Cheri Pierson Yecke, Ph.D., Center of the American ExperimentSeptember 22, 2004
In this short report, former Minnesota education commissioner Cheri Yecke reports on the findings of her discussions with Minnesota educators about the challenges of NCLB. She heard more than bellyaching and offers a practical set of tweaks and improvements, both to the federal law and to her state's accountability practices, seeking "to strengthen No Child Left Behind," not "to dodge the law or mask accountability." In particular, she urges Washington to consider value-added measures of achievement to measure and understand changes over time. She suggests improvements related to special ed, including a modification to the teacher quality provision (so that a teacher covering five subjects need not prove proficiency in each); a pitch for replicating Florida's McKay scholarship program; and flexibility in the AYP formula (noting that as students improve they might no longer be classified as special ed, thus mislabeling good schools as needing improvement in that area). She notes the folly of holding school leaders accountable for results if they are powerless over their teachers, leading her to urge Minnesota to make it easier to fire bad teachers, reform tenure, and enable performance pay. And she would grant states more freedom with their federal funds in exchange for increased accountability (an idea abandoned on Capitol Hill in 2001 in favor of NCLB's regulatory approach). Overall, Yecke's report is a rewarding read for anyone hoping to improve NCLB. It also provides revealing charts on state-by-state minority achievement gaps (Minnesota's is among the worst) and concrete suggestions. It's available online here.
