Readers of these columns know that I've been a wee bit ambivalent about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. So when I was asked to discuss it at the recent educator awards ceremony of the Milken Family Foundation, the likeliest - and most boring - approach was to give an equivocal speech, full of buts, howevers and maybes. Yawn. Instead, we decided that I would debate myself, taking up a series of NCLB-related issues and doing my best to argue in favor of and then against each. There turned out to be ten issues. What follows is an abbreviated version of my "debate" about five of these. The other five will follow soon.
The federal role in education
Washington is right to intrude itself in this major way into American public education so long as the end is worthy and the means effective. Nor is there anything new about Uncle Sam advancing national education objectives by using money and regulations to alter the practices and priorities of states, schools and educators. In this instance, the problem's diagnosis goes back at least 20 years to A Nation at Risk, which said the country had a grave problem posed by the weak academic performance of its schools and students. Efforts to solve that problem have been pursued by Washington ever since, in a pattern that runs from Charlottesville in 1989 through Bush I's "America 2000" program to Clinton's "Goals 2000" to NCLB. A serious national problem begs for a national solution and where else could that come from if not Washington?
Nowhere in the federal Constitution does the word "education" appear. Rather, every state has written into its own constitution the self-imposed obligation to educate its citizens. It's wrong for Washington to push them around in the ways we find in No Child Left Behind. Moreover, states are not all alike. Some people in Washington may think everyplace should resemble Texas but, in fact, Oregon and Vermont and Maryland have very different notions about education, about what good standards look like, what assessments to use, what kind of accountability system will work best and who should be accountable for what. They also have very different approaches to training, evaluating and certifying teachers. For Uncle Sam to crack down on this kind of diversity is wrong in principle and dysfunctional in practice.
State Standards, National Timetable
NCLB's authors were smart to direct states to set their own standards while giving them all the same twelve-year timeline for getting children up to "proficiency." While a case can be made for national academic standards, America doesn't have the political stomach for that today. Besides, the states were already beavering away at it. (Iowa may be the only place that hasn't even tried.) It would be disruptive to override these evolving state standards. Moreover, states will be the main enforcers and should therefore be the standard-setters.
But if we left it to 50 states to pick their own timetables for getting all children to the proficient level, endless delay would follow. Morally and pragmatically, everyone needs a deadline. Twelve years is a reasonable period. Besides, there will be plenty of sunshine on these results, and ample opportunities to compare them, since every state must now take part in the National Assessment. Nobody can long hide.
Talk about the worst of both worlds. Talk about perverse incentives. Letting standards vary while holding the schedule constant is an invitation to lower standards. Think how much easier it will be to boost all students to the proficient level in twelve years if proficiency is dumbed down to what was previously deemed "basic" or "partly proficient." Why encourage states to set easy standards so as to comply with an arbitrary deadline? Moreover, the timeline seems to allow for some finagling, as states defer the bulk of their achievement gains into the last few years of the 12-year period. This is really cynical and violates the spirit of NCLB, leaving the heavy lifting and potential embarrassment to one's successors.
Every Child?
Insisting that every single girl and boy become academically proficient is true to American values and the only goal worth having. Yes, it's ambitious, but imagine Kennedy saying we would get 90% of the way to the moon. Besides, if we start winking when some kids get left behind, or giving waivers to schools and states that don't quite get to where they should, guess who will populate the waiver lists? Poor and minority kids, kids in troubled schools, those with disabilities: the very children who have gotten the short end of the stick forever. No, the only way to be serious about leaving no children behind, and the only formula that is morally defensible and politically palatable in the American democracy, is to insist that we mean every single kid. No exceptions.
It sounds noble but it's pie in the sky. Everybody who has spent time working with children knows that they're as different as snowflakes. Some are quick, some slow, some eager, others apathetic. Some come from supportive homes, others have no homes at all. What's more, families are so mobile that half the faces in some classrooms are different in June than in September. How on earth can schools be held accountable for all their results?
Every Year?
Holding schools responsible for "adequate yearly progress" - and making this transparent - is the only way to keep all schools accountable for their students. It's the fairest, surest way of tracking which schools are and aren't succeeding and, by disaggregating the results, it'll be clear whether this is working for boys as well as girls, for minority kids, for disabled youngsters, and so forth. Yes, the AYP calculation is complicated but we'll get used to it. After all, corporations are audited annually; the auditors poke into everything, all the assets and liabilities, not just the bottom line profit summary, and they make their findings available to shareholders and government regulators. We should get accustomed to thinking of schools this way.
Schools are full of living, breathing human beings, some of whom aren't the same from one year to the next. Some kids are more fortunate than others. Some teachers are more effective. This endless micro-analyzing of test scores and insistence on fitting every group of children into a fixed set of annual academic gains - well, it's reminiscent of that mythological fellow Procrustes, who insisted that everyone had to fit precisely into his bed; if you were too tall he sliced you down; if you were too short he had you stretched. What's more, tens of thousands of schools are apt to turn up on the hit list now and then, for any of a dozen reasons, including random test-score fluctuations. What good will it do a school system or state if two thirds of its schools wind up on the "needs improvement" list? And what happens if half of THOSE schools weren't on the list the previous year even as others drop off that list the following year? This AYP system is great for psychometricians and statisticians but it's a joke for teachers and kids.
Why So Much Testing?
Annual testing in the core subjects is the only way to know whether progress is being made. When you skip years or grades, you lose track of whether Jamie and Amy are making the gains they should. Though some educators resist pushing kids into grades instead of letting them progress at their own speeds in different subjects, parents and policy makers can only know whether children are making satisfactory progress when gauged in relation to their grades in school, and can only know whether the Franklin School's 4th graders are learning what they should if they can see how those kids were doing at the end of 3rd.
Yes, people fuss about testing burden and teaching to the test, but if the tests are properly aligned with curricular goals and state standards, then teaching kids what they must know to pass is an honorable thing to do.
We're becoming slaves to tests, which all too often are NOT aligned with standards but are simply what the low-bidding testing company was willing to provide. There are a million things worth teaching that don't lend themselves to multiple-choice testing, and the surest way to kill a school's distinctiveness or an educator's enthusiasm is to homogenize everything into a test centered, drill and kill system.
As for using annual test scores to determine Jamie's and Amy's fate, only someone imbibing the waters of the Potomac would think that kids can be standardized like widgets. They really do learn at different speeds and some really do test better than others. To hinge everything on a single annual test score is to defy human nature and cognitive psychology, to cause needless stress for all concerned, and to risk a lot of false positives and negatives depending on what day of the week it is, whether Jamie got a decent night's sleep and whether Amy is distracted by a dog barking outside the room where she's taking that silly test.
