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Professor Gary Orfield is a faculty member in the Administration, Planning, and Social Policy area at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard. Here, in an excerpt from a presentation at HGSE, he explores both the good news and the bad news—in terms of civil rights—in the No Child Left Behind Act.
We in the Civil Rights Project decided that this bill [Bush's No Child Left Behind Act] was the most important thing to affect the education of minority young people over the next five years. So we went around the country to identify the best researchers who could say something about how you could spend this money usefully for poor kids. We commissioned and delivered 14 studies to Congress. We worked with Congressional staffers fairly intensively, had hundreds of discussions. Just the Fads What emerged was a bill that reflected none of what's known in educational research, primarily because of the extremely partisan processing: an almost complete rejection of everything, except some research on phonics. What emerged was an 1100-page document calling for impossible achievements that have never been accomplished anywhere; use of 50 different sets of standards; and very rigid sanctions. Some of these sanctions are going to take hold this fall for thousands of schools and the states are utterly unprepared to implement them. (There is nothing in the law that will equalize the schools before they are sanctioned.) The Good News, the Bad News A lot of bad things that people felt were going to happen didn't. There were supposed to be vouchers in this bill; there is a kind of half-voucher, but regular vouchers aren't in it. There was a fear of ending bilingual education; instead, they got a limit on it. There was a fear that there would be a block grant that would just let the states and localities spend the money for anything, and not concentrate it on poor schools or children at all, which was a very serious possibility, and that did not go anywhere. Implications for Civil Rights This is significant because some of the testing processes in the U.S. have actually been raising the dropout rates, especially for disadvantaged children. To this point, schools have been able to get credit for raising their test scores by getting rid of the low-achieving students. If, instead, they are responsible for how many students actually graduate, that applies some counter-pressure. The bill, however, makes a particularly troubling pledge on this subject, when it states that "90% of the children of all racial groups are going to be over the higher achievement level within 12 years." This law applies serious sanctions to schools after two years, and almost no one who does whole-school reform research thinks you can do that in two years. Take the dropout rate issue: the gap for Latino students is huge, and has never been significantly moderated. We have data from Texas, for example, to show that the gap grew as a result of the implementation of high-stakes testing in Texas in 1980. We first began enacting the kinds of policies embodied in this bill in the South in the 1970s. Following the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk," almost all states began to enact policies that somewhat foreshadow what we have now enacted in the federal law. They're not related to good trends for minority students. What's more is that we now have a public school system in the United States that is 40% non-white, and that figure is growing each year. This is a serious civil rights issue, and we hope that as this law unfolds, and as the crisis hits, there will be very serious monitoring by the educational research profession. One of the things that we need to do is to combat the stereotype that we are responsible for these problems. We need to combat the idea that there are simple sound bites that will elevate 90% of the children of all racial groups to higher achievement levels within the next 12 years.
For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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