Edspresso -- Dianne Piché vs. Mike Petrilli vs. Joel Packer on No Child Left Behind

Now five years old, the landmark federal law is up for reauthorization. Is it working? What needs to change? This three-way exchange features:
Dianne Piché, Executive Director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights
Mike Petrilli, Vice President for National Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Joel Packer, ESEA policy manager for the National Education Association

The following aspects of NCLB will be debated this week:

Is NCLB working?

NCLB is in many ways schizophrenic. On the one hand, it says to schools “do what works.” On the other hand, it says “do whatever works.” Should a reauthorized NCLB push more in the “do what works” direction, the “do whatever works” direction, or keep the current balance?

Virtually everyone agrees that teacher quality is critical, but almost no one is happy with NCLB’s “highly qualified teachers” provision. Would you keep it or scrap it? If you would “mend it, not end it,” how?

What should a new NCLB do about persistently failing schools and the students who attend them?

How should Congress increase NCLB funding? What strings, if any, should be attached to the increased resources?

NOTE: For the sake of simplicity during this three-person debate, entries from Dianne,
Mike and Joel will all be color-coded.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5

Dianne, 2:16 p.m.:

Yes, Virginia, NCLB is working.

In fact, NCLB is working better than one might expect, given the fierce opposition in states like Virginia and Connecticut, along with some school districts, school administrators and teachers unions. Despite all the whining about the law, however, NCLB is supporting and prodding educators across America to take the teaching and learning of all students more seriously than ever before. And this is leading to unprecedented attention to achievement gaps and the needs of groups of students that historically were left behind. For many, many students and their families, NCLB is providing cause for hope and celebration.

It’s at this point, barely two sentences into my argument, when I can almost hear the reaction of Edspresso’s readers: this woman must be out of her mind! What evidence could she possibly have that NCLB is working? Has she not heard about all the horrible things NCLB is doing to our schools: narrowing the curriculum, imposing “unfunded mandates,” making kids throw up on tests, making kids fat? Of course, I’ve heard it all, but I assure you I am not delusional or on drugs.

Let’s step back and consider what NCLB is and where it came from.

First of all, NCLB is in many respects a civil rights law. As my colleague John Brittain of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law pointed out in his recent Congressional testimony, NCLB is the latest in a long line of efforts in the policy and legal arenas – including desegregation cases, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), and school finance and adequacy cases in the states -- to promote equity and opportunity in the public schools. Thus, far from being the product of a right-wing conspiracy, NCLB was adopted largely to further a compelling civil rights agenda: the erasure of class and race-based achievement gaps that stand in the way of full civic participation and opportunity in our democratic society. Critics and supporters alike should consider: How long does it take a cutting-edge civil rights law to “work?” Could a credible argument have been made in 1969 – 5 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act – that the ambitious law was “not working” and therefore ought to be abandoned? How long has it taken for the promise of Brown v. Board of Education to be realized? Are we even there yet?

Second, NCLB is the product of real-world wheeling and dealing. NCLB was the latest revision of the ESEA, a long and long-standing set of programs authorized by Congress to support K-12 education. No law with the far-reaching aspirations, political history, and legal complexity of the ESEA is ever perfect. No statute hammered out over portions of two Presidential administrations and by a deeply divided Congress could come close to being 99% pure, as the Secretary of Education recently suggested. NCLB is what it is: the product of compromises between Republicans and Democrats, advocates for change and defenders of the status quo, the interests of kids and adults, and so on. Maybe it’s because I have messy, active boys, but I prefer to think of NCLB as more like the heavy-duty, super-concentrated detergent we use to wash their clothes after muddy soccer games: it’s hardly pure or “organic” but if you use enough of it with plenty of hot water, it’ll eliminate over 90% of the stains and odors.

But, whatever its flaws – and there are plenty – NCLB is working in many of the ways Congress and civil rights advocates intended.

Here’s how:
Finally, teeth in Title I. NCLB’s predecessor, the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 contained many of the same provisions (e.g., standards, assessment, disaggregation, schools in need of improvement, corrective action, transfers to better schools). The IASA was not taken seriously by states and school districts, however, and it was only weakly enforced by the Clinton Administration. It took a Republican president, along with the courageous leadership of Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller to decide to put some teeth into the law. Now, for the first time in the 40-year history of this program, Title I is more than a loosely-regulated stream of federal dollars. And while there is always plenty to criticize over at the Department of Education, this Administration, under Secretaries Paige and Spellings, has done more to secure compliance with the law than perhaps all previous Secretaries combined. Recipients of these dollars now get the message that the federal government expects something in return for its investment. This is huge.

Unprecedented focus on the poor, minorities. NCLB has provoked a tectonic shift in the public discourse about achievement in America. In countless schools and communities (though by no means all) the discussion now is not about whether schools can do better but how. There has been a proliferation of success stories, including a series of profiles of high-achieving, high-poverty schools by journalist Karin Chenoweth at the Achievement Alliance, to be published this spring (preview here). In most major newspapers in the U.S., readers now find inspiring stories of schools examining their data and redoubling their efforts to improve achievement. And thanks to NCLB, tens of thousands of students are receiving individual attention and tutoring to bring them up to grade level in reading and math.

The “I’ll have what she’s having” effect. The public education system in the U.S. has done a very good job creating and maintaining inequality. And inequality is so entrenched, it often seems futile to try to change the prevailing order. But NCLB is helping to foster a long-overdue sense of entitlement to decency on the part of educators and parents in long-neglected schools. Three specific NCLB provisions are especially helpful in empowering parents and others to demand some of “what they’re having” on the other side of town: 1) the transparency, disaggregation and report card provisions, 2) the provisions designed to eliminate the “teacher quality gap” between poor and minority students and other students, and 3) the options to select a better school or free tutoring provided to parents in low-performing schools.

Vive la resistance! NCLB is also doing exactly what it was intended to do by advocates for change: it is making the education establishment uncomfortable, pushing the adults in the system to work harder and smarter and to confront their own racism and other biases, whether subtle or otherwise. Though our nation can hardly afford to demand less, NCLB does ask a lot of our public schools. Nobody said it would be easy, and it isn’t, so some degree of pushback is inevitable. In fact, there are some of us who view much of the resistance as a sign that the law really is working!

Mike, 3:41 p.m.:
Is No Child Left Behind working? Nobody, with a straight face, can answer that question with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down (sorry Dianne). The complexity of American education, and NCLB itself, makes such an assessment virtually impossible. Nevertheless, in the spirit of “differentiated ratings,” let’s try to appraise the Act with grades in four categories, from A to Z:

Achievement;

Changes that otherwise wouldn’t have happened;

First, do no harm; and

Zeitgeist of the education system.

AchievementThis is the “man on the street” question: are test scores going up because of NCLB, and are the nation’s achievement gaps closing? It depends on who you believe. The Administration points to NAEP results and claims that achievement gaps are “at an all-time low.” Opponents of the law spin the numbers another way, arguing that the strong progress our schools made in the late 1990s (especially for math but somewhat for reading) has stalled under the law.

The most responsible answer is that it is, indeed, too soon to tell. But are gains in test scores likely? I think so, because states that embraced NCLB-style standards-based reform in the 1990s are already making great strides. Last fall, Fordham published a major study looking at the progress states have made with their poor and minority students since the early 1990s. The states that have made the most widespread “statistically significant” gains in getting disadvantaged students to the lofty “proficient” level on the NAEP are ones such as Texas, Florida, and California that embraced standards, testing, and accountability for many years. If NCLB forces more states to follow this route, strong achievement gains for poor and minority kids should follow—at least in reading and math.

Of course, reading and math are not the whole ballgame; it’s plausible that NCLB has depressed achievement in subjects such as history and civics because of its pressure to “narrow” the curriculum. (We’ll know more this spring when the latest NAEP history and civics results come out.) And if schools are trying to take short cuts to higher reading scores by eliminating all content from the elementary curriculum (see here), we’ll likely see disappointing reading results by the eighth grade too, since students won’t have the knowledge and vocabulary to make sense of the passages they are reading. (More on this below.) Still, this is all speculation.

Achievement grade: Incomplete.
Changes that otherwise wouldn’t have happenedAnother way to assess NCLB is to determine whether it has altered the behavior of states, school districts, or other key actors. After all, the federal government doesn’t actually run the schools; all it can do (through carrots and sticks) is to push, prod, and cajole. Has this law worked to force changes, or at least (as Dianne argues) give local and state leaders political cover to do the right thing?

There have been some successes here. Disaggregating achievement data by racial and income groups has had a galvanizing effect, focusing the nation’s schools on the achievement gap like never before (especially in the suburbs), and wasn’t happening in many states pre-NCLB. Similarly, for all of the complaints, NCLB’s focus on getting a certain percentage of students to the “proficient” level every year is better than the anything-goes, a smidgeon-of-gains-is-fine-with-us growth models some states had in place in 2001. And annual testing of students is, on the whole, a good thing that would have been sporadic if not for NCLB.

Perhaps the best marks on this score are for providing cover to reform-minded superintendents, who have been able to be much more aggressive with NCLB than without. Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan, Steven Adamowski and their colleagues can push hard on the system and its defenders of the status quo (yes, Joel, I’m referring to your affiliates here) and blame those “crazy people” in Washington.

Still, at the end of the day, the federal government has very little power to make anyone do anything against his or her will. When it comes to creating new choices for parents, closing down failing schools, laying off ineffective teachers, or adopting a content-rich curriculum that works, Uncle Sam’s bark is bigger than his bite (see here). Dianne says that “the federal government expects something in return for its investment,” but it’s not exactly foreclosing on schools, districts, or states that don’t deliver.

Changes-that-otherwise-wouldn’t-have-happened grade: B-Minus.

First, do no harmCreating unintended consequences is a longstanding Washington tradition, but NCLB’s creators went even further by creating predictable negative consequences. To wit: the “race to the bottom” spurred by allowing states to set their own definitions of “proficiency,” while requiring that all students reach proficiency by 2014. To wit: the “highly-qualified teachers” provision, which sparked a volcano of meaningless paperwork while insulting the entirety of the nation’s teaching force. To wit: the “narrowing of the curriculum” plausibly made worse by NCLB’s focus on reading and math.

First-do-no-harm grade: F.

Zeitgeist of the education systemFinally, as I explain here, and Dianne describes well in her piece, one of NCLB’s major goals was to change the “public discourse” in education. While the achievement gap has been around forever, narrowing it wasn’t at the top of everyone’s to-do list until the passage of NCLB. This is significant. Sure, battles still rage about whether schools can make up for the challenges of poverty, and resistance to the law is fierce, but insinuating that poor kids can’t learn isn’t allowed in polite conversation anymore (although if you’re Charles Murray the Wall Street Journal will let you argue [for three days] that dumb kids can’t learn).

This is bad news for the apologists for today’s education system, and good news for reformers. For it gives breathing room to those on the left and right, Democrats and Republicans, who want to try bold, far-reaching reforms that touch at the heart of the education enterprise. It makes fairness in funding more possible. It makes changes in teacher distribution more conceivable. It opens the door to discussions about collective bargaining, and whether the old industrial model is still the best one for today’s challenges.

In other words, it gives cover for groups like Dianne’s to do battle against groups like Joel’s—which is good for education reform and great for kids.

Zeitgeist-of-the-education-system grade: A.

So there you have it: mixed grades for No Child Left Behind, and a whole lot of snarky comments for Joel to respond to. See you tomorrow.

Joel, 7:23 p.m.:
No Child Left Behind has good intentions – closing achievement gaps among various groups of students and raising overall student achievement (at least as measured on two statewide tests - one each in reading and math), and ensuring that all students have highly qualified teachers. But the law’s good intentions have gone seriously awry. While Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has said NCLB is “like Ivory Soap; it’s 99.9% pure or something… there's not much needed in the way of change,” the reality is that it is not working – either as intended or unintended.

Among its myriad flaws and negative results (though as Mike points out perhaps predictable ones) are narrowing of the curricula and the projection that virtually all schools will eventually fail to meet its one-size-fits all, all-or nothing AYP mandate. There is also little evidence that NCLB has directly contributed to its own major goal – raising student test scores.
In addition, it has significant flaws in how it tests and “counts” test scores from both English Language Learner (ELL) students and special education students. And its regimen of consequences, sanctions, and punishments are neither research-based, nor is there any evidence they are helping to close achievement gaps. Finally, it is seriously underfunded – with the cumulative shortfall between the amounts actually appropriated and the amounts authorized in the law exceeding $56 billion over six years.

NEA is not alone in calling for fundamental changes to the law. A coalition of over 100 national groups - including the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund, the National PTA, and the National Alliance of Black School Educators - has called for 14 changes to the law noting “the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement”.

Let’s take a look at some of these flaws and failures in more depth:
Is NCLB raising test scores?The Administration consistently claims that NCLB is working because NAEP reading scores for nine-year olds have increased more in the last five years than the previous 28 years. The reality is that most of that five –year period occurred prior to NCLB being in effect, and all of it occurred prior to the mandated testing for each of grades 3-8 being in place. Looking at grade 4 reading results on the main NAEP test, reading scores went up nine points between 2000 and 2002 (before NCLB) and were unchanged between 2002 and 2005 (post-NCLB). Looking at math scores between 2002 and 2003, scores indeed increased by 9 points, but between 2003 and 2005 (post-NCLB) they only rose 3 points.

Is NCLB closing achievement gaps?The respected Civil Rights Project at Harvard, in a June 2006 report found that, “federal accountability rules have little to no impact on racial and poverty gaps. The NCLB act ends up leaving many minority and poor students, even with additional educational support, far behind with little opportunity to meet the 2014 target.”

Is NCLB narrowing the curriculum?According to school superintendents, the answer is a resounding yes. Two reports from the Center on Education Policy, Is NCLB Narrowing the Curriculum? and From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 4 of the No Child Left Behind Act, found that since the passage of the NCLB, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts have reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to make more time for reading/language arts and/or math. Twenty-seven percent of the districts reported reduced instructional time in social studies. Twenty-two reported cuts in science and twenty percent reported similar cuts in art /music. Other studies, including one by Harcourt Assessment have reached similar conclusions.

Will most schools eventually fail AYP? Several studies by a mix of researchers, think tanks, and foundations have all reached the same conclusion - between 75 and 99% of all schools will eventually fail AYP. As a study of AYP in Louisiana found, “Labeling a vast majority of schools as failing would render the accountability system of rewards and sanctions meaningless.” A similar study issued by a coalition of Massachusetts education groups projected a 74% failure rate, while the California Department of Education projected a 99% failure rate by 2014. Even the most vocal critics of public schools wouldn’t claim that 99% of public schools are low-performing.

Does the public think NCLB is working?William Bushaw, Executive Director of PDK International, which conducts an annual poll of the public's attitudes about education recently wrote about NCLB, “Praiseworthy goals are encased in an implementation plan so ill-conceived that the public overwhelmingly rejects every strategy used.” He further notes that, “six of 10 Americans say NCLB is either hurting or making no difference in their community’s schools.
That this reality is being ignored makes it likely that NCLB, for all its bright promise, will lead to limited gains and may actually do harm to our schools.”

What do classroom teachers and other educators think?In a June 2006 survey we conducted of 1,000 NEA members, their feelings about NCLB were in synch with those of the public. The survey showed that NEA members believe that NCLB has not improved public education because of inadequate funding, the punitive nature of the law and the sole reliance on standardized testing to measure student achievement. Other findings of the survey include:

More than two-thirds, 69 percent, of members surveyed disapproved of NCLB, with just under a small majority, 49 percent, strongly disapproving. As NEA members have become more exposed to NCLB, their views have soured. Approval of NCLB has dropped from 40 percent in 2003 to 29 percent currently.

At the same time, disapproval rose from 56 percent in 2003 to a current 69 percent.
Fifty-seven percent of members want to see major changes in NCLB, 21 percent favor making minor changes, 17 want total repeal and only 4 percent want to keep the Act as it is.
If you want to hear the voices of classroom educators express their frustrations, anger, and sorrow at NCLB and its impact, read through their stories on NEA’s website. “Voices from America's Classrooms," offers hundreds of observations and stories from educators who have been impacted by this law.

The bottom line: NCLB is presenting real obstacles to the original purpose of the law.
Check back tomorrow for continued debate.Posted by Featured Guest on February 5, 2007 02:22 PM Permalink

The 100% proficiency mandate will change the dialog as the screws ratchet up.
Numbers vary by state, but the general rule is that now the numbers hilight differences between groups, while soon, as the bar rises, passing will no longer be possible for somewhat above average, homogenous groups in many states.

Scores last year were the 4th out of 12 years - meaning we've gone one-third the way to 100%. But the math is non-linear for moving score distributions. It's easier to go from 60 to 70% (less than half a standard deviation with eyeball math) than from 70% to 80% (about half a standard deviation). Lots easier than going from 80% to 90 (more than half a standard deviation). And 90 to 100? Depends on how much fudge you allow, but that's two, three, four, well, in fact, an infinite number of standard deviations, if you're not fudging the results.

If scores were simply being used to prioritize application of resources like tutoring or teacher training, this wouldn't matter much. But because AYP is used to declare schools as failing and apply punishments or initiate radical restructuring, it matters.