It’s been nearly four years since No Child Left Behind was signed into law, and the results have been underwhelming. Not only has the law’s rigid structure proved to be a straitjacket for many school districts, but student progress has been minimal.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress recently offered the first report card on President Bush’s cornerstone education plan, and while the president and his education secretary Margaret Spellings heralded the findings – “It shows there’s an achievement gap in America that is closing,” Bush said – the NAEP’s first real appraisal of the program was more realistic.
Fourth-grade and eighth-grade math scores were up, a point of pride for No Child Left Behind’s supporters. But the progress doesn’t even compare to the advances made by students in math from 2000 to 2003 – before the 2002 law was enacted. Reading scores were mostly flat across the board.
Fifty-nine percent of Colorado’s school districts met federal reading and math standards during the 2004-05 year, a 4 percentage point drop from last year.
Meanwhile, there is the bizarre provision that penalizes schools that are making great strides but still aren’t meeting Adequate Yearly Progress in reading and math. That yearly progress is an accountability measure for schools, with the wildly optimistic goal of having all students proficient in math and reading by 2014.
Each school not only has to hit a certain target of students who are proficient in the subjects, but each of the school’s subgroups, such as black, Hispanic, disabled, low-income and white students, also must meet that standard. If even one subgroup falls short, the whole school fails and could face stiff penalties.
Spellings, in an effort to add some flexibility to the law and avoid wrangling with Congress and state legislatures, has begun to ease some aspects of the law.
As many as 10 states will be allowed to experiment with “growth models,” giving schools credit for growth in student achievement even if test scores fall short of state standards. That model would more accurately track whether students, and schools, are making progress.
The law also requires that a “highly qualified” teacher be in every classroom by the end of this year. Spellings now says she won’t cut federal funds to states that fall short of that goal if they can show a good-faith effort to meet the requirement. Even that dodge defies the fact that it’s an unreasonable goal for some rural districts, where teachers are often forced to teach more than one subject.
No Child Left Behind, increasingly disparaged, can yet be successful. The law’s basic tenets – that students must tested and schools held accountable for their progress – are reasonable, but the administration needs to provide flexibility in how school districts will move forward.
