No Child Left Behind

HGSE Faculty Join the Conversation This spring, in HGSE's Learning Technologies Center, faculty member Robert Schwartz moderated a videoconference about the future of No Child Left Behind with five national leaders in education. To that conversation, several HGSE faculty members now add their voices with the commentaries that follow: [caption id="attachment_8521" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Faculty member Paul Reville (photos: Karlyn Morissette)"]

[/caption] Paul Reville: NCLB represents an ambitious attempt by the federal government to support the systemic reforms that had been adopted in virtually all of the states in the 1990s. NCLB admirably expresses a commitment to high-performing schools and quality teachers for all students. It provides new entitlements to parents. However, its accountability architecture is so faulty that NCLB risks damaging the good work accomplished in many states. I'd be inclined to scrap NCLB as so many good intentions gone away, then start over in designing more modest federal legislation that would guarantee the states provide all students the learning opportunities they need to be successful in life.   [caption id="attachment_8522" align="alignright" width="185" caption="Anrig Professor Richard Elmore (photos: Karlyn Morissette)"]

[/caption] Richard Elmore: The federal government has over-extended its reach in NCLB by adopting a theory of intergovernmental relations that it cannot possibly adhere to over the long run. There is no way that the federal government can oversee and regulate the accountability systems of 50 states and more than 16,000 local jurisdictions without reducing them to a caricature of what they were originally designed to do. Least of all can the federal government perform this task in a period of general downsizing of government. The whole project of federal control embedded in NCLB is absurd and should be gracefully abandoned. It is clear that localities are under-investing in professional development for teachers and administrations and in the development of new pedagogical and administrative practices associated with school improvement. Why? Local school systems have to run schools. Their focus is primarily on getting new knowledge into classrooms, not on the development of new knowledge, the benefits of which accrue to everyone, not just themselves. States are generally weak players in accountability and improvement because they are removed from the immediate demands of making schools work. Their comparative advantage is to sustain and develop knowledge about how accountability systems can be made to serve the purposes of school improvement. The political discipline required to keep policymakers focused on sustaining continuous improvement in accountability systems is more than enough for states to focus on. At the national level, as most industrialized countries discovered after World War II, the compelling interest is keeping the country focused on the development of human talent. Since the benefits of large-scale investments in human talent accrue powerfully to society as a whole, and are not necessarily visible to individual parents, students, local or state officials, it is important for the national government to keep policy focused on this level of aggregation. A human investment strategy for education would have an explicit strategic focus: to increase access of all students, particularly low-income, minority students, to high-level academic work, and to invest in the human capital infrastructure for schools that will promote this access. [caption id="attachment_8523" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Pforzheimer Professor Susan Moore Johnson (photos: Karlyn Morissette)"]

[/caption] Susan Moore Johnson: Standards-based accountability has won broad support from teachers, who welcome its clear focus on what they should teach and what students should learn. However, the implementation of NCLB has perverted standards-based accountability by narrowing the curriculum, limiting the ways in which student performance is assessed, and constraining pedagogy. In an effort to ensure that their students will succeed and that their schools will meet AYP goals, many teachers spend virtually all their instructional time on literacy and mathematics, with little attention to science and social studies. Teachers in many schools, particularly those in low-income communities, are required to used scripted curricula and to comply with lock-step pacing guides, monitored closely so that all tested topics are covered. Teachers must spend precious instructional time on test preparation, despite their conviction that many of the standardized tests they administer inadequately assess what their students know. Increasingly, new teachers who leave the classroom report that they are disillusioned with the prospects of accountability for their students and for them. The purposes of NCLB are worthy, but as it is currently being implemented, the law is having unintended negative consequences for students, their teachers, and the future of public schooling. [caption id="attachment_8524" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Professor Dan Koretz (photos: Karlyn Morissette)"]

[/caption] Dan Koretz: Some of the principles underlying NCLB are worth maintaining, but the bill has so many problems that it would be more practical to start over than to fix it. It certainly should not be maintained in anything approximating its current form. We should continue to hold educators accountable for results, and we should continue to insist that they work to raise the performance of all students, especially those in historically low-scoring groups. Personally, I think we should also continue to give options to students who would otherwise be trapped in failing schools. The devil is in the details, however, and many of the details of NCLB are unreasonable and even pernicious. Arbitrary, uniform, and inflexible performance targets such as those set in NCLB are impractical and counterproductive. Instead, targets should be based on evidence and should reflect the circumstances of individual students and schools. The AYP mechanism is fundamentally flawed. Given both the inconsistent path of educational improvement and the many sources of instability in school performance, we should be looking for gradual improvements over the moderate term, not incessant gains in scores. Most fundamentally, accountability systems that focus entirely or almost entirely on scores on a single test simply don't work well. They tend to backfire because they create incentives to raise scores by many undesirable means, such as reducing time allocated to untested subjects and devoting time to various types of inappropriate test preparation. We know what the result is: misleading and sometimes outright fraudulent gains that create an illusion of progress but leave kids behind. If we really want not to leave kids behind, we have to institute more complex accountability systems that combine multiple measures and use both scores and expert judgment. And for both practical and ethical reasons, we need to monitor these accountability systems to minimize unintended negative consequences and make midcourse corrections. We know how to do that; we simply need the political will. For More Information More information about HGSE faculty members is available in the Faculty Profiles. About the Responses Richard Elmore's response is an excerpt from a chapter of What We Stand For: A Program for Progressive Patriotism (edited by Mark Green), published by Newmarket Press in May 2004.