Fix NCLB! Fundamental flaws need to be addressed in the 2007 reauthorization 

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is the kind of legislation that politicians love.

Its goals—so concisely and compellingly stated in its name—are beyond dispute.

“NCLB is the sort of inspirational title that rallies people forward,” said Michael A. Resnick, associate executive director for advocacy and issues management of the National School Boards Association. “The basic premise is something everyone supports.”

So it’s not surprising that five years ago NCLB enjoyed massive, bipartisan support in Washington. Or that Congress approved the act overwhelmingly. The law offered and promised a lot.

“A year ago, President Bush set out to improve every public school in this country—to ensure that students of all races, all abilities and all ages receive the education they need and deserve,” declared then-Secretary of Education Rod Paige. “Today, with the stroke of his pen, President Bush changed the culture of education in America and kept his promise to leave no child behind.”

But a promise made is not necessarily a promise kept. The value and effectiveness of NCLB has become a matter of considerable debate. In the view of Washington policy-makers (at least according to their press releases and public statements), NCLB has been wildly successful—almost perfect, to hear current Education Secretary Margaret Spellings tell it.

“I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure or something,” she said earlier this year. “There’s not much needed in the way of change.” According to Spellings’ Department of Education, NCLB has, among other things:

• Boosted federal spending on education to unprecedented levels
• Given states and school districts more control and flexibility over needed resources
• Elevated teacher quality and expanded parental involvement and student participation
• Established higher standards of achievement and accountability based on rigorous research and proven assessment tools

Without doubt, there is some truth to all of these assertions.

“NCLB has forced some schools and districts to take action, to make improvements they might not otherwise have made,” said Paula Campbell, a 14-year veteran member of the Nevada City school board, which oversees a 1,450-student elementary district approximately 90 miles northeast of Sacramento, and a member of CSBA’s Board of Directors. “It’s done some good things.”

But contrary to Spellings’ assertion, NCLB is far from perfect. Indeed, many educators (including Campbell) and many educational organizations—including CSBA—contend that No Child Left Behind is fundamentally flawed and, without substantive changes, ultimately unworkable.

“This law is broken. It doesn’t need tweaking. It needs significant repairs,” said Rick Pratt, CSBA’s assistant executive director for Governmental Relations.

The opportunity to make those repairs is approaching. A bill has been introduced in Congress proposing a variety of changes and improvements to NCLB, scheduled for reauthorization next year.

“Now is key time,” said Erika Hoffman, senior legislative advocate at CSBA. “At the local level, teachers, administrators and school boards know NCLB has problems. The effort [in the months before reauthorization hearings begin] has to be to unite those voices and make sure policy-makers and politicians in Washington hear them. These people need to know that the law doesn’t work.”

The five basic problems of NCLB

Broadly speaking, critics say NCLB suffers from five basic problems.

First, NCLB requires 95 percent student participation on any school- or districtwide assessment test. Critics say the percentage requirement is unreasonably high and rigid. It does not take into account, for example, that in some states (among them California) parents can choose to not let their children take a test. Districts have little, if any, control over participation rates.

“For parents and children, there often is no great benefit to taking a test or any consequence for not taking it,” said Frank Pugh, a member of CSBA’s Board of Directors and a school board member in the K-12 Santa Rosa City School District, 50 miles north of San Francisco. “We bribe them with pizza, offer breakfast, do what we can to get them to take the test, but many parents and children just don’t take assessment tests seriously. They don’t want to do them.”

Nonparticipation usually doesn’t affect individual students, but enough of it can dramatically alter a district’s circumstances. Consider the case of Cupertino Union School District, a district of 16,500 students on the western edge of San Jose, said CSBA’s Pratt.

By all accounts, Cupertino is a very successful school district, among the highest performing in the state. Most of its schools are perennial top-scorers on the Academic Performance Index, the state’s assessment tool for measuring school and district improvement. In fact, the only school in California to achieve a perfect score of 1,000 on this year’s API was Cupertino’s Faria Elementary.

“Cupertino is the kind of district parents try to get their children into,” said Pratt.

But according to the strictures of NCLB Cupertino was, until recently, a district in need of “Program Improvement.” That’s because in the 2003-04 school year, test participation in one of the identified student sub-groups—special education math—fell just short of the required 95 percent rate. The district achieved 94 percent. It was short by six students.

“If those kids had taken the test,” said Pratt, “the district would have been OK, even if the students had failed their tests.”

As a result, Cupertino was required by NCLB rules to seek additional funding for improvements to its special education services, and to have those efforts evaluated by an outside agency. The district did so, and has since had the “program improvement” tag removed, but the episode, which compelled district officials to send out explanatory letters to parents, still rankles.

“The whole thing makes no sense,” said Pratt. “The law is failing to distinguish between schools and districts that really do need improvement and those that don’t. As a result, scarce resources go to the wrong places. Changes are made that are unneeded and potentially disruptive.”

The second problem with NCLB may be more onerous. The federal law emphasizes increased accountability and improvement based upon “cut scores,” or regular, static tests assessing student proficiency in various subjects at various grade levels. The resulting aggregate number measures the district’s adequate yearly progress, which is required to be at or above a mandated and steadily rising score.

But Pratt says neither adequate yearly progress nor any other single number can fully and accurately describe a school or district.

“The idea that AYP describes everything going on inside a school is ridiculous,” he said. “When the Federal Reserve Board considers raising or lowering interest rates, it doesn’t base its decision on one number. It looks at housing starts, the Consumer Price Index, employment data—a host of things. The Fed works on a business model. Schools are admonished to behave more like a business, but not in this case, not with AYP.”

Pratt and others say a more relevant assessment measures the progress a school or district makes toward academic excellence. That’s the idea behind California’s API assessment tool, which advocates call a “growth model.”

“The growth model is really an improvement model,” said Bill Padia, director of the California Department of Education’s policy and evaluation division. “No matter where a school or district is [in terms of its numerical score], both should be getting better each year. If a school or district is improving, then you don’t intervene. You save your resources for places that are not improving or are consistently performing poorly.”

The third complaint is also related to adequate yearly progress. Critics say remedies and sanctions automatically triggered by unacceptable measures of AYP are out of alignment with reality and reason. Cupertino would be one such case, but there are many, many others. This year, roughly 35 percent of school districts in California were deemed to have fallen short of adequate yearly progress in one way or another.

“NCLB says ‘I don’t care where you started, you have to be here or you have to do these things,” said Campbell, the Nevada City school trustee. “That’s discouraging, and it forces people to teach to the test, to spend all of their time just trying to reach an AYP mark.”

The fourth complaint about NCLB also relates to real-world considerations. Currently, NCLB holds all schools and districts accountable for the performance of all students. There is no substantial differentiation between students’ backgrounds or abilities. They are essentially judged the same.

For teachers and local school officials, this one-size-fits-all approach is simply illogical and impractical. Every student is different, they say, and certain groups of students are different from other groups. For example, it is unreasonable, they say, to expect and demand that students with disabilities or limited proficiency in English perform at exactly the same level and rate of progress as students without these burdens or obstacles.

And yet, they argue, NCLB insists upon just that.

Lastly, there is the familiar problem of funding. While the Bush administration boasts that NCLB has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding to schools, many educators say it hasn’t been enough. Sometimes it hasn’t even been what’s promised.

For example, according to the National School Boards Association, Congress enacted a funding schedule that called for $20.5 billion in Title I education spending for the 2005-06 school year. It actually appropriated $12.7 billion, $7.8 billion less than promised and just 3.2 percent more than the previous year. Critics say it’s unreasonable for schools and districts to be held accountable to demanding and ever-escalating NCLB standards if they’re not getting enough money to do the job.

“NCLB is an unfunded mandate,” said Pugh, the school board member in Santa Rosa. “It sets a high threshold for action, but doesn’t provide adequate funding to meet its demands.”

Fixing NCLB

Five years of NCLB and its consequences have  created widespread dissatisfaction—more in some states than in others—and spurred some to action. NSBA, CSBA and others are advocating a proposed law submitted by Don Young, R-Alaska, that would, if passed in its current form, significantly alter NCLB’s impact but not its overarching goals.

Dubbed the No Child Left Behind Improvements Act of 2006, House Resolution 5709 consists of more than 40 provisions affecting NCLB. Many focus on the five primary complaints about the current law.

For example, the proposed law would give states greater flexibility to use alternate assessment tools for students with recognized disabilities. It would give schools and districts credit for progress, even if their assessment scores fell short of  NCLB’s AYP measurements. It would refocus the use of sanctions more narrowly upon schools and districts reporting consecutive years of inadequate performance. It would require Congress to appropriate at least $2.5 billion more in Title I spending over the preceding year.

At this point, no one can say what chance HR 5709 has of successfully becoming law.

“It’s a guessing game right now in terms of NCLB reauthorization,” said Mary Fulton, a policy analyst with the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.  “Certainly people are lobbying, trying to get their voices heard. But what eventually happens depends upon many variables, like the makeup of next year’s Congress—the interest of people in Washington in changing the law.”

If real change does happen, it won’t come easy.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle,” said Pratt, CSBA’s Governmental Relations director. “Part of the challenge is the starting point of the administration, which sees little reason for change. Another is that the leadership of both political parties has their fingerprints all over the law. They won’t want to admit mistakes were made.”

David Shreve, senior committee director of education for the National Conference of State Legislatures, agreed: “Congress voted overwhelmingly for it. How many congressmen are willing to say ‘I screwed up. I didn’t understand the complexities of the subject or the law. I didn’t understand what the law wouldn’t do. I didn’t understand that the law doesn’t do what we said it would do.’ ”

Aside from HR 5709, there have been other efforts to amend NCLB to make it more acceptable to states and local districts. Despite her comments about NCLB’s vaunted purity, U.S. Education Secretary Spellings has approved two pilot programs in Tennessee and North Carolina that employ growth models rather than just adequate yearly progress in student achievement. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has talked about “harmonizing” the state’s API system with the federal benchmarks.

“I’m a believer in the growth model, and I want to raise the issue with the federal government of utilizing a growth model as a component of accountability for NCLB,” O’Connell said in a speech earlier this year.

But doing so will be difficult.

“You’re trying to harmonize two measures that are philosophically very different,” said Padia at the California Department of Education.

Indeed, when the federal DOE asked states to submit growth model pilot project ideas, six of eight applications were rejected. California’s API system wasn’t even deemed eligible for consideration, though O’Connell hopes it may be in a couple of years when the state’s student tracking system is fully in place.

Unfortunately, O’Connell’s optimism doesn’t seem to be very contagious—at least for the moment. Shreve, at the National Conference of State Legislatures, says he can imagine only a couple of scenarios in the foreseeable future:

“The first is a continuation of the status quo. The second is a post-election change with the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate going over to a Democratic majority. In neither case do I think things will be immediately different, because the leadership of both parties in both the House and Senate have all indicated that they don’t think the law needs anything more than a little tweaking or nipping around the edges.”

Significant change may not occur until the situation becomes dramatic or dire. A core goal of NCLB is that all students are proficient in math and language arts by the 2013-14 school year. That’s every student. In seven years.

“This law requires 100 percent perfection,” said Pratt. “You don’t get that anywhere. We don’t have No Child Goes to Bed Hungry laws. We don’t have 100 percent health care coverage. These ideas would be just as laudable as NCLB, but people realize that you can’t achieve 100 percent perfection.”

As hard as they try, many education leaders predict the list of schools and districts deemed to be failing in some way by NCLB will inevitably grow. By 2013, in some worst-case scenarios, it could be the majority of schools and districts in California.

“People are going to be really confused when their school, which they like, is sanctioned by NCLB, when their students’ test scores are twice as good as before but the law says they are not getting an adequate education,” said Campbell, the Nevada City trustee.

If that happens, it might provoke a grassroots demand for changes to NCLB.

Another possibility is happening right now: Some states are forging ahead with their own assessment systems. “I think you’re going to see more and more of these dual systems of accountability, like you do now in California and Florida,” said Shreve. “There will be one system to measure student performance and schools based upon meaningful parameters set up by the state and another system with standards established by NCLB, which the state will acknowledge and ignore.”

In this future, said Shreve, NCLB could become just another federal program that states comply with to receive funding. Presumably, that’s not what President Bush had in mind when he envisioned No Child Left Behind. It’s not the “changed culture of education” that former Education Secretary Paige spoke about in 2001.

But it’s a possibility, say educators, if the shortcomings and unintended consequences of NCLB aren’t addressed soon.

Scott LaFee is a contributing writer for  California Schools.