USA Today - "Our view on education: Five ways to improve No Child Left Behind"

Our view on education: Five ways to improve No Child Left Behind
Accountability law has flaws, but it should be mended, not ended.

The 5-year-old No Child Left Behind law is up for renewal this month, and its fate is uncertain despite notable success.

President Bush's signature domestic achievement has brought accountability to school districts that for decades shamefully buried their failures in grossly understated dropout rates and vastly overstated academic achievement. Scores of inner-city schools have improved dramatically.

But the law is under fire from the left (teachers' unions dislike its rigidity), from the right (conservatives dislike federal meddling in local education) and from critics across the spectrum who dislike the annual testing designed to ensure that all students are learning.

The law does have flaws. Too many schools, for instance, are ensnared in its needs-improvement lists. The appropriate response, however, isn't to scrap the whole act or to water down its emphasis on reading and math. Here are five ways to improve NCLB without undermining its promise:

* Provide new options for students in failing schools. The current choices for children trapped in faltering schools — free tutoring and the opportunity to transfer — are nearly useless. The quality of free tutoring has proven to be erratic. And in cities such as Cleveland or Washington, what good is a transfer option if no high-performing schools are available nearby? What would work is the opportunity to transfer across school district lines from a persistently failing school to a successful school in a neighboring district.

* Make sure good teachers stay in schools that need help. Many districts allow their toughest schools to be staffed by the newest, lowest paid teachers and let more experienced teachers transfer to better schools. One way to reverse that would be to demand that federal dollars set aside for poor children actually get spent on those children. That means offering substantial bonuses to teach in struggling schools and exposing the fatter payrolls in better-off schools.

* Get serious about turning around failing schools. Schools that fail to make adequate progress for more than five straight years — there are about 1,300 of them nationally — are allowed to spin their wheels while making only cosmetic changes. Fixing those schools requires states (with federal help) to develop school turnaround teams of administrators and teachers that move into troubled schools until they are fixed.

* Allow schools to trade time for quality. The law says all students need to be at grade level by 2014. That's an admirable goal, but it has all the reality of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor's fictional town where all the children are above average. Since pushing back the goal is inevitable, it should be possible to win some trade-offs in the process. States such as Mississippi, which set embarrassingly low standards, could be given extra time in return for raising them.

* Narrow the hit list. By naming thousands of schools to need-improvement lists rather than hundreds, the law has been more righteous than popular. To survive, it needs broader support. Schools that are generally OK deserve flexibility. They especially need to stay off any list that allows them to be carelessly labeled as failing schools.

By testing everyone, and breaking out the scores by race and income levels, No Child Left Behind has revealed unacceptable gaps in the ways children in the USA are educated. Whether it can close those gaps is yet to be determined. This much is sure: The answer will never be known if the law is snuffed out before the age of 6.