states must figure out ways to boost achievement at a steady pace across that entire time span. Secretary Paige issued a "Dear Colleague" letter on July 24 that said:
"A State's definition of AYP is based on expectations for growth in student achievement that is continuous and substantial.... Accountability systems must establish proficiency goals statewide...that progressively increase to reflect 100 percent proficiency for all students by 2013-14. These goals must increase at steady and consistent increments during the 12-year timeline, although not necessarily annually throughout the 12 years (i.e. States cannot establish goals that will require the most substantial progress toward the end of the 12-year timeline.)"
Please review that last sentence and decide whether, in your opinion, it is a clear warning to states NOT to back-load their student gain expectations like a balloon mortgage, making it relatively easier to post those gains in the early years (hence easier on incumbent officials and educators) but far more challenging for those who become responsible down the road.
That's how I read it. But at least two of the five states that already had their AYP plans okayed by the feds have opted for the balloon-mortgage approach. Both Ohio and Indiana claim that they will squeeze half of the necessary achievement growth into the final quarter of the twelve-year period. Inexplicably, the feds said OK. (The Education Department also approved plans from Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York, which appear to contain the equivalent of fixed-rate mortgages.)
How did Ohio and Indiana manage to pull this off? I've no idea why Uncle Sam approved a maneuver that plainly violates the spirit of NCLB and Secretary Paige's guidance. One hopes it was a mistake that won't be repeated, perhaps the reason the then-cognizant assistant secretary no longer holds that job. But it's easy to find the NCLB technicality that these two states exploited. It lies in the concept of "intermediate goals." NCLB allows states to set such goals during the 12-year period, like stair steps along the upward path to proficiency. Those intermediate goals come with just three constraints: the first one cannot arrive later than 2004-5, each intermediate goal must encompass the same amount of academic growth as the others, and no more than three years can elapse between any two intermediate goals. But nobody said how FEW years could elapse or that the periods between them had to be uniform.
So Ohio and Indiana each opted to set 5 intermediate goals, which effectively creates six achievement targets (since 100% proficiency comes in the period between goal #5 and 2014.) And guess what? The first three of those targets each spans a three-year period (i.e. they're to be attained in 2005, 2008 and 2011). But the final three are just a single year apart. In other words, these states are promising to make as much academic growth in the one year from 2011 to 2012 as in the three-year period 2002-5; they say they expect as sizable achievement gains between 2012 and 2013 as between 2005 and 2008; and they claim that their students will make as much progress from 2013 to 2014 as from 2008 to 2011.
Let me say it again: half the total gain to be made by Ohio and Indiana students will - if you believe it - be made in the last three years of the NCLB timetable, from 2011 to 2014.
To believe that this approach is plausible, you have to believe that academic gains will be made in U.S. schools at an accelerating pace, indeed that as the going gets hardest - moving those last, toughest kids over the hump to proficiency - the rate of improvement will speed up. Does that sound right to you?
What I think is going on, cynic though you may call me, is that clever folks in at least two states figured out that, by the time 2011 rolls around, none of them will be responsible any longer. They'll all have moved on to new jobs, retired to their ranchettes, taken high-level posts in Washington, whatever. Nor will anybody from the Bush Administration still be in office after January 20, 2009. Hence the immense achievement gains being promised for those last three years of the NCLB timetable will be somebody else's problem to deliver. The incumbents will, in effect, have sold the property before the balloon part of the mortgage hits.
No wonder the Ohio and Indiana AYP plans became the talk of other state officials after they got approved. We can safely predict that at least a few of the AYP plans being submitted tomorrow will follow in their footsteps. One wonders whether the feds will approve them, too.
Does this not make a travesty of AYP and, perhaps, of NCLB itself?
PS: To see this part of Indiana's plan for yourself, surf to http://ed.gov/offices/OESE/CFP/csas/incsa.doc and make your way to page 22. To see Ohio's, surf to http://ed.gov/offices/OESE/CFP/csas/ohcsa.doc and turn to page 26.
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A report released yesterday by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) shows the steps that all 50 states have taken to comply with No Child Left Behind, and reveals how far many states still have to go. ECS found that just twelve states are on track to comply with even half of the major requirements of the law. North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas are farthest along while Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oregon bring up the rear. Only 25 states are ready to offer students the opportunity to transfer out of failing schools, and 20 states are offering students in persistently failing schools the free tutoring services that the law requires.
"Most states lag far behind 'No Child Left Behind' law," by Greg Toppo, USA Today, January 29, 2003, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-01-28-education-cover-usat_x.htm
The interactive ECS study can be found at www.ecs.org.
