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Courtesy of Campus Progress:

Crib Sheet: Reauthorizing No Child Left Behind

Why it hasn’t saved American education.

By Jim Downie, Columbia University, and Zach Marks, Yale University

Thursday June 7, 2007

Third graders in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

On Jan. 8, 2002, a rather strange event occurred in American politics: Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and President Bush were happy for the same reason. The two politicians—on opposite sides of almost every policy debate—came together to update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Better known as No Child Left Behind, the legislation was the centerpiece of Bush’s first-term domestic policy agenda, and Kennedy lent it bipartisan legitimacy by guiding it through the Senate. Now, five years later, the act is up for reauthorization in Congress. NCLB has its proponents and opponents, but they all seem to agree on one thing: The American education system still needs major help.

What methods does NCLB use to improve education?

NCLB increases the standards of accountability for states, school districts, and schools in three primary areas: student proficiency, teacher qualifications, and performance in math and reading.

First, each state is required to hold its districts accountable for moving all their students to a level of “proficiency” by 2014. Districts must report test scores and other measures for every school and show how these metrics break down by subgroups, including major racial and ethnic groups, low income students, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” toward state goals for two years are required to provide students with public school choice: the option to transfer to other designated public schools in their districts for the next school year.

Second, the act required that, by the end of the 2005 to 2006 school year, all teachers be “fully qualified” under the law’s conditions, including new teachers having a bachelor’s degree and passing a state test in their subject or subjects. In addition, middle and high school teachers must have some sort of advanced certification, such as an undergraduate major or graduate degree in the subjects they teach.

Third, the act emphasizes the importance of reading and math as core subjects. State standards are required in those subjects, but each state has great latitude in defining their own standards. Furthermore, the act is supposed to put significant money into early reading classes, with the goal of every child being able to read by the third grade.

Where has NCLB succeeded?

No Child Left Behind has greatly increased accountability, making it much more difficult for school districts to hide low-performing schools and achievement gaps between more and less privileged students. Because of NCLB, large suburban schools can no longer rely on the excellent overall performance of a majority of students as cover for the failures among a minority group or special-ed students.

Possibly more lasting is the expansion of the federal government’s role in education through NCLB. Through the law, the federal government is now playing a far larger role in education standard-setting and student performance than ever before. As the desegregation battles of the second half of the 20th century proved, while it is ultimately states and local governments that implement reforms in education, it often helps to have the power and funding of the federal government to expedite that process.

Where has NCLB fallen short?

While NCLB has done an excellent job in highlighting shortfalls in American education, it has a far less impressive record in terms of actually fixing those problems.

Most unfortunately, states have been allowed to develop their own tests for assessing reading and math skills. This has led to serious discrepancies in measuring student performance. In Mississippi, for example, 89 percent of students scored proficient or better on the state assessment. Yet on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests a sample of students in every state, only 18 percent of Mississippi students scored proficient or better. In math, some two-thirds of Tennessee students who met the state standards did not meet the federal goal; 87 percent passed the state exam, but only 21 percent passed the NAEP. With such gaps in test results, states are able to meet federal requirements despite the poor performance of their students.

NCLB has also encouraged a narrow focus on math and reading. “Teaching to the test,” a phenomenon familiar in high school, is now commonplace at the elementary and middle school level, with some schools going so far as to cut out basic subjects like history or lab science to increase time studying reading and math skills.

What needs to be done now?

Federal law should continue to emphasize results-based accountability for all student subgroups, set explicit timelines and goals for closing gaps between groups, and ensure that districts provide the public with information about schools so parents can advocate for their children. Going forward, NCLB should aim to have every student not only “proficient,” but “ready for college work.” The three keys to having every student “college work-ready” are better data, better teachers, and better curricula.

Better Data

If educators and policymakers cannot identify the challenges they face in closing the achievement gap, the gap will never be closed. Since many states still cannot collect good data in a timely fashion, the Education Trust, a national nonprofit that does research on education and advocates for reform, recommends that Congress create a $100 million-per-year grant fund to assist states in developing, improving, maintaining, and operating statewide longitudinal education data systems. This money would be used to track individual students’ test records from year to year, student attainment in high school, and performance on college admissions assessments, as well as to collect information on untested students, including the reasons why they were not tested.

Better Teachers

Policymakers must focus on improving teaching quality, especially in high-poverty and high-minority schools where students are twice as likely to be taught by novice teachers. Districts must address inequities in teacher distribution and eliminate disproportionate assignment of ineffective teachers to high-poverty and high-minority schools. States must provide principals in high-poverty schools with additional resources to boost teacher quality.

Better Curricula

A recent report revealed that the core curriculum taught in public schools left three out of four ACT-tested 2006 high school graduates unprepared to earn a C in an entry-level college course. Congress should target funding so states can help teachers be more effective in producing student learning gains. These funds should be focused on helping high-poverty schools develop high-quality curricula, provide professional development around these materials, and create better tests.

What can you do to improve public education?

Our generation must step up to face the education challenge. School districts around the country are in desperate need of qualified teachers. According to the National Education Association, America will need more than 2 million new teachers in the next decade. A number of programs have emerged to address this impending shortage: Teach for America recruits recent college graduates to commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools. NYC Teaching Fellows trains recent college graduates to become teachers in New York City public schools and subsidizes a master’s degree in education—8,000 active fellows currently account for about 11 percent of all teachers citywide, including one-fourth of all math teachers. Mississippi Teacher Corps operates under a similar model, bringing recent college graduates to teach in high-poverty schools in the Mississippi Delta for two years while giving them a full scholarship to receive their teacher certification and master’s degree in education.

Young people complain all the time that they want to change the world but aren’t given the opportunity to do so. Public education is a place where you can make a difference.