The No Child Left Behind rubber is hitting the education road, where it's producing a lot of screeching brakes, skid marks and, especially, honking. A flock of noisy Canadian geese makes less noise than American public education griping about NCLB, the changes it is forcing, the injustices it is said to be inflicting and the difficulties of implementing it as Congress intended. To wit:
*The NEA has declared war, via the courtroom, voicing many grievances centered on the law's "unfunded mandates," i.e. the claim that NCLB will make schools do things for which Washington is not fully compensating them.
*The annual Kappan/Gallup survey appears to show wide public discontent with many NCLB strategies and assumptions, beginning with the enlarged federal role itself.
*Some states are gaming the "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) system and other NCLB monitoring-and-accountability systems, rigging their goals, manipulating their measurements, fiddling with their standards and reworking their definitions.
*As a News Hour segment with John Merrow made plain the other evening, one state after another - this one focused on Maine - is griping that NCLB is making them do things differently, asserting that all was hunky dory without this federal intrusion, and demanding waivers and special conditions.
*Summer's end revealed wide discrepancies that have more to do with where states have set their standards and how they measure performance than with "true" differences. Just 400 of Florida's 3000 public schools, for example, made AYP in 2002-3, but only 144 of Minnesota's 2000 schools did NOT. Similar contrasts are to be found in state reports on how many schools are persistently dangerous. (Under NCLB, children may exit such schools.) Ohio found none last year and New York only two. Tell that to the parents of Cleveland and the Bronx.
*Confusing gaps are emerging between which schools are doing OK according to NCLB and which are satisfying their states' pre-existing accountability schemes. It's easy to find schools that the state says are in "academic emergency," but that NCLB says are making adequate yearly progress - and vice versa. Florida's "A+" system, for example, designed by Jeb Bush, gives honor grades to a bunch of schools that are flunking according to the NCLB system designed by his brother.
*As in fall 2002, NCLB's cramped school-choice provisions are proving exceedingly hard to put into practice, particularly in places that need them most. A quarter million Chicago pupils, for example, are now eligible to transfer to higher-performing public schools, yet the city has only 5000 available places in such schools.
*State officials report widespread confusion over what exactly is entailed in trying to comply with NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirements - and whether it's even going to be possible. Rural states and communities are especially unhappy.
*There's widening concern that NCLB's single-minded focus on reading, math and science will unintentionally marginalize such subjects as history and civics - and shield them from needed public scrutiny.
This list could easily lengthen. But how much is just honking and which are real problems that somebody should be solving? I see five things going on:
First, NCLB expects big changes across a wide spectrum of ingrained practices and entrenched assumptions. It's a deeply behaviorist law, meant to alter behavior via a series of incentives and punishments. But people, institutions and - especially - bureaucracies don't like to alter their behavior, no matter how badly the old practices have failed-or how much better the changed practices may work. Keep in mind, too, that the griping isn't coming from kids. It's from grown-ups. The well being of America's children is the reason for changing but, at least in NCLB's early days, the law's most profound effects are on adults and institutions that resist changing.
Second, NCLB's authors loaded an awful lot into it. That's why the law runs a thousand pages, of course. But was this really the best place to deal with, say, school safety as well as student achievement and teacher quality? NCLB expects people to dance and cook and fly and yodel at the same time. That's hard to do well.
Third, NCLB's authors invited discrepancies when they layered a uniform nationwide accountability system atop fifty different sets of state standards and tests, and when they left key definitions (e.g. dangerous schools, fully certified teachers) to states while micro-managing others (e.g. the disaggregated demographic categories according to which AYP must be measured).
Fourth, some of NCLB's built-in political compromises have hobbled its effective implementation, such as giving kids the right to exit a bad school for a better one while limiting that selection to other public schools within the same district.
Fifth, Americans are of two minds about much of this. People crave better schools and higher achievement but don't want to be pushed around by Washington. They want better teachers yet adore Ms. Jones. They believe in "the basics" but hate it when their kid doesn't get music. They want Johnny to succeed in school but grump when someone tells them he needs to work harder. Because of this ambivalence - much of it shared by educators - it's not hard to manipulate survey questions and poll results to "prove" just about anything. (The recent Kappan/Gallup survey did an especially deft job of biasing the findings by how it phrased the questions.)
The word in Washington - from executive branch and Congress alike - is grin and bear it, stay the course, don't even dream of changing NCLB, it'll be worth it in the end. There's no political stomach for re-opening this complex statute, particularly in an election year. The bipartisanship that is perhaps NCLB's greatest asset would crumble. If amending is needed, that process can start in January 2005.
Which may be just as well. It's obvious that the country would benefit from some fine-tuning of NCLB based on experience with it. Every major government program needs that. Congress never gets it exactly right the first time around. But much of the current squawking has to do with start-up difficulties and confusion, the friction of changing familiar practices and the pain of stretching long-idle tendons. Another year of experience will see some difficulties resolving themselves, states and districts (and schools and educators) beginning to grow accustomed to doing things differently and, perhaps, more imagination in resolving implementation problems. Mainly, though, it's important for everyone to recognize that a new day has dawned in American education and that it simply won't do to go back to sleep.
"Flunking out: Bush's pet education bill is in serious trouble," by Alexander Russo, Slate, August 28, 2003
"Cuts put school law to the test," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, August 31, 2003
