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Sorting Out 'No Child Left Behind' On Monday, the New York Times carried a front page article – datelined Sacramento – with the headline “Under ‘No Child’ Law, Even Solid Schools Falter.” Using Sacramento’s Prairie Elementary as an example, the article describes how growing number of schools are raising their test scores – but nonetheless find themselves unable to meet the escalating benchmarks set by federal No Child Left Behind legislation. This is particularly the case in a state like California, where “officials chose to require only minimal gains in the first few years after the law passed, and then very rapid annual gains later.” The article notes that when NCLB became law in 2002, “officials from many states told the Bush Administration that they needed time to write new tests and accustom teachers to them.” Hence the backloading of high expectations in California, with benchmarks for expected student proficiency escalating dramatically from 2008 through 2014 – at which point 100 percent of students are supposed to be proficient at grade level in math and English. The article suggests that when Jack O’Connell came onboard as California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2003, O’Connell “also bet that Congress might change the law in 2007, perhaps by removing its 100 percent proficiency goal.” O’Connell is quoted as saying “It’s true that was in the back of my mind when we negotiated our plan with the feds. And I’d do the same thing again. I’m still hoping a new administration will change the law.” That’s a candid statement. It appears that O’Connell realized all along, as any reasonable person would, that NCLB’s goal of 100 percent student proficiency was basically unrealistic and unattainable. Common sense would indicate that it’s virtually impossible for ALL students to succeed simultaneously in school after school, year after year. It would the equivalent of expecting doctors to cure all of their patients, regardless of what ails them. It’s a lofty goal, and it makes for appealing ideological, motivational rhetoric. We don’t’ dispute that the public has every right to expect teachers to make every possible effort to help their students learn (and to expect doctors to help patients stay healthy). But a 100 percent success rate, in education or in medicine (or many other fields), simply isn’t going to happen in the real world. Our hunch is that O’Connell was also thinking that some of the more draconian punitive measures contained in NCLB would be revised before the Bush administration was termed out. But no such rewrite took place, and with the 2008 presidential campaign now in the home stretch, the task of refashioning NCLB into a more realistic, workable form will be passed to the next president. In the meantime, we’re left with a problematic law that is poised to label more and more California schools as “failing schools,” even as many of these schools are actually raising test scores and making tangible progress toward the law’s goals. Is there a lesson in all of this? We’re reminded of adjustable rate mortgages. A few years ago, many Californians willingly took on mortgages with low initial “teaser rates” that made for payments they could easily handle during the early years of the loan. They figured they’d “just refinance” a few years later – and they gambled that real estate prices would only go up in the meantime. But now, those adjustable mortgage interest rates are resetting to higher levels, making for bigger and bigger monthly payments – even as home values across California are falling, making it almost impossible for those homeowners to refinance as they’d originally planned. This kind of reminds us of the dilemma that faces K-12 education in California. NCLB now expects student test scores to rise, rise, rise (and will punish schools if they don’t rise fast enough) – even as the national economy dips into a recession, and California’s state budget falls further into the red, with midyear cutbacks in funding for education looming on the near horizon. |
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