Before the 2004 presidential election, it was obvious what the liberal advocacy group Education Trust thought about President George W. Bush. In short, Ed Trust got what it needed from Bush--advocating, as he did, for the No Child Left Behind act, a law that Ed Trust staff played a large role in crafting--and ??would be happy to see him go. But for Education Trust and other liberal reformers, the Bush Administration is the gift that keeps on giving, as the NCLB regulations announced today illustrate. Simply put, there is nothing "conservative" about them.
There was a time when the Bush Administration talked proudly about four "pillars" of NCLB, including "flexibility." Consider these comments from President Bush on January 23, 2001, in announcing his No Child Left Behind proposal at the White House:
The agents of reform must be schools and school districts, not bureaucracies. Teachers and principals, local and state leaders must have the responsibility to succeed and the flexibility to innovate. One size does not fit all when it comes to educating the children in America. School districts, school officials, educational entrepreneurs should not be hindered by excessive rules and red tape and regulation.
Or consider comments from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings during her confirmation hearing in January 2005:
State policymakers who typically devote more than half their state budgets to education expect that the students in their state will be prepared to compete in our country and the world. They need flexibility to meet the needs of their unique states and communities, and they need to be trusted to do right by their students.
Well. Forget all that. In what may be Margaret Spellings's last official act as Secretary, the federal government is tightening the screws on the nation's schools. Rather than learn the key lesson from NCLB's implementation to date--that the federal government can coerce states and districts to do things they don't want to do, but can't coerce them to do those things well--the Bushies have come to believe in the perfectibility of public policy. Districts aren't taking the federal mandate to overhaul failing schools seriously? Tighten the screws. States aren't doing enough to monitor tutoring providers? Tighten the screws. School aren't doing enough to combat high dropout rates? Tighten the screws.
To be sure, not all of the new rules are unreasonable. The requirement that all states measure graduation rates in a common manner makes plenty of sense; it's criminal that in 2008 we don't have an accurate read on how many kids in America are dropping out. Ensuring transparency around graduation rates would have been a bold reform. But Spellings and company couldn't stop there. Imbued with Great Society-style righteousness, and no doubt still trying to impress their "allies" at Education Trust, they will deem every high school in the country a failure that doesn't get a state-specified number of poor, minority, disabled, or non-English proficient students to graduate on time. This even though the federal government pays almost none of the bills for secondary education and has no clue how schools are supposed to improve graduation rates so dramatically.
Let's think about how this might play out. States can set their graduation targets wherever they like. But now they know that their schools will have to get the requisite number of disadvantaged and disabled kids over that benchmark. Who thinks this gives states a perverse incentive to aim low? And what will happen to states that currently have high school graduation exams in order to ensure that a diploma means something? Won't this create an incentive for them to scrap or water down those tests?
The biggest mistake of the original NCLB was to require 100 percent of students to achieve "proficiency" in reading and math but allow states to define proficiency however they like. Now Spellings is creating a dynamic whereby states will say to school districts: you must get a certain percentage of your students, and your minority students, and your disabled students, etc., to graduate, but you can define graduation however you like. Let me make a prediction: graduation rates will rise, and the value of a high school diploma will fall.
There was a time when conservatives worried about these sorts of unintended consequences. Now it's likely up to Team Obama to do so. I'm not hopeful.
