Also participating in the event were Nina Rees and Celia Hartman Sims.

—Education Next

Checker Finn and I argued six years ago in Education Next that NCLB’s critical flaw was its pie-eyed, overwrought ambition. As we wrote, “NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a shaky basis for policymaking, rather as if Congress asserted in the name of energy reform that America will no longer need to import oil after 2014 or fought crime by declaring that by that date all U.S. cities would be peaceable kingdoms.”

All the same, we were not unsympathetic. We wrote at the time: “NCLB’s backers can legitimately argue that they had already spent nearly two decades asking state and local officials and education leaders to address mediocre school performance and stubborn race- and class-linked inequities… In that light, the passion-drenched unseriousness infusing NCLB is forgivable, even honorable. And NCLB indeed has virtues: it produced long-overdue school transparency, focused unprecedented attention on achievement, [and] created urgency where lethargy had ruled.”

That said, the design failings of NCLB were notable. Unaddressed, they infused the Harkin-Enzi bill that emerged in 2011, and will continue to haunt the Democratic proposal. Checker and I pointed out that NCLB sought to do three different things — each sensible enough in its own right, but a Rube Goldbergesque hodge-podge when combined. As we wrote:

“Embedded within NCLB’s accountability system are three distinct, discernible models of educational change that have been awkwardly welded together.

Model one would make transparent the performance of students across the nation, providing an X-ray to show parents, educators, and policymakers how different schools and groups are performing in key subjects. Model two would deploy “behavior modification” accountability methods, refined through decades of public sector reform, to force low-performing schools and districts to set goals, assess effectiveness, and do better. And model three would set “shoot-the-moon” targets and use the federal bully pulpit to exhort leaders in states and districts to improve.

Each of these approaches is plausible on its own terms. And each has a place in federal policy. But they cannot reasonably be linked to one another, as NCLB tries to do. They entail discrepant views of the federal role in education and employ discordant mechanisms. The result isn’t working.”

We pointed out, “The value of an ‘X-ray’ of the nation’s school performance has long been recognized. NCLB’s dictate that all states regularly test students in key subjects marked a historic success. The accuracy of the picture is compromised, however, when this cross-sectional look at student achievement becomes the basis for gauging the performance of schools and educators, much less for triggering interventions or remedies. We don’t judge doctors based on whether their patients are sick today but by how much patient health improves under their care. Judging professional performance on the basis of a one-moment-in-time X-ray encourages questionable behavior, leads states to play games with standards, and threatens to discredit the X-ray itself.”

Similarly, when it came to the idea that the feds needed to force states to act, we wrote “Prodding public sector institutions to set goals, monitor performance, and then reward excellence and address mediocrity has been a signal success for reformers on both the left and the right… Sensibly structured accountability systems encourage self-interested workers to take goals seriously, focus on outcomes, and employ all the levers at their disposal to produce those outcomes. But we compromise such ‘behavior modification’ when those on the ground view the targets as unattainable. If workers know they are unlikely to succeed, the goal becomes to avoid trouble when they fail. By making failure inevitable, unrealistic goals have the perverse effect of focusing employees on compliance.”

What to do about all this? It requires teasing apart these three roles. The federal government can and should insist on transparency in return for federal funds. It’s fine for the Secretary of Education to be a cheerleader and appropriate for the SecEd to use moral suasion. But it’s a mistake to tie artificial goals to pleasing sentiments. And it’s a mistake for Uncle Sam to try and get into the business of fixing schools, no matter how much he distrusts state and system leaders. After all, Uncle Sam can’t fix schools. All he can do is pass laws, which makes ED write regulations, ordering states or districts to alter policies, in the hope that these change practices in schools and classrooms.

Now, for instance, the feds requiring states to set performance targets instead of setting a national 100% by 2014 target is an invitation to repeat some of these same problems, just with a new wrinkle. States will be pressed by the Secretary of Education to set pie-in-the-sky growth expectations for gap-closing… and then all the pathologies of NCLB repeat. Unless and until someone proffers workable suggestions here, such a proposal tells me that the lessons of NCLB haven’t really been learned.

A decision to focus NCLB reauthorization on promoting transparency, honest measurements of spending and achievement, and on ensuring that constitutional protections are respected ought not be seen as a retreat from NCLB but as an attempt to have the feds do what they can do sensibly and well.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry first appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

What happened? Some states did fantastically well. Using the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) as our measure, we found some states had raised the achievement of economically disadvantaged students the equivalent of a full grade level or more in just eight years, 2003-2008—this at grades four and eight and in reading and math. States hitting this bar, in order of success, include: Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, and Florida. But many other states helped their disadvantaged students to little or no progress, including one that moved students backward. (They are named in the report.)

That states differ is hardly news. But the magnitude of the differences is. In less than a decade, the states have created a new achievement gap that is nearly two-thirds the size of the achievement gap between black and white students, a gap rooted in slavery, discrimination, and 200 years of shameful history. The new gap has nothing to do with economic resources, the historic differentiator of the states, or with where states stood at the beginning of the period—since it is always easier to make gains if you’re starting low. Our study controlled for the obvious causes of differential gain rates. In the end, the gap in state improvement remained, and remained large.

What explains the gap? In essence, whether states have been serious about reform. The states that made the most progress after allowing for other factors—Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Georgia, to name the top five—have taken steps, in various ways, to raise academic standards and back them up with rigorous assessments, implement tough but thoughtful accountability systems, and strengthen human capital practices to attract, develop, and retain educators who can deliver on high standards. Low performing states simply have not.

Both parties in Washington are now taken with the idea that states are our best bet for improving education for our most disadvantaged students. The administration has now granted waivers to 37 states and D.C. to carry out their own plans for fulfilling ESEA, subject to some common parameters. Waivers have been approved in equal numbers for states that have performed well and deserve the administration’s trust, and states that have performed abysmally and offer no evidence that trust will be repaid with results. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, yesterday unveiled a  proposal for ESEA reauthorization, endorsing waivers and offering additional flexibility for the states—with no meaningful accountability.

The problem with NCLB, as critics assert, is that Washington cannot be the nation’s school board, fixing tens of thousands of schools with remedies prescribed at a distance. States and districts do need flexibility. But they must be held to account for what they accomplish with that flexibility and the taxpayers’ money. The only accomplishment that really matters is students’ learning. Not restructuring schools, not overhauling teacher evaluation formulae, and not even adopting higher-sounding academic standards. There is not a policy or proposal in town—from the Democrats, Republicans, or administration—that takes student outcomes seriously.

We now have hard evidence that states have exacerbated differences in the achievement of disadvantaged students, with the guidance of ESEA. We also know that some states, both richer and poorer, are doing very good things for students in need. Washington should be investing time and money in understanding what is actually working and using that knowledge to write a new ESEA based on hard evidence and not political expedience. Meanwhile, states should be offered the opportunity to innovate, but not without being able to demonstrate that all students are progressing as a result. NAEP could be a metric. So could future student assessments like those based on the Common Core, if benchmarked to NAEP or international assessments. Meaningful student outcomes like high school graduation or college matriculation might also do. Until policymakers pay attention to what states are accomplishing or not accomplishing for students, there is no reason to expect states to move in the same direction. This was true when the noble experiment called ESEA was launched in 1965. It is every bit as true today.

-John Chubb

This blog entry first appeared on the Quick and the Ed.

I always viewed this as an experiment representing the best guesses of President George Bush and the U.S. Congress about how to improve national educational performance.  While there was strong bipartisan support, NCLB was tempered as always by the conflicting political forces of interested parties, including the one anachronism about teacher quality that was based on inputs rather than outputs.

As with any one thousand page guess, I also thought the idea of revisiting the law in 2007, the date designated for its re-authorization, was an important part of the underlying wisdom of the act.   Without researching it, I suspect that other Congressional acts have missed their re-authorization date by wider margins.  But given the importance of this act to the hopes, aspirations, and operations of our schools, I am willing to assert that this ranks among the most consequential dropped balls of Congress.

Faced with this, Secretary Duncan did more than just rank historic Congressional missed deadlines.  He established a waiver process that effectively allowed two-thirds of the states to deviate from various requirements of the law – most prominently the requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by the end of this year.

While waiting to see where this new phase of accountability takes us, I think it is useful to return to the task of 2007 and to judge what might or might not usefully change in NCLB.

NCLB has a fairly simple structure:  states were required to develop learning standards along with consistent assessments of student accomplishment of these standards; schools were required to be on a glide path to get all of their students up to a state-defined proficiency level by 2013; and the federal government established a series of corrective actions – including provision of supplemental services, broad student choice, and reconstitution – that were required of individual schools after continual deviation from this glide path.

NCLB has been a polarizing policy – in large part pitting school personnel against a coalition of civil rights groups, reformers, and, to a large extent, parents.  While it is difficult to assess definitively the impact of NCLB, the best evidence suggests that it has had positive impacts on student performance as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress; it has narrowed some of the wide achievement gaps by race and ethnicity; and it has generally led to much more attention to the importance of student performance.  But, on the other side, it has not brought all students anywhere close to being proficient; it may have narrowed instruction and the curriculum in general; it may have led to triaging of students and schools close to the cutoff while neglecting the rest of the distribution.

In my view, test-based accountability is both unlikely to go away and shouldn’t go away, regardless of the objections currently expressed by school personnel.   Yet, as one who has studied many aspects of NCLB, I also believe that it has serious structural flaws (making its overall beneficial effect on achievement even more remarkable).    Thus, I want to return to the task of 2007.

I can succinctly state what I think needs to change.  First, the structure is backwards.  NCLB has individual states determine “what” is to be accomplished and has the federal government determine “how” that should be done if schools fail to meet these goals.  This allocation of responsibilities should in my opinion be reversed.  Our achievement  goals should be a national decision, not an individual state decision.  The U.S. is really a single labor market that has common demands for skills of the population.  On the other hand, the states (and districts) should be in charge of deciding how we achieve those goals – instead of trying to determine that from Washington.  (The one caveat is having the federal government set goals is likely to be highly politicized, and it is important to find a way of insulating this from pure politics).

Second, the tests need to be improved so that they do not stop at the most basic levels.  Third, accountability should include measures of learning growth across the entire spectrum and not be restricted to the bottom rung of performance.  Fourth, we should retain the objective outcome focus for student performance.  Fifth, subgroup disaggregation should be central, because this has led to some significant equity gains.

We have actually moved reasonably close to these changes in some dimensions, partly because of the standards and testing associated with the common core and partly because of the waiver process.  If the tests being developed can support both enhanced accountability and measures of learning growth, we have the infrastructure in place for change.  The waivers have also brought states into deciding how best to meet goals, albeit with a still excessive involvement of the federal government in process issues and in the “how” of education.

Congress should, in my opinion, move on the full agenda – rationalizing and solidifying the patchwork waiver process and reinforcing the need to improve our schools.   Congress has shied away from making politically difficult educational decisions – but continuing on this course threatens long term damage to our economy and our nation.

-Eric Hanushek

An earlier version of this discussion appeared on the “Bridging Differences” blog of Education Week, along with a response by Deborah Meier.

The Educrats claim this is fair and equitable; children from at-risk populations are often far behind their more affluent peers, and expecting all children to meet the same high standards is unfair, even mean-spirited.  And D.C. school officials are not alone in this effort.  Educrats all over the country have begun to persuade federal education officials to grant waivers from NCLB, adopting the position that it is unfair to label schools as failing when the performance gaps between ethnic groups are so wide and when minority children lag so far behind their White, more affluent peers.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, twenty-seven of thirty-three states that won waivers from NCLB have established different performance targets for different groups of students.  A recent Education Week analysis of waiver requests from thirty-four states found that only eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Oregon –set the same target for all students.

Further, the Educrats assert that the new policy of lower standards actually raises performance expectations for minority children because they will have to progress at a faster rate over the same span of time.  For example, over the next five years in Maryland, African American students need to increase their proficiency in reading from 76 to 88 percent (a 12 percent increase over 5 years), while White students need only increase from 92 to 96 percent (a 4 percent increase) over that same period.  Furthermore, the waivers permit schools within the same district to establish different student performance targets, again on the logic that school-to-school differences exist even within the same subgroup of students.

Do you think former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee would have permitted the schools to lower their standards and expectations for children of color?  Certainly not.  Whatever anyone may think of her tenure as D.C. school’s chief, and she had many detractors, she would most certainly have never allowed standards to vary by ethnicity.  Some minority parents agree, asserting that lower standards for their children is a form of prejudice, the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as former President George W. Bush called it.  In a recent article in the Washington Post, Alicia Rucker, a single mother of six, called the new policy “disgraceful.  It’s ridiculous to even believe that if you expect less from someone, you’re going to get more.”  She continued, “We need to have as high expectations for any child in Ward 2 as Ward 7, for any child in Ward 3 as Ward 8.  There should be no difference.”  She is right on at least two points.

First, lowering standards equates to lowering expectations.  There is no industry, profession, or athletic sport in which lowering standards does not lead to lower expectations. While standards and expectations may mean different things in theory, in practice, the two are often used synonymously. Decades of research on effective schools conclusively demonstrates that setting high standards and expectations for all children, but especially those most at-risk of academic failure, creates a more positive, inclusive school culture and raises their level of achievement.  The best teachers and school leaders recognize this and make this part of their daily practice.  Unfortunately, this is often the exception rather than the rule.

Second, let’s not pretend that lowering performance expectations is in the best interests of children.  Although they sometimes don’t demonstrate it on standardized tests, kids are smart, specifically, as it pertains to understanding adults.  Kids know which educators truly care about them and which do not.  And they will pick up in an instant the lowered performance targets and expectations the adults in the system have for them.  In reaction to criticism of the policy, Cate Swinburn, head of data and accountability in the D.C. school system, stated, “In no way does DCPS hold our students to different expectations based on their skin color or language ability or special learning needs”.

Perhaps she is right – the new policy isn’t about the kids.  This new system of different performance targets is all about the adults in the schools, not the children.  For proof, one need only ask, “Who stands most to gain from these new performance targets?”  Teachers will benefit, because by lowering the bar of student achievement, they will rate better on performance evaluations.  School leaders will similarly benefit.  It will certainly improve the morale of teachers and school leaders; after all, who would want to work in a system where the majority of children do not perform at a minimum level of proficiency?  This new policy will help the adults feel better about themselves and their performance.  And having significantly lower numbers of failing schools means that state officials, including some mayors and governors, will not be embarrassed with large numbers of failing schools.  After all, it is difficult to win reelection as the education governor (or state superintendent or mayor) if many of your schools fail to effectively educate all children.

So, if children enter school behind, the new policy essentially recognizes that they will leave school at different levels as well.  If teachers and school leaders cannot eliminate the achievement gap within a decade (as NCLB originally intended, since that was woefully unrealistic), perhaps these relaxed, lower standards will enable those working in schools to bring everyone up to proficiency gradually, over time—perhaps in a generation or two.  I can see how such a policy would be attractive to adults working in the system.

Who are the losers in this new system?  The largest group is those children who will look to their teachers and principals and recognize that they have lower expectations for them than they do for other children.  And, because far fewer schools will be labeled as failing, fewer children and their families will be given at least the opportunity to transfer to a higher performing public school in the district.  This is a win-win situation for school leaders who really don’t want those kids transferring into their schools anyway.  So, this new policy makes it easier for adults working in the system.  Adults win; poor, minority students lose.  Again.

NCLB did set unrealistic goals for student achievement; most everyone knew it at the time.  But that wasn’t important.  What was important is that for the first time, policymakers pushed school leaders to focus explicitly on the achievement gap.  The “no excuses” mindset is what was important; the question of whether it was realistically feasible to do so in a decade was less so.  Words and symbolism matter—a lot.  In the movie Second Hand Lions, Hub, played by Robert Duvall, makes an impassioned plea to his nephew: “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most…Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.”  Setting high standards and expectations for all students, and expecting everyone in the schools—students, teachers, counselors, principals, and parents—to work hard with a laser-like focus to achieve those expectations, are important words and symbolism.  They convey a clear message about the core values and beliefs of the school system.

More importantly, it establishes a school culture of high standards and expectations today, not at some future point generations distant.  Establishing different standards of success (and of evaluating the adults who educate them) based on the color of children’s skin or on the wealth of their parents is the wrong message to send. Supporters of the new policy can play all the semantic games they want (and they are apparently playing them quite successfully and persuasively with federal education officials), the new standards will slow progress towards closing the achievement gap.  Seriously, does anyone expect the new standards to speed that progress up?  Sandy Kress, a former education aide to President Bush who helped craft NCLB, asked a very commonsense question that the Educrats have not answered: “Why, after 12-plus years, can’t we expect virtually all of our children to achieve at a basic level?” And these most basic standards of proficiency, as Mr. Kress pointed out, are not all that high.  Unfortunately, this belief about setting high standards and expectations for poor children and children of color, upon which decades of research is based, is being systematically discarded by Educrats throughout the country to make the system more fair to the adults working in schools.

Ms. Rucker observed that lowering expectations (making them more realistic) may help mask what are often profound needs in schools in the district.  Her trenchant observation gets at the heart of one major failure of federal and state education policy: the unwillingness or inability of public officials to invest more resources (fiscal, political, and entrepreneurial) into failing schools.  Talk is important but cheap and must be backed up with specific, concrete action plans for improvement.  All too often, state and federal education officials have been unwilling to make such investments, particularly in tight economic times, partly because they often adopt a myopic view of education’s (and educational programs’) return on investment.  Absent targeted reforms backed with human and fiscal capital, even the best efforts to push all students to proficiency and beyond will meet with uneven success.

NCLB shined a light on an all-too-often ignored problem that seemed insurmountable and thus wasn’t discussed in public.  That light is dimmer now, and at-risk children throughout the country will find it even more difficult to find their way in an increasingly competitive, international world.  I suspect Alicia Rucker, that single mother of six who sent her oldest child to (and through) Georgetown, knows more about improving the education of minority children than all the Educrats in D.C. combined.

- Lance Fusarelli

Lance D. Fusarelli is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University.

I appreciate the intuitive appeal of Rotherham’s argument; it was a similar concern about backing away from NCLB’s lofty goals that led me to attack an earlier set of tweaks way back in 2005. But on this one, Andy’s got it wrong, and Virginia officials have it right. As David Foster, the president of Virginia’s state board of education told the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton, “If you just set an arbitrary target without regard for what’s achievable and where they’re starting from, you’re just shooting in the dark. That was the whole problem with No Child Left Behind. It made no sense to say that by an arbitrary year. . . every child everywhere in this vast country would pass every math and reading test. We made a joke of the process that way.”

In other words, No Child Left Behind’s aspirational aims were more effective as rhetoric than as an accountability regime. As Rick Hess has argued persuasively, if the law’s objectives, carrots, and sticks are to actually motivate educators, and not just demoralize them, they must been seen as achievable. So why is it so “stunning” that Virginia wouldn’t expect the achievement gap to evaporate in just five years?

To be sure, even Virginia officials have agreed that the goals put into their ESEA application weren’t ambitious enough; they will come back later this month with more challenging targets for their poor and minority students. That’s fair; groups that are further behind should be expected to make greater progress over time.

But to follow Rotherham’s advice and demand “common targets” is to doom the next phase of NCLB implementation to the same fate as the last: It will fail, because it will lose credibility with the very people expected to make it succeed—the educators.

America’s schools aren’t doing nearly well enough, especially for our neediest children. We need accountability systems that create urgency and push for significant gains every year. Ideological arguments and utopian objectives don’t help.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

There is some evidence that this kind of race to the bottom has been occurring.  Rick Hess and Paul Peterson, for example, have compared state cut scores for proficiency on their state tests to results on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to show that the level of achievement required to be declared proficient in many states has been dropping over the last decade. In his recent review of the Maranto and McShane book on Obama’s education policies, Nathan Glazer described how advocates for national standards see them as a fix for this race to the bottom:

in Race to the Top, “the Obama administration tacitly gave its approval to a set of ‘Common Core Standards’ developed by a consortium of state school officers and tied Race to the Top dollars to participation in the program.” This may be a path to finally getting a set of national standards and overriding the standards the states set, which have in many states been pushed lower. This “race to the bottom” has made it easier to show adequate yearly progress (AYP) and avoid triggering measures required for schools that do not show AYP.

So does competition among states and localities really produce a race to the bottom or does competition motivate improvement and spark continual improvements?  The answer depends on what states and localities are competing for.  If states and localities are competing to receive federal funds and/or avoid federal sanctions, as Glazer describes states seeking to make AYP, then competition will produce a race to the bottom.  In competing for bureaucratic approval from the feds, states only have to appear good (satisfy the bureaucratic requirements), but they don’t have to actually be good.  Competing for the bureaucratic approval of the federal government turns education into a redistributive policy where the goal is to get a larger share of the federal largess.

But if states and localities are competing for residents and businesses to increase their tax base, then the incentive from competition is to increase standards and quality.  Millions of individuals are not so easily fooled and can distinguish between phony claims of progress created by lowering the bar and real progress.  Clever bureaucrats can also tell the difference but they are bound by the rules for dispersing rewards and sanctions and so are forced into encouraging a race to the bottom.  Individual face no similar constraints.  They want to move to the areas with the best schools to help their kids, enhance their property values, and have access to a quality labor force.  Individuals may make mistakes or have bad taste, but in aggregate they reward real educational progress not fake, race to the bottom, manipulation.

The history of U.S. education is filled with evidence of how this competition for residents and tax base has spurred improvements in quality and increases in rigor.  The economic historian, William Fischel, carefully documents how the development and spread of high school education in the United States was driven by localities seeking to compete for residents demanding a more rigorous education.  And the standards required for graduating high school have steadily increased over time.  Graduation requires more college-prep coursework.  In almost half of the states students now have to pass a state test to receive a standard diploma.  And 37 states instituted their own testing and accountability systems before NCLB was adopted.  The result of these state and local efforts was not always a rigorous education, but they clearly show a trend toward higher standards and quality in response to consumer demand.  Competition produces a race to the top as long as it is competition for individual taxpayers and business instead of competition for federal government handouts.

So, if a race to the bottom is fueled by the desire to satisfy federal bureaucratic rules, why would we think the solution is in the adoption of more federal bureaucratic rules?  National standards will just create a new regime of gaming, manipulation, and the appearance of progress without the actuality of it.  Expanding choice and competition for individuals is the solution to a race to the bottom, not more centralized control that stifles that competition.

-Jay Greene

So I was amazed, befuddled, dumbstruck, bemused (choose your own adjective) to learn that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has rejected a request from Iowa for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. What political courage! What political suicide! Did Duncan and the White House politicos not understand that he’s handing Mitt Romney a handy campaign issue in up-for-grabs Iowa?

What’s most remarkable is the reason the Administration is turning down Iowa’s waiver request: Because the state legislature refuses to enact a statewide teacher evaluation plan. As you may recall, such evaluations were one of the mandates (er, conditions) placed on states that want flexibility from ESEA’s broken accountability requirements. And as many of us have argued, such conditions are patently illegal. There’s nothing in the ESEA that indicates that the Secretary has the authority to demand such conditions be met in order for waiver requests to be approved.

Iowa’s state superintendent, Jason Glass, was discouraged but polite as he took his marbles and went home—putting the blame on Iowa’s state legislators. “We’ve been negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education to try to find a way through this. It’s just not possible. We are very disappointed that our state is [still] under the onerous shame and blame policies of NCLB for another year.”

Republican Governor Terry Branstad blamed his own legislators, too, saying in a statement that “Responsibility for the denial of this request lies squarely at the feet of the Iowa Legislature, which did too little to improve our schools despite repeated warnings. The education reform plan Lt. Gov. (Kim) Reynolds and I proposed would have ensured a waiver from the onerous federal No Child Left Behind law.”

Don’t be shocked, however, if Branstad, who was just named co-chairman of Romney’s Iowa campaign, changes his tune, and starts to point at least one finger at the President. I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls for a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, forcing it to defend its decision and its questionable conditions.

As for Governor Romney, expect him to talk up this issue the next time he’s in the Hawkeye State, as yet another example of executive overreach and federal micromanagement. Iowans love their schools and their teachers; it’s not going to be hard to paint this as a classic case of Washington bureaucrats gone wild.

Who said that education wouldn’t play a role in the election?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Today, there’s not a single Republican in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or running for president willing to defend federal accountability mandates. The GOP conversation has shifted to transparency, in line with what we’ve called Reform Realism. What a difference a decade makes.

The thrust of Romney’s speech, however, wasn’t his fresh view of accountability,  but a major proposal on school choice. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a form of “backpack funding” from the federal level. (This one’s very much in line with what the Hoover Institution’s K-12 Education Task Force proposed in February. It’s also close kin to what Ronald Reagan and Bill Bennett proposed for Title I back in the late 1980’s.) He said:

As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school.  For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted.  And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it.
To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice.  In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited.  And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.

There’s a lot to be said for making federal dollars follow disadvantaged children to their schools of choice:

• It provides incentives for good schools to attract needy kids;
• It helps those kids exit dreadful schools;
• It promotes integration by allowing federal funds to flow to schools that are socio-economically-mixed; and
• It encourages states to make their own funding more portable (a la weighted student funding) – with all manner of benefits around equity, choice, and more.

But it’s not without its drawbacks:

• It could move federal funds away from high-poverty schools (which get most Title I dollars today) to low-poverty ones;
• The money ($1,000-2,000 per pupil) isn’t enough to pay for actual private-school tuition, so that part isn’t apt to get much real traction;
• By giving parents “private accounts” to spend on digital learning, tutoring, and the like, it could weaken schools’ larger improvement efforts, which are mostly funded by these federal dollars.

The biggest concern, though, comes with having Uncle Sam try to use his 10 cents on the education dollar to force major changes on the states. We’ve seen how that works (or doesn’t) in the context of accountability; why do we think it will work better in the context of school choice?

See this passage, in particular, from Romney’s education white paper:

To expand the supply of high-performing schools in and around districts serving low-income and special-needs students, states accepting Title I and IDEA funds will be required to take a series of steps to encourage the development of quality options: First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.

Note especially the phrase, “Will be required.” We’ve been down that road before! And note how far this proposal is from the “let states do whatever they want with their federal dollars” approach of House education committee chairman John Kline.

A better idea might be to take a page from the Obama Administration handbook and make funding portability voluntary. Give states the option to “voucherize” their Title I and IDEA funds. Make them take the steps above in order to participate in that option. Maybe offer a little extra money on top. And see if you get any takers. That’s a way to promote innovation and choice without falling into the same federalism trap that snared No Child Left Behind. And states that opt into it would very likely make their own dollars portable, too.

This plan is a good start. You’ve got 5 ½ months till Election Day, Governor Romney, to make it even better.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn’t have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

“We’re saying we just can’t pay for it,” Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility “must be rich,” he joked.

And, in Kirst’s view, the waiver request is consistent with what’s actually in the NCLB law. “We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation,” he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute does not think the comparison should be made—on the grounds that the data are “too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies.”  Perhaps, but the same can be said for the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth in the number of Americans who are employed. Both are gross, blunt numbers, affected by many factors other than presidential decisions, but the public holds presidents accountable for what happens under their watch. For that very reason, Obama is doing everything he can to pump GDP upward, and the White House staff seized up last Friday when employment figures revealed that the gains were only half what had been anticipated.

The public is right to insist that basic numbers on the ground move in the right direction, no matter how distant from direct presidential control they seem to be. When presidents know they are being held accountable for economic performance, they act more responsibly—or suffer the consequences. If presidents come to learn that they are also being held accountable for the nation’s educational performance, they will think more carefully about the consequences of their actions for students, not job holders.

But, says McCluskey, presidents can’t do much about education in any short period of time. Neither Bush nor Obama should not be given credit or blame for events that happen early in their term of office.   That wave of the hand allows him to slice and dice the numbers to suit his convenience.

But such hand-waving ignores one of Teddy Roosevelt’s keenest insights: The bully pulpit is the most powerful weapon in a president’s arsenal. True about governing in general, it’s of particular significance when it comes to education. For learning to take place, teachers, students, administrators, parents and neighbors must all be committed to the enterprise.

To mobilize broad movement toward a common goal is a job for presidents.  They are the ones best placed to energize a nation, and some presidents have done just that.

Ronald Reagan reversed the downward trend in SAT scores almost overnight when his National Commission on Educational Excellence galvanized the nation to take the educational crisis seriously. At the time Congress passed no law, and no pile of money was added to the pot, but the White House message had a major impact nonetheless.  (For details, see chapter 8 in my book, Saving Schools).

Similarly, George W. Bush, both in his 2000 campaign and immediately upon assuming office, insistently called for accountability reforms that would lead to No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  It was not the law’s rules and regulations but the national attention that had the impact.  Schools, students, and teachers were put on notice that more was expected.  NAEP scores jumped noticeably—from the very beginning of the Bush term.

Though presidents usually enjoy the biggest bully pulpit, Martin Luther King proved no less influential.  When he called for equal educational opportunity in the South, the test scores of African American students in southern states rose dramatically. The biggest gains were among the high school students most susceptible to the calls of the civil rights movement.

The U. S. Department of Education has encouraged a certain amount of reform with its convoluted Race to the Top initiative.  But President Obama’s first—and most powerful— education message to all Americans came with his stimulus package. He urged its passage not so that children might learn but in order that teachers might keep their jobs. That was precisely the wrong signal, and it is not surprising that NAEP gains slowed to a virtual halt.  The stimulus package did little for the nation’s GDP, and it has had a negative impact on its education GDP.

-Paul Peterson

Miller put forward his own bills, which most of the self-same groups quickly endorsed, and which, Miller argues, “eliminates inflexible and outdated provisions of No Child Left Behind and requires states and [districts] to adopt strong but flexible and achievable standards, assessments, and accountability reforms.”

So let’s see how Miller and company do at “eliminating inflexible and outdated provisions of NCLB” and requiring “strong but flexible” accountability systems. The package…

1. Requires states to expect “all” students to reach college and career readiness eventually. (Didn’t we learn from NCLB that calling for “universal proficiency” merely pushes states to lower the bar?)

2. Tightens the screws on NCLB’s “subgroup accountability,” requiring schools to hit targets on dozens of indicators in order to avoid stigmas and sanctions. (Why not let states develop new ways to ensure that vulnerable kids don’t get overlooked—but without all the complexity?)

3. Makes failure even more likely by adding student growth and graduation rates to the mix (along with proficiency rates).

4. Potentially subjects a high number of schools to federally prescribed interventions. Rather than restrict the proportion of schools that must face the strictest sanctions to 5 or 10 percent, as Lamar Alexander’s legislative package and the Administration’s own Blueprint do, the sky is once again the limit under the Miller approach.

5. Micromanages the way that state accountability systems include students with disabilities, setting inflexible rules about how many students can take alternate assessments.

6. Establishes an enormous unfunded mandate by requiring states to translate examinations for every language group of 10,000 students or more. In larger states, this could mean the development of dozens of new assessment formats.

7. Penalizes school districts for doing more with less by keeping intact the “maintenance of effort” requirement—which substitutes Congress’s priorities over state legislatures’ and county councils’ when it comes to spending limited state/local resources.

8. Mandates that states and districts redistribute “effective” teachers from middle class to poor schools, even though recent research indicates that the “teacher effectiveness gap” may not exist.

9. Keeps in place the “Highly Qualified Teachers” mandate, even though its focus on paper credentials has been completely discredited.

10. Creates or reinstates myriad pet programs that Congress has already defunded, often with support from the Obama Administration.

So if Republicans are “radical,” Miller and his allies must be “conservative” because they essentially want No Child Left Behind to stay the same.

On Friday, March 2 from 9:00-10:30 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on No Child Left Behind, starring Michele McNeil, Carmel Martin, Jeremy Ayers, Michael Petrilli, and moderated by Checker Finn. As described on the event page:

After a decade of living with the No Child Left Behind Act, there is wide, bipartisan consensus that this law governing so much of the federal role in education needs to change. With reauthorization still stalled in Congress, however, the Obama Administration offered states a deal—freedom from some of NCLB’s prescriptions in return for alignment with the Education Department’s current reform priorities. Already this month, eleven states were freed from some of the strictures of NCLB; dozens more must decide by February 28 whether the benefits of Duncan-style ESEA flexibility are worth it. You’re invited to join us at the Fordham Institute on March 2 as experts with varying perspectives on this issue weigh the merits of NCLB waivers, whether the Administration struck a sound balance between “flexibility” and “reform,” and what this all means for federal education policy going forward.

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

This would be a big change in a short period. Through most of 2011, the Obama Administration reaped accolades for its intention to allow states to take a new course vis-à-vis the Elementary and Secondary Education act (a.k.a. NCLB). In September, the President got wall-to-wall coverage of the official announcement of his plan to offer waivers to the states to give them “more flexibility to meet high standards.”

Keep in mind, the change we’re making is not lowering standards; we’re saying we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet high standards. We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.

Set aside the debate about the conditions he attached to those standards. Set aside the small matter of Constitutionality and separation of powers. On the issue of flexibility itself, virtually everyone seemed to be in agreement (at least in theory): The 10-year-old law is broken and it’s time to fix it. In particular, Adequate Yearly Progress needs to go the way of the dinosaurs and be replaced by something very different. Even on Capitol Hill, for all the misgivings about Duncan’s unilateralism, there was broad consensus that states should be given much greater leeway to design next-generation accountability systems. (Leeway that both Republican and Democratic governors asked for in an NGA policy statement released last week.)

The idea of flexibility is so popular, in fact, that the President reiterated it in his State of the Union address:

Let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making.

So far so good. It certainly appeared from the rhetoric that the Administration would make every effort to approve reasonable proposals from states, including the 11 that applied in November for the first round of waivers (the round for which results are now imminent). The era of “Washington knows best” in education would come to an end.

But no. Thanks to excellent reporting by Associated Press correspondent Christine Armario, we now have access to letters the U.S. Department of Education sent to these states in December. Which document that federal micromanagement is still the order of the day.

Consider the missive sent to Massachusetts—the first-place finisher in the Race to the Top, the state with the highest achievement in the land, the one that has seen dramatic gains across all subgroups of students, a strong supporter (for better or worse) of the Common Core standards. One might assume that the Bay State would be given the benefit of the doubt. But no.

Here’s an excerpt from the Department’s response to the Massachusetts waiver request:

Please address concerns identified by peers regarding subgroup accountability, including:

• • Without sufficient safeguards to ensure attention and action when an individual subgroup is struggling over a number of years, the use of the “high needs” combined subgroup could lead to individual subgroups not meeting their goals even when the “high needs” combined subgroup is moving forward, and therefore undermine the goal of improved achievement for all students.
  • Massachusetts’s current n-size for subgroups is too high and should be reduced.
  • Schools with high English Learner populations may not be receiving appropriate, targeted interventions.

And another:

• • Please address concern that without differentiating schools within Level 2, there are insufficient incentives to improve achievement for all groups of students. In particular, please address the concern that annual measurable objectives (AMOs) are not used along with other measures to provide incentives and supports to other Title I schools that are not making progress in improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.

(That’s just the tip of the iceberg; read the whole thing yourself.)

All of these issues can be debated ad nauseum by policy wonks. For example, when creating an A to F rating system, what should qualify a school for an A? Strong achievement? Strong growth over time? If the school misses an achievement or growth target for one subgroup (say, special education kids) should that disqualify it for an A? What if all subgroups are doing well but there’s still a big achievement gap?

Whatever your view on these arcane matters, the real issue at stake is whether the feds, or the states, should make such calls. How can the President promise a state like Massachusetts “flexibility to meet high standards” and then second-guess its attempt to rationalize its accountability system?

So how will this go down?

• The Department of Education will announce that most of the 11 states that applied were approved for flexibility. At first, this will lead to a Kumbaya moment.
• Upon closer inspection, observers will notice that the amount of flexibility granted on accountability is tiny. Approved plans will amount to minor changes away from the AYP system we’ve got today.
• The number of states planning to apply for waivers by February 21 will drop precipitously, as they realize that it’s just not worth the effort.
• All of this will embolden members of Congress to talk (again) about the urgency of fixing No Child Left Behind for real (though nothing will come of it this year).

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Or so they say, until push comes to shove. And then many of the players discover that they don’t like flexibility after all. They want to change federal policy in theory but not in reality.

It’s not just the President’s bizarre State of the Union request that states raise their compulsory attendance age to 18. (Perhaps that would help to trim the dropout rate, though the studies suggesting so rely on 40-year-old data.) I’m assuming that he was merely using the bully pulpit to promote a pet idea, not suggesting a new federal mandate.

No, I’m referring to the Army of the Potomac’s reaction to John Kline’s ESEA proposal and to Chairman Tom Harkin’s and Rep. George Miller’s response to the waiver requests put forward by several states.

In both cases, we hear somber leaders express concern that the moves will “undermine the core American value of equality of opportunity in education” and move away from “the critically important gains for our students’ civil rights and educational equity that NCLB achieved.”

So what’s the beef? See this from Harkin’s and Miller’s letter to Arne Duncan about the waiver requests:

In its analysis of the eleven waiver applications, the Center on Education Policy found that nine state applicants will base almost all accountability decisions on the achievement of only two students groups; i.e., all students and a “disadvantaged” student group or “super subgroup.” We fear that putting students with disabilities, English language learners and minority students into one “super subgroup” will mask the individual needs of these distinct student subgroups and will prevent schools from tailoring interventions appropriately. Therefore, we urge you to consider each applicant’s subgroup performance measures as significant and coherent components of overall accountability and require applicants to articulate meaningful and effective interventions for schools that are low performing or have subgroups that fail to progress.”

There’s a name for what Harkin and Miller are calling for: the Adequate Yearly Progress system. This is exactly what we’ve got now! So they seem to be saying: “We favor flexibility, as long as nothing really changes.”

There are two debates going on here. One is over the policy specifics; for example, are “super subgroups” a good idea? The second is over power and control: Who should get to decide if super subgroups are a reasonable way forward? If your answer to the second question is “Uncle Sam” then you’re not really a proponent of state flexibility after all. Lefty reformers, civil rights groups, Chairman Harkin, and Representative Miller: I’m talking about you.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

So argues Mark Schneider, a scholar, analyst, and friend whom we once affectionately (and appropriately) named “Statstud.” Schneider, a political scientist, served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from 2005 to 2008, and is now affiliated with the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute. In his new analysis, he digs into twenty years of trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

We originally asked Schneider to investigate the achievement record of the great state of Texas. At the time—it feels like just yesterday—Lone Star Governor Rick Perry was riding high in the polls, making an issue of education, and taking flak from Secretary Arne Duncan for running an inadequate school system. We wondered: Was Duncan right to feel “very, very badly” for the children of Texas? Had the state’s schools—once darlings of the standards movement and prototypes for NCLB—really slipped into decline since Perry took office? What do the NAEP data really show?

Schneider agreed to take on the project but quickly concluded that there’s a larger and more interesting story to tell than simply the saga of Texas. It was true, he noted, that Texas’s achievement slowed during the Perry years, particularly as compared to the rest of the country. But rather than pin that development on the governor, Schneider saw a more likely explanation: As an early adopter of standards, testing, and accountability, Texas got a head start on big achievement gains, most of which it realized in the 1990s when George W. Bush was governor—and also a head start on flat-lining thereafter, during Rick Perry’s tenure.

Indeed, the Lone Star State made Texas-sized gains from the early- to mid-1990s, as its accountability system got traction. But as other states followed suit, they too hit the achievement fast-track, leading to sizable national gains from 1998 to 2003. Since then, however, Texas’s progress has cooled, and the same is now happening to the country as a whole. It’s not that Perry was a worse “education governor” than Bush (or, for that matter, Ann Richards) before him, but that he presided over an accountability strategy that was running out of steam.

It’s an intriguing argument, and one that deserves serious consideration, even more so as the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the enactment of NCLB and tries to figure out what the next version of that law should entail. If school-level accountability, as currently practiced, is no longer an effective lever for raising student achievement, then what is? If we need another “meteor” to disrupt the system, where should we look? Mark suggests that the Common Core and rigorous teacher evaluations have potential. We also see promise in the digital-learning revolution. But other shocks to the system might work even better. What are they?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael Petrilli

Personally, I’m most interested in the states’ plans around accountability. Partly that’s because this is the only part of this waiver process that I find legitimate and legal; the Department of Education has no business demanding that states adopt and implement the Common Core standards or rigorous teacher evaluations. But if it’s going to allow states to opt-out of the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress system, it certainly has the right to set boundaries around the alternatives. And partly it’s because the major sticking point in the current negotiations over ESEA reauthorization comes down to accountability, and how much leeway to give the states.

So what do these 11 states want to do differently on the accountability front? Particularly when it comes to identifying schools that should be subject to some sort of sanctions or interventions? Here’s what the future holds if the Department of Education gives its assent:

1. A deadline for getting all kids to “proficiency” will go the way of the dinosaur. None of the states opted to set a deadline for universal proficiency. A few agreed to reduce the number of not-yet-proficient students by 50 percent over the next six years, but most developed their own twist on “annual measurable objectives.”

2. A focus on growth will eclipse the need for “subgroup accountability.” Models such as the one proposed by Colorado would set “annual measurable objectives” at the kid-level. Schools would be expected to help all students make enough progress to get them to a college-and-career ready standard by high school. (For high achieving students who are already approaching this standard, schools would be held accountable for making sure they grow at least a year’s worth of learning every year.) This is exactly the right concept–have a real-live standard (college readiness) and ask schools to aim at getting all kids to it by graduation. That will require making the most rapid progress for the students who are furthest behind. Since those kids are more likely to be poor and from minority groups, it makes subgroup accountability per se unnecessary. (Though the Administration’s guidelines still require it.)

3. Subjects beyond reading and math will count again. Seven of the states are taking the opportunity to expand the subjects included in their accountability systems. Colorado will look at writing, science, and ACT results; Florida will add writing and science; Georgia will include science and social studies for grades 3-8 and a whole suite of exit exams for high school; Kentucky and Oklahoma add science, social studies, and writing; and Massachusetts and Tennessee will both add science to the mix. This should be helpful in counteracting the narrowing of the curriculum.

In other words, the states are presenting sensible alternatives to the antiquated Adequate Yearly Progress model. That doesn’t prove that “states are good” and “the feds are bad.” On the contrary, it just shows that our thinking and technology around accountability have improved over the ten years since NCLB was enacted. But it does lay down a challenge to Arne Duncan, his peer reviewers, and his team: Say yes to these proposals or be  accused of a “Washington knows best” mentality.

-Mike Petrilli

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Martha Derthick: When the framers of the United States Constitution wrote that it is a duty of the chief executive to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed, they can hardly have imagined a law so freighted with perverse and destructive consequences as No Child Left Behind. And if they had imagined any such thing, they would likely have assumed that the legislature would be quick to correct its work.

But that is not the case in our time, and the Obama administration, confronted with a train wreck, has responded with an offer to waive the most onerous provisions of the law. The offer is conditioned, however, on the state governments’ acceptance of a set of “principles” put forth in a document titled “ESEA Flexibility.” Flexibility is the new watchword at the Department of Education (ED), though the administration promises that it implies no sacrifice of “accountability,” which has been the watchword for roughly two decades.

Martha Derthick

It is hard to see what else the administration could have done, given the failure of Congress to make corrections itself, the manifest impossibility of carrying on with the law as written, and the protest that would have come from Democrats in Congress and the army of education reformers if the administration had simply settled for waivers. It enjoys broad waiver authority under the law, and waiver provisions in federal law have repeatedly been upheld in court. On the other hand, nothing in the law authorizes it to craft new conditions—in effect, to attempt making law itself—even if the new conditions are not called law or rules or conditions or standards, but merely “principles.”

Forty years ago, in regard to public assistance rather than education, I wrote as follows of intergovernmental relations in the United States:

Federal enforcement is a diplomatic process. It is as if the terms of a treaty, an agreement of mutual interest to the two governmental parties, were more or less continuously being negotiated…. The function of intergovernmental diplomacy in a federal system, like that of international diplomacy, is to facilitate communication and amicable relations between governments that are pretending to be equals by obscuring the question of whether one is more equal than the other…. That this be done is important primarily to the federal government, for it is the aggressive, the states the defensive, actor in intergovernmental relations. It has the greater interest in seeing that change is facilitated. But perhaps the principal advantage of a diplomatic style to federal administrators … is that this mode of behavior makes the best possible use of the technique of withholding funds. It enables federal officials to exploit, without actually using, this basic resource.

—from The influence of federal grants: public assistance in Massachusetts (Harvard University Press, 1970)

Much of what I wrote about federalism 40 years ago needs revision, but I think there is still truth in this passage. And what strikes me in reviewing intergovernmental relations in education is that the federal government has had a very hard time getting the hang of it. It has wavered (that is not meant to be a pun) between administrative passivity, as with the Clinton administration’s prolific granting of waivers following the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA, the 1994 version of the Elementary and Second Education Act), and the deeply intrusive, get-tough, and grant-no-waivers initial approach adopted by Congress and the Bush administration in 2001–02.

The Clinton-era approach perhaps made due recognition of the fact that the origins of the accountability movement lay in the states. Federal law, after all, typically builds, as the IASA did, on state precedents. But the successor regime of Bush, in an overcorrection, reacted sharply against the perceived fecklessness of federal education policy, was indifferent to what the states had in place, and demanded impossibilities. Just how this happened has always puzzled me. How could an elected legislature, traditionally thought to be locally oriented, err so grievously by attempting to improve the public schools by punishing their teachers and administrators? The short answer lies, I think, in the hubris typical of a freshly elected president, the passionate commitment of the liberal lions Kennedy and Miller to social justice (that is, closing the achievement gap), and the pride that John Boehner took in collaborating with these titans. Others who should have known better went along in ignorance of the consequences. Eugene Hickok’s account in Schoolhouse of Cards mentions Senator Judd Gregg, “who harbored serious misgivings about the whole enterprise, having for years argued for local control in education …” but who wanted to help a new Republican president and presumed that the new federal initiative would not have much of an impact in his state of New Hampshire, which he believed to have very good schools. Little did he know.

Now the Obama administration is on the rebound from its predecessor, attempting its own correction and searching for what I take to be a diplomatic middle ground. State intergovernmental cooperation is made the foundation for the promise of flexibility and better federal-state cooperation. But after one gets beyond the lofty principles, which begin with “college- and career-ready expectations for all students,” there is a lot of prescription woven in among the principles.

In announcing the new plan to chief state school officers (CSSOs), Secretary Arne Duncan points out that 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards prepared under the auspices of the National Governors Association with financial support from the Gates Foundation. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia are “developing high-quality assessments aligned with these standards.” According to Duncan, “Over 40 states are developing next-generation accountability and support systems,” guided by the CSSOs, and “many states are moving forward with reforms in teacher and principal evaluation and support, turning around low-performing schools, and expanding access to high-quality schools.” As happened early in the Progressive Era, the expansion of national government activity has prompted states to work more closely together, but that effort is not all embracing. Six states, including Virginia and Texas, have yet to adopt the Common Core standards.

Given the uncertain legal ground on which its new regime of not-quite-regulation rests, the department could face some unusual dilemmas if it attempts to bring federal power to bear against dissenters. Most states will undoubtedly apply for waivers, but what if some just stop complying with NCLB and drag their feet on the waivers? If some of the half dozen or so “outliers” apply but offer much less in the way of conforming principles than ED would like, what then? Withholding funds is never easy, and the legal ambiguities present in this new démarche will not make it any easier. Yet in the absence of a penalty against a state, withholding presumably, no court is likely to be engaged in a legal resolution. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), asked by a House committee for a legal analysis, replied that the secretary of education has broad authority to grant waivers, but hedged on the question of whether these waivers could be made conditional. “Given the novelty of the question,” it said, “it is unclear how a reviewing court would rule on such an issue.” Courts have been applying a “clear statement” rule for federal grant-in-aid conditions: a federal agency cannot withhold funds unless states have been told their obligations in plain language. If that were the test, the Department of Education would be heading into court with a weak hand.

The case raises a concern that extends well beyond the field of education. Just how far is the United States going to take government-by-waiver? Waivers began to make a significant appearance in public policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were the precursors of welfare reform and the instruments for major revisions of Medicaid. These waivers had a foundation in law, and after a great deal of experimentation and intergovernmental negotiation conducted by executive officials in the two levels of government, they resulted in new law. The CRS memo cites court cases involving waiver provisions in the Real ID Act of 2005 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Undoubtedly, there are many others. Perhaps to its credit, Congress recognizes with waiver provisions the limitations of its own ability to tailor national laws to the needs of a huge, diverse, and constantly changing society. For it to include waiver authority in law is just a realistic acknowledgment that it is in over its head.

But waivers threaten to get out of hand, and to undermine the rule of law. What the Obama administration just did with education would be a mild case, in which waivers are combined with new requirements lacking a basis in law, but the more serious case is the Affordable Care Act, under which, without any warrant that I have been able to find in the law itself, the administration granted more than 1,400 waivers to labor unions and small businesses that were offering less insurance coverage than the law requires. If Mitt Romney is to be believed and is elected, he will abolish the whole law by waiver, as if a president has the right to do any such thing.

Andy Rotherham: It is impossible to discuss the Obama administration’s waiver plan without also discussing and understanding the general political and governmental dysfunction plaguing Washington. The administration is proposing to use waivers to give states, school districts, and schools flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, not because waivers are President Obama’s or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s favored way to make policy, but rather because they are the policymaking tool of last resort.

Andy Rotherham

Even casual observers of government have probably noticed that little gets done in Washington these days. The budget process has become an ongoing game of political brinkmanship, with government shutdowns regularly threatened. Legislation moves in fits and starts and often only under special expedited rules. In education, the flurry of policymaking since 2009 has come exclusively under special circumstances and not through the regular legislative process. Race to the Top, i3 (Investing in Innovation fund), and School Improvement Grants, for example, were all folded into the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The administration’s victory on student loans came courtesy of special legislative rules related to the health-care bill. Its “gainful employment” rule for for-profit colleges and universities came through the regulatory process.

This dysfunction matters because when NCLB was passed in 2001, no one involved imagined the law would run for at least a decade without a congressional overhaul. On the contrary, longtime Washington hands were surprised that it took until 2001 to reauthorize the 1994 version of the law. And the 1994 law was not as complex or timetable-laden as the current version. Notwithstanding a few waiver programs and some clever waivers states managed to secure for themselves, the core of the law remains intact almost 10 years after President George W. Bush, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Congressmen George Miller and John Boehner barnstormed the country to celebrate its overwhelmingly bipartisan passage in the House and Senate.

That’s why hardly anyone argues with Secretary Duncan’s decision to grant waivers as a way of modifying the policies. Congress tried—and failed—to overhaul the law in 2007, and current efforts to do so still seem a long shot. Yet revisions are long overdue, and the secretary of education’s authority to grant waivers is clearly spelled out in the law. Previous secretaries have issued a variety of waivers. The criticism of the secretary’s plan, which he and the president rolled out September 23 at the White House, stems from two issues: 1) the secretary’s strategy of making receipt of the waivers conditional on states agreeing to maintain or adopt a series of reforms, and 2) the effect of the waivers on efforts to hold schools accountable for results.

Let’s take the two concerns in order.

Waivers are a common strategy for policymaking. After all, with 50 states and urban, suburban, and rural communities covered by the same laws, it is almost impossible to craft laws that fit every situation without some mechanism for modification. We see waivers on a variety of policy issues to accommodate implementation challenges, state-specific statutes or constitutional requirements, or to encourage innovation and new ideas.

Yet in September in its regular monthly survey, consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors asked a bipartisan group of policy and political insiders whether they thought Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan would be challenged in court, and 63 percent said yes. I am copublisher of that survey, and the figure reflects the substantial discontent on the political right and left with Secretary Duncan’s specific strategy in this case. On the left, groups like the United Farm Workers challenged the secretary’s authority to issue waivers that would curtail parental rights. Other special-interest groups felt the waivers should be unconditional and not predicated on any specific reforms or commitments. On the right, conservatives complained that the administration was not merely waiving aspects of the law but rewriting it unilaterally.

Actually, waivers with conditions attached are also a common practice. A cabinet agency can require that a state be in compliance with various laws and regulations to be eligible for a waiver. Or an agency can sponsor pilots and let states propose their own ideas and conditions. The Department of Education has issued waivers under both of these scenarios in recent years.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, for instance, conditioned waivers in her “growth model” pilot on state plans to ensure student growth to proficiency on state tests within three years. Such a requirement did not exist in federal law, and many of the same individuals and organizations now apoplectic about Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan raised no objections to Spellings’s approach at the time.

Where Secretary Duncan’s waivers get complicated is the hodgepodge of laws, regulations, and initiatives that comprise federal education policy today, again because of congressional inaction. The federal goals of improving teacher evaluations, adopting college- and career-ready standards, and turning around low-performing schools trace their legislative provenance to congressional authorizations permitting the secretary of education to allocate federal funds based on priorities he determines rather than specific laws passed by Congress.

Politically, the secretary is on firm ground citing the precedent of his predecessors’ waivers, and his critics’ temporal concerns about executive power and federalism seem to owe more to which party controls the Oval Office than any underlying theory of government. But the courts will care less about political precedent than statutory precedent, and could read the law and the secretary’s authority more narrowly.

Unfortunately, all the attention to the legality of these waivers (as well as a lot of questionable rhetoric about NCLB itself) has obscured the second question: While the need for revisions to the law and its timetables is inarguable, are these specific waivers a good idea?

There are a number of sensible (and often broadly supported) provisions in the administration’s waiver package, but there are problems, too. Who could argue with getting rid of NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher” rules? States have gamed them to the point of meaninglessness. Flexibility for rural local education agencies is sensible policy as well. However, the lead-up to the announcement of the waivers was unsettling to supporters of a strong federal role in school accountability. In spring 2011, the president visited a suburban school (with notable achievement gaps) to argue that without substantial changes more than 80 percent of the nation’s schools would not meet NCLB performance targets this year. In fact, the actual figures are much lower. But more to the point, given our dismal educational outcomes, why should we be surprised that an accountability system would find a lot of schools underperforming?

Meanwhile, some states proposed, and in some cases were approved for, wholesale departures from efforts to hold schools accountable. Virginia, for instance, sought to retroactively set its accountability targets, and until the proposal became public the administration seemed to be onboard. Idaho and Montana demanded flexibility while announcing that they would not enforce the law, and the administration acquiesced to some changes.

The waiver proposal itself opens the door for suburban schools with achievement gaps to evade accountability. The plan commits states to concentrate on the poorest-performing 15 percent of schools in exchange for flexibility in setting school accountability targets. Yet data clearly show that some groups of students, poor and minority students in particular, do not fare appreciably better in schools that are higher performing overall. In those schools, such challenges are often lost in seemingly respectable averages. Whether the administration can maintain real accountability for all schools remains to be seen. In that same Whiteboard Advisors survey, 75 percent of policy insiders did not think that the administration could maintain a high degree of accountability throughout the process.

The No Child Left Behind law changed the unit of analysis for educational performance and accountability from schools to students. What happens to students within schools, not only differences between schools, became the focal point. This was a major policy shift and reflected the obvious truth that different students can have very different educational experiences in the same school. Laying that reality bare discomfited comfortable suburban communities and upset the traditional education establishment. Complaints about “labeling” schools drowned out hard conversations about the reality of educational performance today.

So while the law clearly needs fixes and updates to a variety of its policies, it does not need a rollback of this bright and often uncomfortable light. The 1994 predecessor to No Child Left Behind had a muted effect in most states precisely because of this issue. Data and transparency alone do not move public policy in a sector like education, which has powerful special interests and unclear outcome goals.

That’s why, assuming that Congress fails to act to reauthorize the law, in the end the same problem that has vexed the law since 2001 seems likely to plague the waiver process as it grinds on over time: how to give states flexibility yet ensure that they hold schools accountable for results. The federal government is not good at the former, and despite a few compelling state examples to the contrary, there is plenty of history to make one worry about the latter. Forget the first few states that have a solid commitment to reform, strong leadership, and will be approved while everyone is watching the peer review process. It’s the ones that come onboard later where a rollback is most likely.

Bottom line: As with No Child Left Behind (and most broad federal legislation), execution and implementation matter as much as the letter of law and regulations. The administration is betting that the education conversation and education politics have changed enough that rollback is politically untenable. Given the track record and the way the past decade unfolded in terms of the conversation about NCLB, that seems like a bad bet, whether a judge ultimately upholds or strikes down this waiver plan.

Checked by Eric A. Hanushek

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was scheduled for reauthorization in 2007, and its future has in recent months garnered renewed attention. Yet so far, Congress has found it impossible to reach sufficient consensus to update the legislation, as competing groups want to a) keep all the essential features of the current law as a way of maintaining the pressure on schools to teach all students, b) modify the federal law by moving to a value-added or some alternative testing and accountability system, or c) eliminate federal testing and accountability requirements altogether, reverting to the days when the compensatory education law was simply a framework for distributing federal funds to school districts. Critics of NCLB’s testing and accountability requirements have a litany of complaints: The tests are inaccurate, schools and teachers should not be responsible for the test performance of unprepared or unmotivated students, the measure of school inadequacy used under NCLB is misleading, the tests narrow the curriculum to what is being tested, and burdens imposed upon teachers and administrators are excessively onerous.

But in all the acrimonious discussion surrounding NCLB, surprisingly little attention has been given to the actual impact of that legislation and other accountability systems on student performance. Now a reputable body, a committee set up by the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has reached a conclusion on this matter. In its report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, the committee says that NCLB and state accountability systems have been so ineffective at lifting student achievement that accountability as we know it should probably be dropped by federal and state governments alike. Further, the committee objects to state laws that require students to pass an examination for a high school diploma. There is no evidence that such tests boost student achievement, the committee says, and some students, about 2 percent, are not getting their diplomas because they can’t—or think they can’t—pass the test. The headline of the May 2011 NRC press release is frank and bold in the way committee reports seldom are: “Current test-based incentive programs have not consistently raised student achievement in U.S.; Improved approaches should be developed and evaluated.”

Needless to say, the report can be expected to play an important role in the continuing debate over NCLB. Upon its initial release, the report captured top billing, appearing on Education Week’s front page. Certainly, the NRC intends for the report to influence the NCLB conversation, rushing a draft version to the media five months before the completed report was available to the public.

Unfortunately, the NRC’s strongly worded conclusions are only weakly supported by scientific evidence, despite the fact that NRC’s stated mission is “to improve government decision making and public policy, increase public understanding, and promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.”

The Report

Reports from the NRC are generally treated as highly credible. The NRC convenes panels of outside experts who volunteer their time to provide consensus opinions on issues of policy significance. And this particular panel includes a number of especially qualified researchers (see sidebar). The committee chair, Michael Hout, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; 7 of the 17 panel members have named professorships; 2 are deans (of law and education schools); and a majority have published articles about testing, accountability, or incentives.

When it comes to gathering together the general literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the use of incentives in various contexts, the committee’s work is solidly constructed. But this strong scientific discussion of theory and empirical analysis of incentives and accountability breaks down when it comes to the committee’s core purpose: evaluating accountability regimes in education that employ incentives and tests.

The report comes to two policy conclusions: NCLB and state accountability systems have proven ineffective and state-required high-school exams are counterproductive. The unequivocal presentation of the conclusions is clearly designed to leave little doubt in the minds of policymakers. When the underlying evidence is examined, however, it becomes apparent that neither conclusion is warranted. Instead of weighing the full evidence before it in the neutral manner expected of an NRC committee, the panel selectively uses available evidence and then twists it into bizarre, one might say biased, conclusions.

Selecting Evidence

To get a grasp of the bias that motivated the report’s authors, consider how its first conclusion is phrased:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

Note especially that the conclusion does not say that there is no evidence that testing and accountability work. It says that testing and accountability, by themselves, cannot lift the United States to the level of accomplishment reached by the world’s highest-achieving countries, an extraordinary standard for evaluating a policy innovation. To catch up to the leading countries would require gains of at least half of a standard deviation, or roughly two years of learning (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). No individual reform on the public agenda—neither merit pay, class size reduction, salary jumps for teachers, nor Race to the Top—can claim or even hope for anything close to that level of impact. The appropriate question is not whether testing and accountability is a panacea, but whether it has proven worthwhile.

By that more appropriate standard of judgment, the committee’s own data indicate that testing and accountability have proven effective, if not quite the spectacular success promised by those who enacted NCLB into law. The committee report tells us that the average estimated impact of these interventions is 0.08 standard deviations of student achievement. In other words, the average student in a state without accountability would have performed at the 53rd percentile of achievement had that student been in a state with an accountability system, all other things being equal.

That estimate may well be too low. The report states that “our literature review is limited to studies that allow us to draw causal conclusions about the overall effects of incentive policies and programs,” and then it goes on to describe several types of studies that would be excluded by this criterion. Where does the 0.08 come from? The committee considers a review from 2008 of 14 studies, and 4 studies conducted after that review. The review presents an average impact of 0.08. The NRC committee apparently felt no need to look any further and ignored the fact that a majority of the 14 studies would not come close to meeting its standard of enabling a “causal conclusion.” The committee determines that one of the more recent studies also supports an estimate of 0.08, although that study’s authors prefer estimates that are much higher. The 14 earlier studies and the 4 later ones produce a wide distribution of estimated impacts, but the committee makes no attempt to investigate whether the unusual estimates suggest circumstances under which accountability seems particularly effective (or ineffective). The committee chooses to emphasize the studies with negative findings (10 percent) while downplaying a number of those that have positive findings (90 percent). Thus the NRC mantra, repeated with slightly different wording throughout the report: “Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education.” Apparently, the inconsistent results heralded in the press release reflect the 10 percent of studies that differed from the overwhelming majority.

Small Gains Add Up

Let us put this concern aside and consider the increment in student performance of 0.08 standard deviations of individual achievement that the committee presents as its best estimate. Is that so small an effect that it cannot justify continuation of testing and accountability? Consider that this is the average effect of a program that has been implemented on a national scale, affecting students across the country. We are hard pressed to come up with any other education program working at scale that has produced such results. Moreover, these average gains are the result of accountability systems that many people believe have important flaws. Even larger gains might be expected if those flaws could be corrected, as many experts, though not the NRC panel, have suggested.

The estimated benefits from a 0.08 standard deviation gain in student performance vastly outweigh its estimated costs. The cost of designing, administering, grading, and reporting the results from statewide examinations have been estimated at between $20 and $50 per pupil, a trivial sum considering that per-pupil education expenditures in the United States run above $12,000 annually. Most reforms—including class size reduction, merit pay, across-the-board raises for teachers, in-service training programs, or the scaling up of charter schools—would cost many, many times as much. For these innovations to have the same kick for every dollar invested, results would have to be improbably large.

The NRC, instead of considering these actual costs, suggests that implicit costs in the form of narrowed curricula are the most important, but it provides no evidence for its view.

What might the economic impact of a 0.08 standard deviation improvement in average achievement nationwide be? Along with University of Munich professor Ludger Woessmann, I have estimated the impact on U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of higher levels of student achievement. These estimates project the historical pattern of growth to determine the result of gains in student achievement, calculate the additions to GDP over the next 80 years, and discount them back to today so that they are comparable to other current investments. A 0.08 improvement has a present value of some $14 trillion, very close to the current $15 trillion level of our entire GDP, and equivalent to $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. today. In other words, an inexpensive program that affects every student nationwide can, over the long run, have a very large impact, even if its average effect seems at first glance to be quite small. Indeed, if we figured testing cost $100 per student each year for the next 80 years and we tested all students rather than the limited grades tested now, the rate of return on the investment would be 9,189 percent. Google investors would be envious.

Several omissions from the report are also noteworthy. The report gives only passing attention to the positive impact of NCLB on the education of the most disadvantaged students, a consequence of the requirement to report performance by specific subgroups (e.g., racial and ethnic groups and the economically disadvantaged). The NRC report’s main reference to this feature of current accountability systems is that consideration of subgroup performance has added analytical difficulties because of the smaller samples.

Perhaps more telling, this panel of experts on testing and incentives makes absolutely no effort to describe how accountability programs could be improved. Being good researchers themselves, they do favor continued research on testing, however, and provide recommendations on what research should be done, which not surprisingly matches their own interests and expertise.

Lower the Bar?

The report also addresses a second, widely used accountability policy: high-school exit exams that hold students responsible for meeting a set of content standards. The report’s second conclusion reads,

The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.

The panel strongly suggests that states that impose an exit exam should repeal this requirement. To understand this conclusion, it is necessary to understand the exams themselves and to evaluate the evidence behind the committee’s conclusion.

Currently, more than half of the states require that students pass a test of some sort to obtain a normal diploma (see Figure 1), and virtually all of these current requirements have been put in place since 2000. The tests almost always cover English and math, but many states add science and history. Test difficulty varies by state, but the modal level is grade 10. Although that standard may seem low, it is considerably more stringent than the standards that existed prior to 1990, when no state had a test reaching even the 9th-grade level. The current tests are not as high a barrier to high school graduation as they are often alleged to be, as a student may generally take the exam multiple times in order to achieve a passing score. And in all but three states (South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas), students can either appeal the test result, if they feel the score misrepresents their accomplishments, or obtain a diploma by some alternative path.

The motivations for administering exit exams are to create incentives for students to apply themselves to the task of learning and to set uniform (minimum) quality standards for the state’s schools. Such content standards provide guidelines to schools about what to teach. They also indicate to colleges and universities what knowledge and abilities a graduate can be expected to possess. And they give similar information to prospective employers.

According to the best available evidence (discussed below), perhaps 2 percent of students are induced to drop out of school either because of failure to pass the exam or because of fear of not being able to pass the exam. Implicitly, the committee assumes this consequence does considerable harm to the affected students, given the substantial economic rewards that accrue, on average, from receiving a high school diploma. But average effects do not necessarily apply to the 2 percent on the border line between graduating and failing to graduate from high school. The impact for this particular group of students is likely to be much less, unless you make the bizarre assumption that it is only the diploma—not what the student learns—that affects job prospects and future income. The people who are induced to drop out because they cannot pass a 10th-grade exam would most likely be near the bottom of the earnings distribution of graduates were they to be handed a diploma. The economic impact on these students will be much lower than the average difference between graduate and dropout.

Perhaps the best argument against exit exams is simple: If a student shows up for school for 12-plus years and cannot pass a 10th-grade exam, it must be the school’s fault, and it would be unfair to hold the student responsible. This argument, interestingly enough, is the precise opposite of one of the primary arguments against the testing and accountability provisions of NCLB: We should not hold schools responsible for low achievement, because achievement is affected by student motivation and family background characteristics beyond the school’s control. Taken together, the arguments embedded in the committee’s two conclusions imply that nobody—not schools, not teachers, not even students themselves—bears responsibility for low student achievement.

Interestingly, the committee’s conclusion with respect to exit exams does not pick up on the full report’s emphasis on the importance of the design features of incentive systems, which include warnings that tests aimed at ensuring minimum competency may lower expectations, and concerns about both the potential narrowing of the curriculum and the tendency for score inflation on a known test. Instead, the presumed problem is the inherent unfairness of denying a diploma to a student who has met the attendance and course distribution requirements for a diploma.

If the main objective is to maximize high school graduation, there are many ways to do that. We could eliminate all exams, even those administered by teachers. We could loosen up course requirements. We could offer the diploma after 10 or 11 years of schooling, instead of 12. Of course, nobody is willing to take such steps, even though class exams, course requirements, and the inclusion of the 12th grade of schooling all have negative impacts on graduation rates. So why then does the NRC promote the idea of eliminating a 10th-grade-level examination as a requirement for high school graduation on the narrow basis that a few students will, as a result, not earn the degree? Is the NRC also against the movement of many states toward increasing the required amount of math or moving to college and career-ready standards?

The Data Shuffle

Let’s examine the evidence the committee supplies for its exit exam conclusion. The report marshals three studies that explore the issue: two on dropouts and one on achievement. Evaluating the impact of exit exams on achievement is inherently difficult. Because the exams apply to everybody in a state at the same time, it is not possible to compare students of the same age within the same state to find out the impact of exams. It is possible, however, to look at different cohorts of students, for example, those who attended school before the exam was in place and those who attended after, and to compare these to similar cohorts in other states where no such change in policy took place. In conducting this type of study, one must rule out other differences, such as those in family background or those in state education policies that might also affect student performance over time. Even when these challenges are met, one cannot be entirely sure of the results, as exit exams may influence student and school performance even before they come into effect, if teachers and students know that they will soon be introduced, which is usually the case.

The committee tosses out every exit-exam study (save three) that has ever been conducted on the grounds that it is not possible “to draw causal conclusions about the overall effects of test-based incentives” (that is, the very same criteria the committee ignored in considering school-level accountability). Some of the excluded studies use the well-regarded quasi-experimental technique known as regression discontinuity analysis. In the committee’s view, “Such regression discontinuity studies provide interesting causal information about the effect of being above or below the threshold, but they do not provide information about the overall effect of implementing an incentives program.” That criticism is odd, since the impact of an exit examination is of special interest for exactly those students on the cusp of adequate levels of achievement. While these excluded studies are not really appropriate for studying achievement, they tend to show little impact of exit exams on dropout behavior or graduation outcomes.

The committee relies for its conclusion regarding exit examinations exclusively on a 2009 study by Eric Grodsky, John Robert Warren, and Demetra Kalogrides. Because of the significance of this piece of research for the committee project as a whole, it is worth considering in some depth. The Grodsky team identified trends in student achievement in each state that administers an exit examination by drawing on data provided by the long-term trend assessments of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The long-term NAEP, begun in the late-1960s and continued with testing every few years, was designed to provide consistent score information to judge achievement of the nation as a whole. It was not designed to be used to evaluate the schools of any particular state or district. As a result, NAEP never collected in its long-term trend assessment a representative sample of students for any specific state, and the median number of tested students in each state was very small.

Grodsky et al. pretend that the NAEP provides them with just that: a representative sample of students for each state. They assume that the average performance of students in each state on the long-term NAEP provides an accurate measure of the average performance of students in that state, thereby violating the first principle of statistical sampling.

They then merge the information with information on the timing of the adoption of an exit exam by a state between 1971 and 2004. The study includes observations of math and reading achievement at 9 and 10 different points in time, respectively. The researchers report results for achievement of 13-year-olds and 17-year-olds separately, acknowledging that there are limitations to using either cohort. Thirteen-year-olds may be too young to detect the impact of exit exams, while the sample of 17-year-olds suffers from the noninclusion of school dropouts.

The Grodsky analysis encounters a further difficulty. For the most part, the researchers consider only the very early years, when exit exams were first introduced, a time when the exams were set at a very low level of difficulty, below that of a 9th-grade student. Only 1 percent of the observations included in their analysis are for states that had an exit exam rated at the 9th-grade level or higher, as most current examinations are.

Not only does the Grodsky team rely on inadequate data, but the analysis itself is flawed. Any attempt to see the effects of state tests should compare the changes that occur in the states that introduce them with changes in the states that do not. But the Grodsky study effectively tosses out all the information available for the 27 states that do not have an exit examination before 2004. As important, the analysis does not consider any measures of state policies except for exit exams, implying that any other policy changes for the three decades between 1971 and 2004 are either irrelevant for student performance or are not correlated with the introduction and use of exit exams.

The central finding is that exit exams do not have a statistically significant effect on test scores. But this insignificance could arise because of any or all of the above-mentioned problems rather than the absence of an effect of exit exams, as the NRC committee wants us to presume.

The committee’s estimate of the effects of exit exams on school dropout rates is less controversial. It relies on two quite reliable studies, although they are not without limitations: they study the effects of specific exit exams, which may not generalize to other arrangements. The studies indicate that perhaps 2 percent of potential high-school graduates would have received the diploma had it not been for the exit exams.

The committee touts the possibility of alternative incentives to exit exams: “Several experiments with providing incentives for graduation in the form of rewards, while keeping graduation standards constant, suggest that such incentives might be used to increase high school completion.” The key of course is just what the phrase “while keeping graduation standards constant” means. The idea behind exit exams is to ensure a minimum level of quality, as distinct from meeting the course completion requirements. Moreover, the report never makes the case that exit exams and other potential incentive programs are mutually exclusive. In principle, nobody would argue against employing other incentive programs as long as they were worth the expense and, as the committee says elsewhere, do not introduce perverse incentives of one kind or another.

The Takeaway

The NRC clearly wants to enter into the current debate about the reauthorization of NCLB. And the NRC has an unmistakable opinion: its report concludes that current test-based incentive programs that hold schools and students accountable should be abandoned. The report committee then offers three recommendations: more research, more research, and more research. But if one looks at the evidence and science behind the NRC conclusions, it becomes clear that the nation would be ill advised to give credence to the implications for either NCLB or high-school exit exams that are highlighted in the press release issued along with this report.

The framing of policy in the NRC report is simple: “The small or nonexistent benefits that have been demonstrated to date suggest that incentives need to be carefully designed and combined with other elements of the educational system to be effective.” Nobody would oppose careful design of incentives. Nobody would oppose evaluating the intended and unintended outcomes of incentives. And nobody would oppose combining carefully designed incentives with “other elements of the educational system to [make them] effective.”

The NRC is careful to offer no guidance on how NCLB or state exit exams might be modified to make them more effective. And the NRC is very careful not to offer any guidance on “other elements of the educational system.” The message that comes through is clear: keep working on test development, but never use tests for any incentive or policy purposes.

A better takeaway message might be, “Never rely on the conclusions of this NRC report for any policy purpose.”

Eric Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.

1. This is a big deal, folks. The ESEA reauthorization process hasn’t gotten this far since–well, ever. In 2007 the House education committee floated a draft bill which then died an ignominious death. The Senate HELP committee has never produced a bill . So to have a comprehensive bill marked up and sent to the floor represents a significant milestone.

2. President Obama and Secretary Duncan deserve credit for spurring the Senate into action. It’s not a coincidence that a bill emerged and a mark-up was held just weeks after the announcement of the Administration’s waiver package. And the discussion over the past few days makes it clear that Senators on both sides of the aisle are motivated to get their job done to stave off the waivers from taking effect. So while I’m not a fan of conditional waivers as a policy, I must admit that it was an effective tool for waking the Senate out of its slumber.

3. Republicans are in the driver’s seat. Yesterday’s unanimous Democratic vote might have been a display of party unity, but it also demonstrated a willingness to vote for almost anything. The Democrats want to send a bill to the President, and they will need Republican votes in order to do that. So expect GOP senators like Lamar Alexander to make their support contingent on key changes to the bill–and to get a lot of what they want. Meanwhile, the House bills (which are being put together in pieces) will surely come out to the right of the Senate. If Democrats want to get something across the finish line, they are going to have to accept something that looks a lot more like Alexander-Burr than Harkin-Enzi.

4. The civil rights groups and lefty reformers are getting rolled. What became clear from the mark-up is that there’s very little support in Congress for federal oversight of state accountability systems. Except for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, nobody seemed interested in getting “annual objectives” or achievement-gap-closing metrics back into the bill. And where do the aggrieved lefty groups go from here? They won’t be able to get an accountability amendment passed on the Senate floor. There’s no way a House bill will include it. So then what? Try again in 2013? Why would anyone think the politics will be any better? (Same goes for federal intrusion into teacher evaluation.) The bottom line is that federal accountability hawks have lost this argument. It’s time to move on.

5. Let’s admit it: Harkin-Enzi is better than current law. I’ve still got a lot of beefs with it (especially around its high school interventions and inclusion of the highly-qualified teachers mandate). But for Reform Realists, it represents several steps in the right direction. It focuses the federal role on transparency instead of accountability. It encourages a look at student growth instead of a one-time snapshot. Thanks to Lamar Alexander’s work over the past week, it shows a willingness to let states take the lead on key issues like teacher evaluation and school turnarounds. Assuming that the  House bills will be even better, I would claim that reauthorization is finally heading in a hopeful direction.

-Mike Petrilli

No, that bill, authored by education-committee chairman Tom Harkin and ranking member Mike Enzi, is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left.

And sure enough, progressives have already made their opinions clear on why the bill should be stopped dead in its tracks. But it should offend conservatives (including the Reform Realists among us) too, though for very different reasons. Such conservatives should back the aforementioned proposal put forward by Senators Alexander, Burr, and others, instead.

Here are the Harkin-Enzi bill’s major offenses:

• An expansive new reach into high schools. While the legislation deserves credit for handing many accountability decisions back to the states, it would launch a whole new series of federal interventions in the nation’s worst high schools. Targeting “dropout factories” might sound like a good idea until you consider the Department of Education’s capacity (or lack thereof) for tackling something so complicated and complex from Washington.

• Maintaining the onerous “highly qualified teachers” mandate. One of No Child Left Behind’s most hated provisions is the requirement that teachers earn designation as “highly qualified.” Not only did this get the feds into the position of micromanaging teacher qualifications, it also did so in a clumsy way, focusing on paper credentials. The Administration’s waiver package moves to a policy of “non-enforcement” around this provision, signaling that it’s time to move on. And the Alexander proposal scraps it entirely. Meanwhile, Harkin-Enzi keeps the “highly qualified” rules in place for newly hired teachers.

• Rather than eliminating or consolidating wasteful programs, it adds new ones. As far as I can tell, few major programs are put on the chopping block, and several more are created, including a new initiatives for high schools, STEM, literacy, and “safe and healthy schools.” As the country is running a historic deficit, this is the best we can do?

Leading Republicans, including ranking member Enzi and Senator Lamar Alexander, have already signaled that they will vote to get the bill out of committee but can’t support “sending it to the president” in its current form. Here’s hoping that somewhere along the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (House of Representatives, we’re looking at you!), these onerous provisions fall by the wayside.

Otherwise, Republicans would be wise to scrap the bill and start over—with Senator Alexander’s proposal as the jumping-off point. It’s a much stronger bill, closer in many ways to the Administration’s own Blueprint, and much more serious about re-calibrating the federal role in education. And if Democrats won’t go for that—well, wait for a more favorable environment in 2013.

-Mike Petrilli

This article first appeared in the Education Gadfly.

It’s official: Federal policymakers across the political spectrum are finally willing to admit that Congress overreached when it passed No Child Left Behind and put Uncle Sam in the driver’s seat on education accountability. First there was (Republican) Senator Lamar Alexander’s proposal to get the feds out of the business entirely, save for requirements around the worst five percent of schools. Then there was (Democratic) President Obama’s waiver package, which allows states to make a pitch for their own approach to accountability. And, this week, there’s the (bipartisan) Harkin-Enzi bill, authored by the chairman and ranking member (respectively) of the Senate education committee, which, well, it’s hard to tell exactly what it does, but it surely reduces the federal footprint around accountability. (Try making sense of the convoluted bill yourself. And quick—the mark-up is next week.)

But if the debate around the federal role in accountability is coalescing, a much bigger question remains wide open: Could we be watching the beginning of the end for the accountability movement in toto?

One harbinger might be California Governor Jerry Brown’s veto of a bill to tweak his state’s accountability system by adding “multiple-measures” to a test-score laden index. Brown’s complaint wasn’t the multiple measures per se, but the notion of data-based accountability writ large. “Adding more speedometers to a broken car,” he wrote, “won’t turn it into a high-performance machine.”

If those of us who support test-based accountability are going to push back against these arguments, we’d better get much clearer about what we’re fighting for. In other words: What are we talking about when we talk about “accountability”?

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that it means different things to different people:

• The Tough Lovers want to see people held accountable for doing their jobs. They are sick and tired of public-school managers who are sheltered from the harsh realities of market competition and who shy away from hard decisions. If someone doesn’t perform—whether he’s a clerk, a classroom teacher, or an assistant principal—they want to see him fired. They want to know that our civil servants are driving a hard bargain with vendors, setting smart budget priorities, eliminating wasteful and ineffective programs, and cleaning house on a regular basis to make sure that only hard workers stay on the payroll. And they hope that the pressure from accountability will motivate the system to get serious about results and care less about hurting people’s feelings or cow-towing to union demands.

• The Tight-Loosers see a move toward results-based accountability as an opportunity to cut back on traditional regulation. They embrace the charter-school bargain: Hold schools responsible for improving student achievement and get rid of all the other rules in return—the class-size mandates, the teacher-certification regimes, the crazy budget protocols, all of it. They hope that this will lead to better outcomes, but even if it doesn’t, they are almost certain that it will lead to better school environments, as educators are unburdened from the stifling command-and-control culture that pervades so many public-sector bureaucracies. And if it leads to truly disastrous schools, officials can always shut them down.

• The World-is-Flatters worry about America’s economic competitiveness and distrust local schools and parents to emphasize the right educational priorities. They see test-based accountability as way to force the education system to embrace the academic subjects (think STEM) and skills (think Common Core) that will build our “human capital” and fuel future economic growth. They have little respect for a system that stresses feel-good notions like “self-esteem” over hard work and rigorous preparation.

• The Poverty Warriors view accountability as one weapon in the battle on educational inequality. By shaming and sanctioning schools that don’t do right by poor or minority kids, they seek to shift resources (money, strong teachers, challenging courses) to the neediest schools and kids. They are happy to push for redistributionalist policies in other ways too—via school-finance reform, closing the Title I “comparability” loophole, etc.—but they see this brand of accountability as changing the political dynamics on the ground in ways that would favor kids who would otherwise be marginalized.

If we are to save “accountability,” we might need to shed one or two of these arguments. So which ones?

The Tough Lovers, it seems to me, are on the strongest ground politically. As a center-right country, the United States is more than happy to complain about bloated and inefficient government. And particularly now that so many people are out of work and struggling to make ends meet, a civil servant system that stresses job security is highly vulnerable to attack. I suspect that when people tell pollsters they support “accountability” in education, this is what they mean. They want people in the system to do their jobs or get fired.

The Tight-Loosers are politically safe, too, though their argument is unlikely to appeal to everyday voters, focused as it is on intergovernmental relationships and structures.

The World-is-Flatters, however, are starting to run into trouble. This is entirely predictable; in a country that values “local control” of our schools, we blush at the thought of far-away elites dictating the content to be taught in our schools. Further conflict ensues when well-connected parents and educators feel that their own niche schools—be they Waldorf or Montessori or whatever—are being violated by educational values that are foreign to them. Listen to many of the complaints of the “Save our Schools” types (or Governor Brown) and you’ll glimpse the old battles about traditional vs. progressive education. We’re a big, diverse country. Anything that tethers the pluralism of our education system is bound to face backlash.

But it’s the Poverty Warriors, by my read, who are in the most precarious situation. It’s not that they don’t have a strong case on the merits. Our education system is horrendously inequitable. It’s criminal to spend twice as much on the education of the rich as on the schooling of the poor. And we’ve all heard compelling stories about how NCLB-style accountability has given “political cover” to district and school leaders, allowing them to shift attention and resources to the kids most in need.

Still, as a center-right country, America is deeply suspicious of redistribution in any form. Furthermore, the Poverty Warriors haven’t been honest about their motives. Their slogan has been “leave no child behind” when it’s really closer to “take from the rich, give to the poor.”

Of course, that class warfare rhetoric won’t sell. Not back then, and certainly not now, in the midst of the Great Recession.

So where does that leave us?

The kind of “accountability” we should be promoting would be responsive to the arguments of the Tough Lovers, Tight-Loosers, and World-is-Flatters, while being flexible enough not to antagonize niche schools in our pluralistic society.

Such an accountability movement would continue to call for rigorous standards, regular testing, and interventions in schools that don’t measure up. It would be serious about untying the hands of managers, especially so they can “hold accountable” teachers and other staff who don’t pull their weight. And it would allow some sort of accountability opt-out for schools that don’t want to be part of the default system. This might look like charter-school agreements in the early days—customized contracts that consider “multiple measures” and qualitative judgments that are better aligned with the mission and approach of the schools being evaluated (like the ones you love, Governor “Moonbeam” Brown).

This approach to accountability is defensible, saleable, and workable—in other words, the kind of accountability worth promoting. To push the Poverty Warrior option, I predict, is to ensure accountability’s end. Which would you prefer?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears in this week’s Flypaper.

For that reason, one must give a great deal of respect to Sandy Kress’s opinions.  And so I am encouraged when he tells me that the moves away from accountability and merit pay that have taken place recently in Texas were forced upon Governor Rick Perry and Robert Scott, the state’s education commissioner, by legislative pressures beyond their control.

But the fact of the matter remains:  Texas is backing away from education reform under its current political leadership. That is a shame, because Texas has historically led the way, not least because of Sandy Kress’s own commitment to the cause and effective leadership skills.

There are still good things that can be said about Texan schools. As I said in my original blog post, students within each ethnic group in Texas—white, Hispanic, and African American—are among the nation’s top performers, in some cases surpassing even the levels achieved in Massachusetts. Let’s hope the Texas political leadership can resist the anti-accountability forces in the months and years to come.

-Paul E. Peterson

First, a confession. I’m a big admirer of Paul Peterson. I share the values and concerns he reflects in his post.

As most readers of this blog know, I have been deeply involved in Texas reforms since they began to be implemented systematically in the early 90s. I have a strong and passionate commitment to keeping accountability, broadly defined, in place in our state.

I believe Governor Perry is strongly committed to maintaining accountability in Texas, so I wanted to respond to a few of Paul’s characterizations.

As to merit pay, which I have been deeply involved in supporting and helping to create in Texas, Governor Perry has been a strong and steadfast supporter. I recall his role in the early days in using some discretionary dollars to model pay for performance and then his leadership in seeking support from the legislature for our program, which became the largest in the country.

In this last session, Governor Perry did insist that we deal with our fiscal problems without tax increases. That meant some budget cuts, and the legislature did cut deeply (too deeply, in my view) into state education initiatives. This was unfortunate, but not Governor Perry’s doing, nor within his power to prevent.

I could spend more time than I have here to talk about the uphill politics behind creating and sustaining merit pay. But the main point I want to make is that Perry is a supporter, and that our loss was in no way due to his “giving in to special interests.”

As to the district waiver program, this initiative came out of the legislature, not from the Governor’s office. So it’s not at all like Secretary Duncan’s waiver program, which the Executive is doing on its own, without legislative authority. Further, while I worry a lot about the Administration’s watering down accountability across the country, I am convinced the Texas program will entail added accountability while under Robert Scott’s administration. That is to say, I believe he’ll look for additional and more rigorous measures for higher-end performance while maintaining student-specific, objective measures for students across the board.

This is not to say that I like the bill the legislature passed. I worry about its expansion and, mostly, its administration in a post-Perry period for precisely the same reasons Paul raises.

Finally, as to accountability generally, Governor Perry has been a stalwart supporter and defender of our accountability initiatives. Our state adopted a basic re-write of our accountability policies under HB 3 two years ago. It’s a fine model for states and has been widely designated as such by many groups around the country, including Achieve and the SREB. Make no mistake about it, it would never have been as strong as it was when passed, nor would it have survived this last session without being watered down, but for the looming veto pen of Governor Perry.

I know Paul has decided to support Romney and I respect his decision, but the record should be clear: Governor Perry has been a strong leader on education and a fervent supporter of accountability and other policies designed to improve student academic results.

- Sandy Kress

Sandy Kress served as senior advisor to President George W. Bush on education with respect to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

-Education Next

That said, I think we may be heading into new territory in the use of waivers. By now they have a moderately long history that was well summarized in an essay by Tom Gais and Jim Fossett, “Federalism and the Executive Branch,” in Joel Aberbach and Mark Peterson, eds., The Executive Branch (Oxford, 2005). Waivers have typically been used for adaptation to variation among states, which bedevils American public administration, and to encourage policy innovations sought by incumbent administrations. With NCLB, they begin to approach a way of undoing, at its core, an ill-conceived, unworkable law. Secretary Duncan—and a dilatory Congress, unable so far to rewrite the law–have me poised on the edge of my chair.

- Martha Derthick

How has the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act affected student achievement? This is no idle question, as the landmark federal law is long overdue for reauthorization. The Obama administration has recently urged Congress to add the issue to its already crowded 2010 agenda, even going so far as to include an additional $1 billion for K–12 education in its budget proposal if the law is reauthorized this year (a wholly symbolic gesture, given that it is Congress that sets spending levels, but one that indicates the administration’s priorities).

Yet heightened attention to NCLB has not produced consensus over its consequences for students. No Child Left Behind was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the central federal legislation relevant to K–12 schooling. NCLB dramatically expanded the law’s scope by requiring that states introduce school-accountability systems that applied to all public schools and students in the state. NCLB requires annual testing of students in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 (and at least once in grades 10 through 12) and that states rate schools, both as a whole and for key subgroups, with regard to whether they are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward their state’s proficiency goals. Supporters and critics, in their various approaches to discerning NCLB’s impact, share a significant problem: because NCLB applies to all public school students, researchers lack a suitable comparison group and so have been unable to distinguish the law’s effects from the myriad other factors at work over the past eight years.

The new research we present below takes on this challenge. Our basic insight is that the test-based accountability provisions that are the defining characteristic of NCLB did not come from nowhere, but rather were modeled quite closely on reforms adopted by many states in the 1990s. For states with such accountability systems in place before 2002, NCLB’s most important components may have created some logistical headaches but were largely irrelevant. In contrast, NCLB forced the remaining states to enact accountability systems for the first time. We can therefore estimate the impact of NCLB’s accountability mandates by comparing test-score changes in states that did not have NCLB-style accountability policies in place when the law was implemented to test-score changes in those that did.

We find that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and statistically significant increases in the math achievement of 4th graders and that these gains were concentrated among African American and Hispanic students and among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch. We find smaller positive effects on 8th-grade math achievement. These effects are concentrated at lower achievement levels and among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch. We do not, however, find evidence that NCLB accountability had any impact on reading achievement among either 4th or 8th graders.

Assessing NCLB

The broad interest in understanding whether NCLB has influenced student achievement, both overall and for key subgroups, has motivated careful scrutiny of trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other sources. For example, the authors of a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) note that achievement trends on both state assessments and NAEP were “positive overall and for key subgroups” through 2005. Using more recent data, a report by the Center on Education Policy concludes that reading and math achievement as measured by state assessments has increased in most states since 2002 and that there have been smaller but similar patterns in NAEP scores. Both reports were careful to stress that these national gains are not necessarily attributable to the effects of NCLB.

Other studies have taken a less sanguine view of these achievement gains, arguing that they are misleading because states have made their assessment systems less rigorous over time. University of California scholar Bruce Fuller and colleagues, for example, document a growing disparity between student performance on state assessments and NAEP since the introduction of NCLB and conclude that “it is important to focus on the historical patterns informed by the NAEP.” Using NAEP data on 4th graders, they conclude that the growth in student achievement has actually slowed since the introduction of NCLB.

Turning to the broader literature on school accountability, several researchers have evaluated the achievement consequences of the accountability systems states developed during the 1990s. One study by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb of Stanford, which was based on state-level NAEP data, found that the within-state growth in math performance between 1996 and 2000 was larger in states with higher values on an accountability index, particularly for African American and Hispanic students in 8th grade. Another study, by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, both also at Stanford, evaluated the impact of school-accountability policies on state-level NAEP math and reading achievement measured by the difference between the performance of a state’s 8th graders and that of 4th graders in the same state four years earlier. They classified states as having either “report-card accountability” or “consequential accountability.” Report-card states provided a public report of school-level test performance. States with consequential accountability both publicized school-level performance and attached consequences to that performance. Hanushek and Raymond found that the introduction of consequential accountability within a state was associated with increases in NAEP scores.

Both of these studies suggest that NCLB-style accountability provisions may increase student achievement and also demonstrate how state-level NAEP data can be used to evaluate accountability systems. The analysis described below effectively extends this important work to cover the more recent state accountability reforms that were compelled by NCLB.

Research Design

Given the various social, economic, and educational factors at work before and after NCLB was implemented, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the policy’s impact from a simple comparison of achievement trends before and after enactment of the law. For example, the nation was suffering from a recession around the time NCLB was implemented, which one might expect would have reduced student achievement in the absence of other forces. At the same time, other national education policies and programs were in place that may also have influenced student achievement.

Perhaps the central challenge in evaluation research is to identify a plausible comparison group that was unaffected by the intervention under study. In the case of NCLB, this is particularly difficult, as the policy simultaneously applied to all public schools in the United States.

We address this issue by comparing trends in student achievement across states that had varying degrees of prior experience with state school-accountability policies similar to those brought about by NCLB. The intuition behind this approach is that NCLB represented less of a “treatment” in states that had already adopted NCLB-like school-accountability policies prior to 2002. To the extent that NCLB-like accountability had either positive or negative effects on measured student achievement, we would expect, once NCLB had been implemented, to observe those effects most distinctly in states that had not previously introduced similar policies.

This strategy relies on the assertion that pre-NCLB school-accountability policies were comparable to NCLB—that is, that the two types of accountability regimes are similar in the most relevant respects. The fact that many state officials criticized NCLB, arguing that it duplicated their prior accountability systems, suggests the functional equivalence of the two sets of policies. To ensure that this is the case and relying on a number of different sources, we evaluated the comparison states according to whether the features of their pre-NCLB accountability policies closely resembled the key aspects of NCLB. We found that they were in fact quite similar.

As an additional check on the validity of our treatment and comparison groups, we used our research design to estimate the impact of NCLB accountability on outcomes that we would not expect to be affected, such as the state-level average poverty rate and median household income. The fact that our method does not find any “effect” of NCLB on such outcomes suggests that these states can serve as a plausible comparison group for isolating the impact of NCLB accountability.

We implement our research design in a more fine-grained manner than simply comparing achievement trends in the treatment and comparison states. We define the treatment as the number of years without prior school accountability between the 1991–92 academic year and the onset of NCLB. Hence, states with no prior accountability have a value of 11. Illinois, which adopted its policy in the 1992–93 school year, would have a value of 2. Texas would have a value of 4 since its policy started in 1994–95, and Vermont would have a value of 9 since its program began in 1999–2000. This method implies that the larger the value of this treatment variable, the greater potential impact of NCLB. The total effect we report is the impact of NCLB accountability in 2007 for states with no prior accountability relative to states that adopted school accountability in 1997 (the mean adoption year among states that adopted accountability prior to NCLB).

It is important to note that this research design will capture the impact of the accountability provisions of NCLB, but not the impact of other NCLB components such as the Reading First program or its Highly Qualified Teacher provisions. Additionally, our estimates will identify the impact of NCLB-induced school-accountability provisions on states without prior accountability policies. To the extent that one believes that states that expected to gain the most from accountability policies adopted them prior to NCLB, one might view the results we present as an underestimate of the average effect of school accountability.

Data

This analysis uses data on math and reading achievement from the state NAEP, which offers a representative sample of student achievement in each state at regular intervals. Participation in the state NAEP was voluntary prior to NCLB, although roughly 40 states did participate. NCLB made participation mandatory. The main advantage to using NAEP data for our analysis is that it is a low-stakes exam that is not directly tied to any state’s standards or assessments. Instead, NAEP aims to assess a broad range of skills and knowledge within each subject area. Consequently, NAEP data should be relatively immune to concerns about accountability-driven test-score inflation, such as may result from “teaching to the test.”

Because our research design depends on measuring achievement trends prior to NCLB, we limit our sample to states that administered the state NAEP at least twice prior to the implementation of NCLB. We include 2002 as a pre-NCLB data point in our analysis because, given the timing of the passage and implementation of the law, it seems unlikely that spring 2002 scores could have been substantially influenced by NCLB (see sidebar). All states administered NAEP in 2003, 2005, and 2007.

Our sample includes 39 states for 4th-grade math, 38 states for 8th-grade math, 37 states for 4th-grade reading, and 34 states for 8th-grade reading (see Figure 1). With a few exceptions, our analysis sample closely resembles the nation in terms of student demographics (e.g., percentage African American and percentage Hispanic), observed socioeconomic traits (e.g., the poverty rate), and measures of the levels and pre-NCLB trends in NAEP test scores.

Results

We find that the accountability provisions of NCLB increased 4th-grade math achievement by roughly 7.2 scale points (0.23 standard deviations) by 2007 in states with no prior accountability policies relative to states that adopted accountability systems in 1997. How large is this effect? As one point of reference, consider that the difference between the average scores of 4th and 8th graders in our sample suggests that students gain roughly 12 scale points per year. By this measure, the NCLB impact is equivalent to roughly two-thirds of the average annual gain in scale points. Consider also that the achievement gap between black and white 4th graders on the NAEP math exam is roughly 30 scale points (1 standard deviation), which means that the impact of NCLB is equivalent to about one-quarter of this difference. The effect for 8th-grade math is smaller (0.10 standard deviations) and falls just shy of achieving conventional levels of statistical significance. We find no effects for 4th- and 8th-grade reading.

The design of NCLB necessarily focused the attention of schools on helping students attain proficiency. Figure 2 presents our estimates of the effects of NCLB accountability on the percentage of students achieving at or above the basic and proficient performance levels on NAEP. Although states’ definitions of proficient vary widely, very few set the proficiency bar as high as NAEP and most correspond more closely to NAEP’s basic performance level. We find that NCLB accountability increased the share of students performing at or above basic in math by 10 percentage points among 4th graders and 6 percentage points among 8th graders. Math proficiency rates among 4th graders also increased by 6 percentage points. Again, however, we do not find consistent evidence that NCLB increased reading performance at either grade level.

Given NCLB’s focus on proficiency, one would expect the law to disproportionately influence achievement among previously low-achieving students. Our results showing larger increases in the percentage of students reaching the performance level of basic on the NAEP are broadly consistent with this theory. However, in contrast with some previous research and commonly voiced concerns, we do not find that the introduction of NCLB harmed students at higher points on the achievement distribution. Indeed, NCLB accountability seemed to increase achievement among higher-achieving students, if by a smaller amount than it did among their low-achieving peers. For example, in 4th-grade math, we find that NCLB increased scores at the 10th percentile by roughly 0.29 standard deviations compared with an increase of only 0.17 standard deviations at the 90th percentile (see Figure 3).

One of the primary objectives of NCLB was to reduce inequities in student performance by race and socioeconomic status. Indeed, this concern drove the requirement that, under the statute, accountability ratings be determined by subgroup performance in addition to aggregate school performance. Hence, it is of particular interest to understand the effect of NCLB accountability on specific student subgroups.

In 4th-grade math, these estimated effects are somewhat larger for Hispanic students relative to white students. Similarly, the effects were substantially larger among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch (regardless of race) relative to students who were not eligible. We also found relatively large effects for black students but only when our analysis weighted the state-year NAEP data by the corresponding enrollments of black students. This pattern suggests that NCLB generated more meaningful improvements in the achievement of black students in states where public schools served larger numbers of black students. The effects were roughly comparable for boys and girls.

In 8th-grade math, we find extremely large positive effects for Hispanic students and small, only marginally significant effects for white students. Unfortunately, the results for black students are too imprecisely estimated to warrant interpretation. The effects for students eligible for subsidized lunch are large and statistically significant. Interestingly, for 8th graders the effects are substantially larger for girls, with boys experiencing little if any benefit of accountability.

Unintended Consequences?

One concern about NCLB and most other test-based school-accountability policies is that they may cause schools to neglect subjects other than math and reading. NAEP data offer some opportunity to test this hypothesis in the context of NCLB. A sizable number of states administered state-representative NAEP tests in science. Unfortunately, during our analysis period, the 4th-grade science exam was only administered in 2000 and 2005 and the 8th-grade science exam was administered in 1996, 2000 and 2005. The lack of multiple pre- and post-NCLB measures of student achievement limit the power of our research design. Nonetheless, when we apply our research design to these data, we find no statistically significant effects at either grade level at any point on the achievement distribution. Moreover, we are able to rule out effects larger than roughly 0.10 standard deviations. While these results should be taken with a grain of salt, they cast doubt on some claims that NCLB accountability has had an adverse impact on student performance in science.

Another major concern with test-based accountability, including NCLB, is that it provides teachers an incentive to direct energy toward the types of questions that appear most commonly on the high-stakes test and away from other topics within the tested domain. As noted above, one of the benefits of the analysis presented here is that it relies on student performance on NAEP, which should be relatively immune from such test-score “inflation” since it is not used as a high-stakes test under NCLB or any other accountability system. It is nonetheless interesting to examine whether NCLB accountability has improved student achievement in any particular topic within math or reading. The NAEP math exam measures student performance in five specific topic areas: algebra, geometry, measurement, number properties and operations, and data analysis, statistics, and probability. Our results suggest that NCLB had a positive impact in all math topic areas for the 4th-grade sample. Among 8th graders, NCLB had a moderately large and statistically significant impact in data analysis and marginally significant effects in number properties and geometry.

The NAEP reading exam measures student competency in several skills related to comprehension: reading for information (i.e., primarily nonfiction reading), reading for literary experience (i.e., primarily fiction reading), and (for 8th grade only) the ability to perform a task (e.g., students apply knowledge from reading bus schedules or directions for repairing something). We find no significant differences in student achievement effects by topic area in reading; that is, NCLB accountability did not appear to have significant effects on student achievement in any of the three reading competencies. Keep in mind, however, that our research design does not allow us to comment on the effects of other aspects of the law, such as the Reading First program, that were explicitly designed to boost reading performance.

Summing Up

So how has NCLB accountability affected student achievement? Our results suggest that its consequences have been mixed. Specifically, we find that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th graders and somewhat smaller gains for 8th graders. Our results suggest that NCLB accountability had no impact on reading achievement for either group.

The mixed results presented here pose difficult but important questions for policymakers considering whether to “end” or “mend” NCLB. The evidence of substantial and almost universal gains in math is undoubtedly good news for advocates of NCLB. But the lack of any effect in reading, and the fact that the policy appears to have generated only modestly larger impacts among disadvantaged subgroups in math (and thus made only minimal headway in closing achievement gaps), suggests that the impact of NCLB has fallen short of its extraordinarily ambitious goals. Some commentators have argued that the failure of NCLB and earlier accountability reforms to close achievement gaps reflects a flawed, implicit assumption that schools alone can overcome the achievement consequences of dramatic socioeconomic disparities.

An effective redesign of accountability policies like NCLB may need to pay more specific attention to the processes and practices operating within schools. Along those lines, it is interesting to note that our evidence of differential effects by grade and subject is broadly similar to the results from evaluations of earlier state-level school-accountability policies. Understanding the sources of these differences is likely to be particularly useful as policymakers discuss the future design and implementation of school-accountability systems. For example, the unique effectiveness of NCLB in improving the math skills of younger students could be related to the biological evidence that cognitive skills are more malleable at early ages. These outcomes may also result from the specific ways in which schools and teachers have adjusted their instructional practices, perhaps differently for mathematics and reading. Much evidence suggests that school decisions about curricula (e.g., textbooks, instructional software, and the corresponding pedagogy) can have comparatively large effects on student achievement. Further research that can credibly and specifically examine how school and teacher responses have contributed to the achievement effects documented here would be a useful next step in identifying effective policies and practices that can reliably improve student outcomes.

Thomas Dee is associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College. Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan.

But my concern here is just one part of the Ravitch book and it’s not just Ravitch:  it’s what to my provincial eyes looks like a proverbial cut ‘n run on the part of our reform leaders over No Child Left Behind.

Despite the bashing the ten-year-old federal law has been taking–much of it deserved–on the ground, in the provinces NCLB has succeeded in beginning a much-needed change in the culture of public education: from a system focused on adults to one looking behind all the curtains to see how kids are doing. It hasn’t been a pretty launch, of course, but the ship is only barely out of port.

I think there are statistics that give some credence to my beliefs, but my conclusions here come from close observation of my small piece of the public education world — a tiny district with 30% African-American enrollment, 55% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, and a 59% graduation rate.  A district on whose board of education I now serve (and have written about).

Here, the NCLB rollout has gone like this: the first three to four years were spent with teachers (99% white), backed by their distant but powerful union leaders, kicking and screaming about how bad and nasty NCLB was. Nothing much got done in those years, but I knew there was hope when I listened to an envoy from the Education Trust (whom a bunch of us invited in) give a reading from the actual law to a group of mostly minority parents. They cheered – must be a first for any piece of federal legislation! – and sang their “Amen” chorus to the sections requiring transparency and full reporting from schools and schools districts.  They got it, this being the first time they felt they had a right to actually question THE MAN or get real information about why their kids never seemed to make it to graduation.  And much to the surprise of the local establishment, these folks could actually read a chart showing 80 percent failure rates for African American kids in 3^rd and 8^th grade math and English. These first years for our community were a long and very uncomfortable “shock of the new.”

During the next three to four years, thanks to the continued NCLB bite, teachers actually spent time looking at the law (which they began to notice nowhere told anyone to “teach to the test”) and began to think that maybe they should (COULD! There is in NCLB the much needed faith that schools and teachers CAN make a difference) be doing something to improve the kids’ academic performance. Having been labeled a “district in need of improvement,” they felt some shame and rose to the occasion; they began analyzing the curriculum (actually, they began to realize they really didn’t have one, a revelation that came only because of NCLB pressure) and their teaching methods. Parents and other community members – thanks to some local gadflies who began to get the message out – also began paying attention and, for the first time in memory, voted down a school budget in large part because of academic failures. The state education department was getting on board and actually issued a “core curriculum” to offer some guidance. This period was also difficult, but it was one of positive tension and argument and a barely discernable consensus beginning to emerge that academics counted.

So now, here we are, barely ten years into this huge reform, with our little platoon of teachers and administrators and parents fighting feverishly on the front, beginning to make some progress on test scores and feel some confidence about improving our kids’ academic opportunities – and I look up from my trench and, instead of seeing the school house door thrown open with garlands of WELCOME signs, I see teachers back to cheering from the windows as the reform generals scurry away, white flags in hand.

As I have urged Professor Ravitch, a historian, I hope our policymakers take the long view on this one. They need don their best Margaret Mead outfits and visit the places where the culture of failure and low expectations spans generations (the culture that Ravitch so wonderfully described in “Left Back.”) No, no. It is far too early to declare NCLB a failure, much less abandon the many parents and students who have already benefited immensely from it.

The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan’s reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.

At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law’s targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, “We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn’t feel like it’s being imposed upon them…then that’s something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.”

Given the strong union support for the Obama presidency, there was great speculation within education circles throughout the fall as to whether the new president would turn out to be a reformer—willing to challenge existing practices and the teachers unions in order to achieve dramatic changes in schools—or play it politically safe by backing programs that brought only marginal changes. A sharp divide among Democrats was in full view at the party’s national convention in Denver, where urban mayors and educators, gathered at a forum sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), challenged the dominant role of teachers unions in shaping policy. Newark mayor Cory Booker told those assembled, “We have to understand that as Democrats we have been wrong on education, and it’s time to get it right.”

Even before the national convention, conflicts between the unions and Democratic reformers were intensifying. At a New York fundraiser in 2007, Obama reportedly made a similar point. According to Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, Obama incriminated the teachers unions when the director of a Harlem charter school asked the then candidate why Democrats threw up so many obstacles.

Williams explained, “We’re at this point where the nation wants to change education more than the unions and the unions are going to have to decide if they’re going to be part of the change or be left out of it entirely.”

Two manifestoes issued during the Democratic primaries laid out competing philosophies on improving student achievement that were intended to influence the eventual Democratic nominee. A “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a letter issued by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, signed by national leaders across much of the political spectrum, and endorsed by the AFT, argued that improving schools alone would not close achievement gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. It called on policymakers to provide preschool, afterschool programs, and summer school, and take steps to improve students’ health and social development. Another letter, issued by a coalition called the Education Equality Project, advocated addressing school system failures through greater accountability, school choice, and changes in compensation that would promote teacher quality. Those who signed on to the project, a diverse group of leaders in education, philanthropy, and public service, vowed to “challenge politicians, public officials, educators, union leaders and anybody else who stands in the way of necessary change.”

Obama has allies in both camps. Arne Duncan was one of only a handful who signed both statements. Yet in his confirmation hearing, Duncan left little doubt that the administration wants to make systemic changes.

“We must do dramatically better,” Duncan told the Senate committee. “We must continue to innovate. We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.”

Advisors to Obama say the rhetorical distinction was overdrawn and that the thrust of the president’s strategy is to make progress without causing further polarization. His education platform reflected that approach. Like many Democrats, he wants to spend more money: on helping students attend college; early childhood care and education; and improving teaching through mentoring and professional development for both principals and teachers. He has criticized NCLB for encouraging teaching solely focused on preparing students to pass tests. But in line with many Republicans and more conservative Democrats, Obama, like Duncan, supports school choice, charter schools, performance-based pay, and alternatives to education schools for teacher preparation (see sidebar). He and his opponent, Senator John McCain, both praised the work of Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has fought the local union as well as the AFT over tenure and teacher pay.

Economic Stimulus

Widespread agreement that only a massive stimulus package could rescue the U.S. economy presented the new administration with the opportunity to placate both sides of the Democratic divide. The unions and their allies would get a massive infusion of federal funds into the schools that would help offset state and local budget cuts. And this would give Obama cover to push for tougher reforms down the road.

House Democrats, after negotiations with Obama’s team, in mid-January proposed a stimulus package of $825 billion that included between $120 billion and $140 billion for public schools and colleges. Most of the money would have few strings attached.

The spending package would boost federal spending on Title I programs for low-income students and for special education, distributing the money according to current formulas. It would also provide at least $39 billion to offset state cuts in education budgets and $20 billion for capital improvements at schools and colleges. About $15 billion would be available to states as bonuses for efforts such as ensuring that low-performing schools and districts have effective teachers and that the performance of English-language learners and special education students is properly assessed (see Figure 1). One Obama aide said similar incentives would be incorporated into education programs to be introduced later in the spring.

The stimulus package also proposed to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), a Bush-era program that provides financial incentives to teachers and principals who raise overall student achievement and close achievement gaps. After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, they zeroed out funding for TIF but restored $100 million for the following year. In his last budget, Bush requested $200 million for the program, the same amount Obama’s team has proposed.

Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia already have local or statewide teacher compensation systems that add some sort of financial incentive to the standard step-and-column pay plan, according to the NEA. Former NEA president Reg Weaver cautioned that “while we can be open to alternatives, we should always oppose politically motivated, quick fixes designed to weaken the voice of teachers and the effectiveness of education employees. If they want to talk about changing the way we’re paid, they need to do that with us, not to us.”

In Obama’s platform, he agreed that such plans should be developed in consultation with teachers. Among the promising models is a voluntary pay-for-performance program in place in districts in a dozen states, funded in part by TIF, and implemented by Duncan in Chicago. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) provides teachers with professional support, helps them to use data in instruction, holds them accountable for results, and provides bonuses. Teachers in 10 Chicago schools voted to participate in TAP starting in the fall of 2007, and bonuses totaling $340,000 were given out the following year for improved test scores at 9 of the schools. “This is a landmark event for Chicago’s schools—recognizing and rewarding educators for exemplary work and compensating them accordingly,” Duncan said at the time.

The scale of the proposed spending on education is stunning, more than doubling the federal contribution. Of course, even an increase of that magnitude would leave the feds as the junior investors in public education, their contribution dwarfed by current state and local spending. But the funds proposed to offset cuts in state funding would mean that, for the first time, the federal government would be directly covering the cost of basic school operations. That kind of money could buy a lot of goodwill, especially if it helps states avoid laying off thousands of teachers. By December 2008, 19 states had cut K–12 education spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. Even with the infusion of federal support proposed so far, states may have to make further cuts in their education budgets if the economy does not improve quickly. States spend between one-third and one-half of their budgets on elementary and secondary education, and the revenue available to state and local governments is shrinking fast. By January 2008, states had reported deficits of $350 billion. “If the economy doesn’t get better, schools are in trouble,” said Jack Jennings, founder and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. “For the sake of the schools it’s important that Obama pay attention to the economy.”

Even if the economy recovers and the stimulus package goes through intact, some observers question whether the proposed spending will do enough to address persistent disparities in achievement. Despite past federal support directed toward the needs of low-income students, African American 4th and 8th graders did not make measurable progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2005 and 2007. “Is the stimulus going to benefit kids in ways that are palpable and real and that improve achievement?” asked Dianne Piche of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. As the House was passing its version of the stimulus package (see Figure 1), Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute noted that most of the money simply gave states dollars to keep intact the programs of the past: “It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” he told a New York Times reporter.

No Child Left Behind

The pressing economic issues, as well as difficult politics, will likely push reauthorization of NCLB into 2010 or even 2011. California Democrat Representative George Miller, who was one of four members of Congress who worked with the first Bush administration on the original NCLB, wants to see it revised and reauthorized. Yet Miller acknowledged to the Washington Post that “at the end of the day, it may be the most tainted brand in America.”

NCLB has been a great success in the sense that no one disagrees with its goals: accountability for results, addressing issues of teacher quality, putting a spotlight on the learning of all students, and better targeting of funds to districts serving the most disadvantaged students. Still, its detractors argue that the law has had unfortunate side effects: too much time spent teaching to narrow tests, schools focused on boosting the scores of students who are just below the proficiency threshold, and some states lowering their standards to reduce the number of schools missing their achievement targets.

“We’ve learned over the past five to 10 years that we have to align curriculum, align standards, and align tests with professional development,” Jennings said. “We’ve also learned that it is very, very hard to do. We’ve also learned that if we really set certain goals…teachers will pay attention to those students who are just below the goal and not pay attention to those who are further down or further up.”

Obama spoke during his campaign at length about the ins and outs of testing and decried teaching to the test. Rather than abandon the testing in NCLB, he has said he wants to invest in improving assessments, so that they measure a broader range of skills than just the basics.

The battle fought over reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 offers a preview of the challenges the Obama team will face. In a speech at the National Press Club outlining his priorities for reauthorizing the law, Representative Miller said, “Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong.”

Hope for Reform
Despite the challenges, many in Washington are hopeful that public schools may in fact improve under an Obama administration. Although he cannot ignore the unions that form a key part of the party’s constituency, Obama owes less to them than did past Democratic presidents. The unions did not support him in the primaries and, because he raised so much money on his own, Obama was not as dependent on their money as others have been. Of course, he is hugely popular with teachers, and the staggering amount of money he appears to be willing to spend on education will only make him more so.

In addition, the leaders of the two unions at least appear more willing to be flexible on some long-standing issues. AFT president Randi Weingarten has said several times that “nothing is off the table” except vouchers. Not that much is known about Dennis Van Roekel, the Arizona math teacher who became president of the NEA last summer (see “Same Old, Same Old,” features, Winter 2009). But he was among those who supported Bob Chase, an earlier NEA president, when he tried to get the union to endorse what he called the “new unionism.” Chase wanted the union to experiment with new forms of performance pay and peer review of teacher performance, but the rank-and-file members nationally were reluctant to go along. It remains unclear how far Weingarten and Van Roekel will be able to push their members now to accept changes in compensation, evaluation, tenure, and so on.

Weingarten finds it “very sad” and frustrating that unions are always blamed for opposing reforms. “There’s a lot of demonizing and blame-mongering going on in education and it’s ridiculous…because it just creates excuses,” she said. “It says to me that they don’t think anything can be done because they are looking for the fall guy rather than helping all kids achieve.”

Weingarten expressed hope that Obama would push for more rigorous standards, better curricula, more valid assessments, and investments in helping teachers improve. “You can’t buy it by putting money out there and saying to teachers, ‘if you don’t do it, you’re fired,’” she said, referring to her opposition to Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. “We have the responsibility…to recruit and support and retain teachers if they’re doing a good job, and if not, to counsel them out of the profession.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, counters that the unions have resisted that course of action. “I think the unions are up against the wall,” she said. “The whole movement toward the notion that teachers don’t have a basic right to be in the classroom unless they are effective is proving so powerful as an idea that they’re weakened because they’ve run away from it rather than embrace it.”

It is well known that one of the strongest threads in the narrative of Obama’s journey from his childhood to the White House is educational opportunity (see “The Early Education of Our Next President,” features, Fall 2008). Schooled first in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii because his mother wanted him to get a better education. There, his maternal grandmother and grandfather enrolled him in the private Punahou School, where he studied with the island’s elite. Then, it was on to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

“I wasn’t born with a lot of advantages, but I was given love and support, and an education that put me on a pathway to success,” Obama said during a major campaign speech on education last September in Dayton, Ohio. “The reason Michelle and I are where we are today is because this country we love gave us the chance at an education. And the reason that I’m running for president is to give every single American that same chance.”

Joe Williams believes that all of those factors, as well as Obama’s personal commitment to improving education, create a real opportunity to bring about systemic, long-lasting changes. “Everyone says they support the goals of NCLB and if that’s real, then he can use his bully pulpit to say that we’ll do in education the equivalent of saying we’ll put a man on the moon in 10 years.

“He can say that we will make sure that every kid who starts the race will cross the finish line and it will give everyone goose bumps and start a new type of discussion about what the game is. But it only has the potential to change the game if he treats it as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and inspire people to think very big about what is possible,” adds Williams. “Obama is the only person I’ve seen in the last 20 years who may be up to that job.”

“His vision of education is as a foundation not just of the economy but of a society in which people take care of each other,” explained Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who advised Obama during the campaign and handled education policy for the president-elect’s transition team, in remarks delivered in November 2007 at a National Academy of Education event. “I think we can make great strides in a very short time.”

Although some may worry about the cost of all of the new programs, Darling-Hammond views the amount Obama wants to spend on education as a relatively small part of the overall bailout and recovery package, which could exceed $1.5 trillion.

In his speech last September in Dayton, Obama assured his audience, “We can do it all.”

Richard Lee Colvin is a longtime education journalist and director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University.

A major debate among education reformers over how best to reduce the achievement gap broke out during the 2008 presidential campaign. Most advocates on both sides backed Barack Obama, but they urged him to pursue different policies. The Education Equality Project (EEP) supported a continuation of accountability and other school-focused reforms. The coalition for A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education claimed that the greatest gains could be achieved by addressing health, housing, and other social ills (see “Straddling the Democratic Divide,” features, Spring 2009).

A close look at recent changes in education in the state of Florida sheds light on that debate. One finds in this southern state, a closing of the achievement gap that has eluded allegedly more progressive states. When it comes to education progress, Florida is a star performer. Moreover, its success has come in spite of a challenging student demographic profile and relatively modest resources.

Let us begin with a basic demographic fact often cited by those in the Broader, Bolder camp. Over the past 20 years, the schools of Florida, California, Texas, and New Mexico have all seen rapid growth in their Hispanic populations. Compared to other groups, Hispanic students underperform academically, drop out of school in higher numbers, and attend college in lower numbers. A straight projection of the recent past into the future looks bleak for these students and their educational outcomes.

But demography need not be destiny. Over the past decade, Florida has succeeded in improving student achievement despite its demographic profile. Low-income students (those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) make up almost half of Florida’s K–12 student body. Florida has a “majority minority” mix of students, with non-Hispanic white students making up 48.3 percent of the total, African Americans about 24 percent, and Hispanics 25 percent. But the educational situation is not as bleak as those statistics might imply: both minority groups have recently made academic strides forward.

Florida has managed to realize such gains although the state’s per-student funding is below the national average. More than making up for its fiscal limitations, the state, led by former governor Jeb Bush, implemented a series of school reforms that together appear to have had dramatic consequences for student performance. Upon taking office in 1999, the governor pursued a multipronged strategy of education reform: an emphasis on reading, standards and accountability for public schools, and new choice options for students. The bulk of the reforms passed in his first year in office. Subsequently, those initial measures were buttressed by additional innovations, including the curtailing of social promotion for students who failed to learn to read in the early elementary grades.

Academic Achievement

Prior to the introduction of those innovations, Florida’s educational record was little short of abysmal. Among the 43 states that in 1998 were gathering information on their students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Florida had the fifth-lowest 4th-grade reading scores. But over the next decade those scores moved sharply upward so that by 2007, Florida’s scores were tied for 8th highest among all the states. As the state moved up the leader board, Florida students, on average, were making strikingly larger gains on NAEP exams than the average student nationwide (see Figures 1 and 2). Nor were gains occurring only in reading. Fourth-grade math scores were climbing at an even faster rate. In 8th grade, reading and math gains in Florida were less impressive but they still outpaced the nation.

Those statewide trends could have been masking a widening of the achievement gap between whites and minorities. But exactly the opposite was happening. Far from lagging behind, Florida’s minority students were doing much to drive the overall rise in test-score performance. In the decade after the education reforms began, the average NAEP reading score for Hispanic 4th graders in Florida rose steeply so that by 2007 scores were higher than the average NAEP reading scores of all students (regardless of ethnicity) in 15 states (see Figure 3).

One might think that rising scores among Hispanic students reflect their families’ movement up the income ladder into the middle class. But even Florida’s low-income Hispanic students scored, on average, equal to or higher than nine statewide averages for all students (regardless of income). Average scores of all Florida low-income students, regardless of ethnicity, tied or exceeded the statewide average for all students in seven states. Many of these differences are small and thus within the margin of NAEP sampling error, so should be thought of statistically as ties. The margin of error cuts both ways, however, as the 2007 statewide averages for all students in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Texas all fell within two points of Florida’s average for Hispanics on the 4th-grade reading exam. Indeed, the national average for all students falls within this same narrow margin.

Comparison of trends in Florida with those in California is particularly intriguing. Both are large states with growing Hispanic populations. California’s median family income is 12 percent higher than Florida’s, meaning families have more resources to devote to their children’s education. But California has largely eschewed the kinds of accountability and choice reforms that Florida adopted.

The consequences for students range between noteworthy and startling, as shown in Figure 4. The chart displays the differences in the NAEP gains 4th- and 8th-grade students made in the two states. As they did in 4th-grade reading, Florida’s Hispanic students outperformed California students in 4th-grade math and 8th-grade reading; they tied the California average in 8th-grade mathematics.

Explaining Florida’s Success

Not everyone thinks that something remarkable has been happening in Florida. The state’s success is only an apparent one, says Boston College education professor Walter Haney. He discounts Florida’s progress on 4th-grade NAEP scores, on the grounds that Florida’s worst-performing readers repeat 3rd grade and thus are not included in the 4th-grade NAEP. Without the low-performing 4th graders who have been held back for a year, the average scores of the remainder jump upward.

Haney’s critique is worth considering. One of the pillars of the Florida accountability reforms has been the policy, introduced in 2003, of not promoting 3rd graders unless they perform at a minimally acceptable level on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

But a more careful look at the data shows that Florida’s NAEP scores were rising before implementation of the retention policy. Between 1992 and 1998, Florida’s average NAEP score in 4th-grade reading dropped by two points. Between 1998 and 2002 (before the social promotion policy affected 4th grade), however, it increased by eight points. One of the reasons for lower retention rates was improved 3rd-grade performance on the state’s examination. In 2002, 27 percent of 3rd graders scored at the lowest level on the reading portion of FCAT, but by 2008 only 16 percent did so, a 40 percent reduction in the pool of students eligible for retention. This helps explain why actual retention rates declined by 40 percent between 2002 and 2007.

One would expect, if Haney’s interpretation is correct, to see an upward spike in 4th-grade test scores in 2003 followed by a steady decline in test performance in subsequent years. But in fact the trend line shows no such spike and decline, only a steady movement upward.

Perhaps Florida’s gains are only apparent for another reason: its low starting point in 1998. Is it possible that gains are realized most easily when scores are initially very low? On this question, opinion is quite divided. Some think gains are more easily realized if students are already accomplished, while others think those with high scores have neared a ceiling, making it difficult to raise their scores further. However that issue is settled in principle, it cannot account for the fact that Florida made striking gains while states with equally low scores did not. For example, on the 1998 4th-grade reading test Florida was near the bottom, with Arizona, California, Hawaii, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico. In 2007, all those states but Florida were still clustered near the bottom.

But if the Florida achievement gains are genuine, and not imaginary, they might still be attributed to factors over which schools have little or no control, for example, demographic changes in the state. Such is the claim of those who say that demography is destiny. Were demographic change the best explanation, however, student performance in Florida would be worse than ever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 45 percent of Florida children attending public schools in 1998 were of minority background. By 2005, that percentage had climbed to just over 50 percent. Similarly, the percentage from low-income backgrounds (eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) rose from 43 to 45 percent between 1998 and 2007.

Another plausible explanation for the Florida success story is the 2002 passage of an amendment to the state’s constitution mandating universal preschool education for all those who would like to participate. But however valuable the program may prove to be, it cannot explain the gains in achievement observed thus far. The amendment did not require implementation until 2005, and none of the students participating in the Florida early childhood program had reached the 4th grade by 2007, the most recent year for which NAEP data are available.

Much the same can be said for a second constitutional amendment—the class-size reduction amendment—approved by Florida voters in 2002. As in the case of preschool, there is some research evidence that suggests class-size reduction can yield significant gains in student achievement in the early grades. Florida state law now mandates no more than 18 students per classroom in grades K through 3, and no more than 22 students in grades 4 through 8. But the constitutional amendment is being implemented slowly. Through the 2008–09 school year, administrators have been considered in compliance if their schoolwide average class sizes were under the constitutional limits. According to the state department of education, from 2002 to 2008, average class sizes in the early grades were reduced from roughly 23 to 16 students in pre-K to grade 3 and from 24 to 18 students in grades 4 to 8. Still, if class-size reductions had any effect on achievement gains between 1998 and 2007, it could only have been toward the end of the period.

Nor can the gains in education be easily attributed to changes in public school funding. Florida’s average spending per pupil rose from $7,183 in 1998–99 to $7,683 in 2004–05, in constant dollars. This was less than half the increase in the national average over the same period.

One can pretty much rule out these possible explanations for the Florida success story. The gains are not an artifact of the elimination of social promotion in 3rd grade or of the ease with which low test scores can be lifted. Nor can they be attributed to demographic change, the introduction of preschool education or class-size reduction, or greater per pupil expenditure. One must look elsewhere for an explanation. The most likely remaining candidate is school-focused reforms, which have the vigorous support of the EEP side of the education reform debate.

The Florida Reforms

Over the past decade, Florida has introduced a comprehensive program of school reform that has five main points: school accountability, literacy enhancement, student accountability, teacher quality, and school choice. Together, the reforms created a system that appears to have focused teachers and students on the task of learning in a way that has yielded the dividends we have highlighted above.

School Accountability.  In 1999, the state legislature enacted a law that required students in grades 3 through 10 to take annual tests in reading and mathematics, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. The assessment had two distinctive features lacking in most other accountability systems, including the one prescribed by the federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). First, it gave each school in the state a very clear grade of A to F based on the results from the test and offered a specific fiscal incentive to schools to try to reach as high a grade as possible. Bonuses were given for obtaining an A or raising one’s grade from one year to the next. Conversely, schools receiving an F grade twice over a four-year period were asked to carry out a variety of reforms. The law offered students at “double F” schools the opportunity to attend private schools until a court decision disallowed the practice in 2006.

Beginning in 2002, the accountability system included measures of student progress from one year to the next, a feature not incorporated into NCLB. That gave schools with low-performing students an opportunity to raise their grades without imposing upon them the extremely difficult task of matching the performances of schools whose student body enjoyed a preferred demographic portfolio. Clear, realistic incentives to improve were made available to schools across the state.

Focus on Literacy.  Along with its accountability system, Florida in 2002 introduced a statewide program known as “Just Read, Florida!” The effort created new academies to train teachers in reading instruction and provided for the hiring of 2,000 additional reading coaches. Teachers in grades K–3 took mandatory reading training courses over a three-year period. Students in grades 6 through 12 who demonstrated insufficient reading skills were provided remedial instruction.

Student Accountability. Beginning in 2003, Florida students were asked to pass a more demanding examination if they were to be given a high school diploma. In addition, Florida lawmakers, as discussed above, curtailed the social promotion of 3rd-grade students who performed at very low levels in reading. According to a careful evaluation by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters at the University of Arkansas (see “Getting Ahead by Staying Behind,” research, Spring 2006), the program had a positive impact on the performance of all 3rd graders, including those who were retained in that grade. Apparently, they benefited more from an additional year of instruction than they would have had they been pushed on to 4th grade when they were not well prepared for the more challenging material.

Teacher Recruitment.  Florida enacted new policies for broadening the pool from which teachers were being selected. Previously, teachers were required to earn a certificate by attending one of the state’s schools of education. Florida supplemented that channel of recruitment with a variety of alternative paths. The state opened “Educator Preparation Institutes” to facilitate the transition into teaching. Districts were allowed to offer alternative certification. Today, more than one-third of all new teachers in Florida are coming to the profession through alternative certification programs. The state’s teaching workforce has become the nation’s third most ethnically representative (see “What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009).

The alternative certification program may have had a particularly significant impact on Hispanic students. Florida enjoys a large immigrant population that fled from Cuba in the years following the establishment of Castro’s communist regime. Many of the immigrants were middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs, and they have established a strong economic, political, and cultural presence in southern Florida. That population provides a pool of potential educators of high talent who speak both English and Spanish. Just how important alternative certification was to the recruitment of highly qualified bilingual instructors is unknown, but it cannot be ruled out as a potential explanation for the particularly large gains Florida’s Hispanic students have made. On the other hand, it cannot be the whole story, as African American and non-Hispanic white students also made strong gains during this period. Moreover, the percentage of Hispanics of Cuban origin has declined during the past decade (though this may not have affected the size of the pool of qualified bilingual teachers).

School Choice. Florida is well known for the range of school choice legislation it has enacted over the past decade. Charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, and online education all provide students and families with greater choice in 2008 than they had in 1998. For example, 105,329 students were enrolled in the state’s 358 public charter schools in 2007–08. That same year 19,852 students eligible for special education took advantage of the opportunity to use a voucher to attend private schools, and 21,493 students received scholarships averaging $3,750 from a tax credit program that opened private schooling to students from low-income families. The state-funded Florida Virtual School currently offers students more than 90 online courses (ranging from GED to Advanced Placement courses). Middle and high school students anywhere in Florida can access these classes free of charge. The state projects that 168,000 courses will be taken and completed during the 2008–09 school year (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features). Multiple evaluations, by organizations ranging from the Manhattan Institute to the Urban League, have found the choice programs to have had a positive impact on Florida public schools.

Despite the numbers, the school choice programs are not large enough to have had more than a limited statewide impact on the millions of students attending Florida’s public schools. Yet they helped create a climate in which public schools may have wanted to demonstrate their effectiveness for fear that choice opportunities would continue to expand.

Identifying what has caused the rise in Florida student performance cannot be done with perfect certainty. It might have been the accountability system, or the state’s reading program, or its decision to expect more from students, or its alternative certification program, or its plethora of school choice innovations, or some combination of all of them. But the results from Florida do suggest that concerted efforts to improve the quality of an education system can pay dividends for students. It is probably not a coincidence that the one state that has outdone the others in its efforts to reform its schools has made outsize gains in student performance. Exactly which of the many reforms Florida undertook was the key to success may never be known, but the reform package offers other states—and the nation as a whole—a clear path on which they, too, can move forward.

Matthew Ladner is vice president for policy at the Goldwater Institute. Dan Lips is senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

More than seven years ago, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. Sweeping calls for testing, intervening in persistently low-performing schools, and policing teacher quality made it the most ambitious legislation on K–12 schooling in American history. The law, due for congressional reauthorization in 2007, still awaits legislative action. This spring, the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force issued 10 recommendations to guide reauthorization. In this forum, lead author of Learning from No Child Left Behind, EdisonLearning’s John Chubb, and education historian and task force member Diane Ravitch, who declined to sign the recommendations, weigh in on the future of the law.

EDUCATION NEXT: Is NCLB working? Should it be reauthorized?

Diane Ravitch: It is time to pull the plug on No Child Left Behind. It has had adequate time to prove itself. It has failed. After seven years of trying, there is no reason to believe that the results of NCLB will get dramatically better. Now is the time for fundamental rethinking of the federal role in education.

NCLB has produced meager gains in achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assesses student achievement in reading and mathematics every other year. Despite the intense concentration on reading and mathematics required by the law, the gains registered on NAEP since the enactment of NCLB have been unimpressive.

In 4th-grade reading, the gains after implementation of NCLB, from 2003 to 2007, were small (three points) and exactly the same as the gains from1998 to 2003. Fourth graders in the bottom10th percentile of performance had a five-point gain after NCLB, but this did not compare to the 10-point jump in their scores from 2000 to 2002 pre-NCLB (see Figure 1).

In 8th-grade reading, there were essentially no gains from 1998 to 2007. Student performance was a flat line both before and after NCLB.

Mathematics was tested in 1996, 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007. The gains preceding the adoption of NCLB were larger than those posted after NCLB. From 2000 to 2003, 4 th grade students recorded a nine-point gain in mathematics, compared to a gain of only five points from2003 to 2007. Among 4th-grade students in the lowest decile, there was an astonishing 13-point gain from 2000 to 2003 pre-NCLB; the same group saw a gain of only five points from 2003 to 2007. The same deceleration of student improvement was seen at all performance levels, from top to bottom.

In 8th-grade mathematics, gains also slowed after the passage of NCLB. Eighth graders saw a five-point gain from 2000 to 2003, but only a three-point gain from 2003 to 2007.

John Chubb: NCLB will and should be reauthorized. Absolutely, student achievement has grown much more rapidly in the last decade—the NCLB era—than during the 1990s, especially for the lowest achieving and most-disadvantaged students in the nation. Achievement is what NCLB is all about, so the law has met its most basic test. This is recognized by even the law’s critics which is why the only discussion in Washington is how to mend the law. The Obama administration recognizes that No Child Left Behind aims to help the federal government perform its most important education function: improving the education of students in greatest need. The new president is supported in this view by a bipartisan majority in Congress, which has worked for many years to ensure that poor kids get the help they require. The education needs that NCLB addresses are not going away, nor is the need for funding. Indeed, the economic stimulus bill passed in February increased funding for NCLB by 80 percent, and these provisions of the massive and controversial bill met no objections.

Over half of poor and minority students have reading and math skills far below grade level, whether measured by the tough performance standards of the NAEP or by the standards of the various states. Dropout rates, measured accurately only since NCLB made them part of Title I accountability, hover around 50 percent in many major cities.

NCLB is based on sound principles and should with time improve the achievement of all American children, especially economically disadvantaged and racial minorities. There is empirical evidence these principles are working. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation recently completed an analysis of the top and bottom 10 percent of all students tested by NAEP. It found that the bottom 10 percent had gained far more than the national average since 2000 in math and reading, more than a full grade level in math. The top 10 percent had gained as well, providing no evidence that schools were ignoring the best students while focusing on the kids below proficient and subject to NCLB sanctions. Both groups of students had also gained more since 2000 than they had during the 1990s. The federal government’s own comprehensive analysis of Title I, mandated by Congress, conducted by RAND among others, and published in 2007 after several years of NCLB experience, found the largest academic gains since 2000 and 2003 among students in high-poverty schools. To be clear, the evidence in total is early, and the research is incomplete. But there is no question that American kids, especially the most disadvantaged, are making progress. It is absolutely mistaken to suggest, that NAEP changes pre- and post-2003 are evidence that NCLB has been counterproductive. Disadvantaged kids are achieving far more today than ever before, and those gains are attributable to higher standards and tougher accountability that began in the states in the 1990s and accelerated with NCLB.

EN: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the NCLB approach to assessment?

DR: Educators and the public are getting wise to the uselessness of the testing regime that has been foisted upon them. A year ago, North Carolina’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accountability issued a report recommending a sharp reduction in the number of tests that the state required. The chairman of the commission, Sam Houston, said, “We’re testing more but we’re not seeing the results. We’re not seeing graduation rates increasing. We’re not seeing remediation rates decreasing. Somewhere along the way testing isn’t aligning with excellence.”

NCLB may in reality be dumbing down our children by focusing the attention of teachers and administrators solely on basic skills. Our students are not being prepared to compete with students from high-performing nations in the world. Many are not getting an education based on a coherent, content-rich curriculum in history, geography, the arts, science, foreign languages, and literature. They are not getting a good education. They are getting thin gruel. If we want a future workforce that is smart, creative, independent, and resourceful, we are not educating to get what we want.

JC: Perhaps the single greatest virtue of NCLB’s approach to assessment and accountability is that it shines a bright light on student performance, as measured against explicit standards of proficiency. The nation finally knows which schools are raising proficiency in reading and math and which are not. Before NCLB, such information was spotty at best. A weakness, however, is that the bright light does not shine on all subjects that matter for kids and their future.

The education the nation values is one that is rich in content. NCLB has unwittingly and unfortunately encouraged schools to focus instruction inordinately on reading and math, the subjects that NCLB requires be tested annually and to which it has attached the tough accountability regime. Students, however, need also to understand science, history, geography, civics, and more if they are to succeed in a 21st-century world of intense international competition and technological sophistication.

NCLB already requires science testing once each in grades 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12. This requirement should be extended to include three tests of social science, defined as U.S. history, world history, geography, and civics. The law should further specify that the science and social science assessments be cumulative and comprehensive, and not focused just on the content taught during the tested grade level. NCLB should require that scores be posted on state and district web sites and included in school report cards. State scores should be benchmarked against NAEP, to encourage high standards. But science and social science should not be part of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP); the process of assessing and exposing performance should be ample to promote attention to these fields.

EN: How should proficiency be defined and measured?

DR: The federal demand that all students will be proficient by 2014 has led states to embrace a very loose definition of proficiency. Most states are now using NAEP’s “basic” achievement level as their definition of proficiency because NAEP’s “proficient” level is far beyond their reach. But many states go even lower than NAEP basic for their definition of proficiency. Tennessee, for example, says that 90 percent of its 4th-grade students are proficient in reading, while NAEP says that only 26 percent are. Only 61 percent of students in Tennessee are at basic or above, according to NAEP. Similarly, North Carolina tells the public that 86 percent of its 4th graders are reading proficiently, but NAEP says only 28 percent are (and 36 percent score “below basic”). These states and many others make inflated claims to satisfy NCLB’s ridiculous requirements.

JC: There is much room for improvement in how proficiency is defined and measured by NCLB—and we have practical suggestions for improving both. But the fundamental principles that NCLB advances represent a huge step forward for the nation. NCLB asks the nation to define what all students should know and be able to do in reading and math, and then measures progress toward these performance standards. This is a boldly democratic and egalitarian expectation and the very first time that the nation has asked its schools to perform at an explicit level. We should proudly defend these principles.

On a practical level, “proficiency” should describe the knowledge and skills necessary to be “college and career ready” in the 21 st century. Proficiency should capture the “common core” of competencies deemed necessary for all students to have a chance at success after high school.

NCLB should authorize the U.S. Department of Education to fund—after a competitive bidding process—up to three multistate consortia to develop standards, tests, and performance levels that support the overarching goal of college and career readiness. With federal funding, states will buy into one of the systems of national standards and tests, saving the huge expense of developing new standards alone. NCLB could, through these recommendations, give the nation standards both achievable and worth achieving, while preserving the rights of the states to determine what “national” standards should be.

EN: Are the law’s “remedy” provisions—including public school choice and supplemental educational services—working?

DR: The remedies the law prescribes—choice and tutoring—have proven to be ineffective. Less than 5 percent (and by some estimates, as low as 1 percent) of eligible students choose to leave their “failing” school to transfer to a school that made AYP. Some say it is because the students and families did not get adequate notice, but more likely students are not choosing to leave for other reasons. In many suburban and rural school districts, there may be no other school to transfer to. But perhaps more important, most students will not leave their school even if there is another school that is presumably better, by NCLB’s definition, and that is accessible. That is because most students are not in the group that is failing to make progress, and if they like their school, they don’t want to be separated from their friends.

The law assumes that the schools are bubbling over with discontented kids who are eager to escape, but that assumption is probably wrong. Or at least there is no evidence for it based on the lack of response to the choice provisions of NCLB. We have long known from polling data that the public is concerned about the quality of American education, but most parents are satisfied with their own children’s school. The failure of choice in NCLB reminds us of that consistent finding.

The other remedy in NCLB for failure to make AYP is tutoring, and that too has proved to be ineffective, though it has turned into a half-billion-dollar bonanza for tutoring companies. Evaluations in several states, including Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, and Kentucky, have reported that students who received tutoring did no better on state tests than their peers who did not receive tutoring. Only about 15 percent of eligible students have signed up for tutoring. Even when tutoring is free, conducted after school, and provided in a convenient location (sometimes in their own school building), most students don’t want it. Maybe it conflicts with their afterschool jobs or their sports or other commitments. Maybe they just don’t want to study for an additional hour or two when the school day is done. We need to know more about why 85 percent of eligible students avoid tutoring. We need to know why most eligible students are not showing up to be tutored, and why those who do show up are gaining so little from it.

JC: We know from ample research that choice can boost the achievement of students who avail themselves of it. We also know that tutoring is an effective means of remediating achievement deficits. RAND recently affirmed the effectiveness of SES tutoring in a well-controlled study. But choice and tutoring are not working nearly as well as they could in NCLB. This has nothing to do with the ideas of choice and tutoring but rather with the way NCLB provides for them.

Students in failing schools simply do not have enough choices. The law currently limits choice to schools not in improvement status, which often eliminates all nearby options. NCLB should increase the choices available by permitting families to judge school shortcomings for themselves. A school failing a single subgroup or barely missing AYP, for example, might be a better choice for a student in a school that is failing badly. Yet today those choices are not available.

NCLB should offer additional charter school start-up grants in any school district where failure is rampant, such as a district not making AYP. Students should be able to choose schools in neighboring school districts, subject to district approval. And private schools should be eligible to receive choice students, provided those schools charge no extra tuition and participate in the state testing program.

Students in failing schools should also have greater access to tutoring, sooner. There is no more effective way to help students who are struggling than to get them extra, focused, individualized attention. Yet only 20 percent of students eligible for tutoring under NCLB are receiving services, and the services often fall short of the quality offered in the private marketplace. This should be remedied.

First, make Supplemental Educational Services (SES) available as soon as schools are declared in need of improvement, the same time as school choice is offered. Second, ensure that students have access to the best possible tutors. Grant districts the right to provide SES, even if the district is failing to make AYP, but also require districts to provide a fair and competitive marketplace for all providers. Whatever access the district itself has to families, students, and facilities, it must also provide to private tutors—or the district loses the right to be a provider. To reinforce these measures, NCLB should require states to provide information on eligible students to approved providers. The states should be required to collect and post comparative information on the effectiveness of all tutors.

EN: Are NCLB’s sanctions for persistently failing schools effective? Are they fair?

DR: The law’s punitive sanctions are ineffective. By year six of failing, the schools may be turned into charter schools, taken over by the state or private management, closed, or restructured (e.g., replacing the entire staff). None of these sanctions had a research basis to justify its inclusion in the law. They were hopes or hunches, based on ideology, not evidence. Most states and districts choose the least onerous of the sanctions, which is restructuring. According to a 2008 report from the Center on Education Policy, restructuring itself needs to be restructured because there is no sure-fire way to turn around a chronically low-performing school. The federal Institute of Education Sciences recently published a research summary on how to achieve this admirable goal, but not one of its four recommended strategies was supported by evidence.

JC: Currently, NCLB’s escalating sanctions apply identically to schools that have failed massively and to schools that barely miss. This is a big mistake—but one that is easily fixed. NCLB should differentiate school improvement needs. Over time we expect more and more schools to succeed with the majority of their students, but to struggle with certain extra-needy subgroups. It is vital, as the nation expects increasing percentages of students to achieve proficiency, that we identify schools accurately for their performance. The Department of Education has approved nine states’ requests to implement “differentiated accountability” plans. NCLB should build on this good work and institutionalize a simpler system for all states.

Schools should be placed into one of two categories of “needs improvement.” “Limited” improvement is for schools whose shortcomings involve less than one-third of the student body. Limited improvement would offer students in year one of their school’s acquiring improvement status (two years of missing AYP) choice of another school and SES. If schools remain in limited improvement status, NCLB would require, in year four of improvement, that states develop with schools “limited corrective action plans.” Schools with limited improvement status should not face restructuring; states should have the flexibility to work with schools with limited problems as they see fit.

“Schoolwide” improvement is for schools that miss new AYP growth targets for all students or for subgroups that total more than one-third of school enrollment. Schoolwide improvement would require schools to proceed through restructuring, but NLCB should be revised to include only three means to restructure: First, a school may be reorganized as a charter school, giving it new governance. Second, the school’s management can be contracted out to an independent school management company, changing day-to-day control of the school. Finally, a school may be closed and reopened with 100 percent of the teaching staff and administration replaced. Each of these measures ensures a new day for the school and its students.

EN: Is NCLB’s goal of universal proficiency by 2014 one that should remain in a reauthorization of the law?

DR: The demand that all students be proficient by 2014 is absurd. This laudable goal has never been reached by any other nation or by any state. The only way it can be met is by defining “proficiency” to mean minimal literacy and numeracy. Meanwhile, the expectation that all schools will achieve this goal has created a trajectory of failure that guarantees a steady increase in the number of schools that are stigmatized for not making adequate yearly progress. In the 2007–08 school year, nearly 30,000 schools—or 35 percent of all public schools—joined that abysmal list; this was a 28 percent increase in the number of “failing” schools over the previous year. In Massachusetts, which has the highest-scoring students on NAEP in the United States, nearly half the public schools in the state were rated as being “in need of improvement.”

It does not take a statistician to figure out that NCLB is a recipe for disaster for American public education. An article in Science magazine last fall predicted that nearly 100 percent of all elementary schools in California would be failing schools by 2014.

JC: Universal proficiency is perhaps the most important principle of NCLB—certainly the most audaciously democratic one. It should and will be preserved. Who, after all, will be willing to say whose children should be proficient and whose should not? And, this is not just a matter of principle—the goal is doable.

But the states need to come together around standards that are worth accomplishing, that represent the common core of knowledge and skills that every child needs to be prepared in the 21st century for college or a productive career. Students with special needs or just beginning to learn English need to be provided alternative means to demonstrate proficiency. Universal proficiency in practice may mean 90 to 95 percent proficient, a high number but not an unattainable one. Finally, schools must be given time to realize goals worth achieving.

NCLB should extend the 2014 deadline for universal proficiency by six years—half the original NCLB timeline—to 2020, but only for states willing to adopt new high national standards.

EN: Has the federal leadership embodied in NCLB been a help or a hindrance to school improvement?

DR: Washington does not have the institutional knowledge or capacity to reform our nation’s schools. Congress is not the right institution to reform the nation’s schools. The U.S. Department of Education lacks the capacity to tell the nation’s schools what they should do to improve. Washington is too remote from schools to take responsibility for improving them. In their edited volume, No Remedy Left Behind, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Frederick Hess wrote that NCLB “amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, rather as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date…. NCLB’s dogmatic aspirations and fractured design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of federal action in the American system. In the end, Washington is not well-positioned to effect change to a program that depends on state and local action, or successfully to require states and districts to adopt measures whose efficacy hinges on gusto and creativity rather than compliance.”

A few tweaks here and a little tinkering there cannot fix this fundamentally flawed legislation. The time has come to discard it altogether and begin to think afresh about how the federal government can provide useful assistance to states, districts, and schools that are trying to improve. What we need is a clear recognition of the appropriate federal role in education and a deeper understanding of the meaning of a good education. Perhaps with a sense of the limits of federalism and of the limitless potential of education, we might be able to free ourselves from the sterility, rigidity, dogmatism, and narrow anti-intellectualism of NCLB.

JC: NCLB embodies a delicate balance between federal leadership and state execution. Despite the hue and cry from critics about federal over-reaching, NCLB provides ample discretion to the states. The role that NCLB sets out for the federal government—setting national goals while leaving states and districts to decide how to reach them—is sound, and surely superior to the hodge-podge of state accountability systems that preceded it. The challenge now is to improve how our federal-state partnership works. Experience can be a powerful guide.

Let’s face facts. The nation needs to boost its achievement even more now than when the law was passed. Our economic welfare depends more and more on education. We should learn from the law—as it is beginning to help our children learn—and not expect 50 uncoordinated states to get the nation where it needs to be in the demanding world of the 21st century.

What, in addition to what we have already suggested, would improve the federal-state partnership? A practical remedy on which all sides now agree: change how the law measures academic progress. NCLB currently recognizes achievement only when it lands a student above a state’s proficiency bar. The act does not recognize student progress by the lowest achievers, growing from, say, below basic to basic. The act also fails to recognize the growth of the nation’s top students: a school gets zero credit toward AYP for upper-end success. The Department of Education has approved 15 states’ requests to use “growth models” to measure achievement. NCLB should be revised to make growth the only measure of achievement. The act should require that each student’s achievement be judged, for purposes of determining AYP, against one simple standard: is the student on track to be proficient or better by the time of her last reading and math tests in high school? Those tests must be passed for high-school diplomas to be awarded.

The Education Equality Project champions accountability, pay reform, and school choice, while the Broader, Bolder coalition insists we must attend to health care, preschool, and parenting skills if students are to succeed in school. The Obama administration must negotiate this split in pursuing education reform; indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only individual to serve as a founding member of both groups.

In this forum, president of Democrats for Education Reform Joe Williams speaks for the Education Equality Project and Pedro Noguera offers the Broader, Bolder perspective on improving K–12 schooling, the early record of the Obama administration, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Education Next: What principles unify the signers of the coalition [Education Equality Project or A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education]? Can you explain the key reforms the coalition is calling for?

Pedro Noguera: The basic principle underlying the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform is that efforts to raise student achievement cannot ignore the unmet social needs of children, particularly those related to concentrated poverty—inadequate health, housing, and nutrition. These conditions have a tremendous impact upon child development and learning.

Poverty does not cause academic failure, but it is a factor that profoundly influences the character of schools and student performance, in at least three broad and interrelated ways: 1) in most cases, considerably less money is spent on the education of poor children. Per-pupil spending has bearing on the quality of facilities, the availability of learning materials, and the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. While high levels of funding do not guarantee that children will receive a quality education, money matters, and many of the most acclaimed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools, even though they generally serve fewer high-need students (i.e., special education or English language learners); 2) the unmet, nonacademic needs of children (social, emotional, and psychological) often have an impact on learning; 3) schools serving large numbers of poor children typically lack the resources and expertise to respond to their academic and social needs.

This does not mean that poor children cannot learn or that until we eliminate poverty and related social issues we will not be able to educate all children in this country. There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. However, the fact that a small number of schools have experienced a degree of success does not mean that we can simply blame other schools for their failures or ignore what is happening to children outside of school. Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities.

BBA advocates providing universal access to health care for children, quality early-childhood education, and expanded access to extended learning opportunities, after school and during the summer. While these measures alone will not guarantee higher student achievement or large-scale school improvement, they are essential for creating a context in which other education reforms can be effective.

Joe Williams: The Education Equality Project is a coalition of leaders (from education, civil rights, government, public policy, and business) who believe that what happens inside schools (and in the politics surrounding schooling) plays a tremendous role in shaping the achievement gap that exists in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The focus for reform, therefore, should be on what happens between teachers and students. That isn’t meant to be glib; we keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

One of the beliefs that has tied together the signatories of EEP thus far is a commitment to eliminating the racial and ethnic achievement gap in this country. This is not just an education issue, but a civil rights issue. If we neglect the education needs of our children, we are depriving them of the kinds of opportunities that the American dream can offer.

The EEP has called for an effective teacher for every child (paying teachers as professionals, giving them the tools and training to do their work effectively, and making tough decisions about ineffective teachers); empowering parents by allowing them to choose the best schools for their children; holding grown-ups at all levels accountable for the education of our children; and, very important, having enough strength in our convictions to stand up to anyone who seeks to preserve a failed system.

EN: Is it fair to expect all students to meet a uniform performance baseline? Is it reasonable to hold schools and educators responsible for ensuring that students meet that bar?

JW: Yes, these expectations are fair and reasonable. The key is making sure that schools and educators have the tools to provide students with the kind of education they need to clear the bar, including resources, the ability to build teams of excellent educators, and enough flexibility at the school level to adjust the length of the school day and year (among other things). This will likely require both additional resources and smarter use of education budgets around the country. Newark mayor Cory Booker often talks about the fact that we allow time spent on education to be the constant, while achievement is the variable. We need the flexibility to flip that notion so that time is the variable and achievement is the constant.

PN: Setting high academic standards for schools and students to meet is important but relatively easy to do. The harder and more important task is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. This is what government policy must strive to achieve. We have quality standards for airports, highways, food, drugs, and water, but no state has adopted standards for learning environments, and many poor children attend under-resourced, inferior schools.

In fact, the most troubled schools typically serve students with the greatest needs. These schools cannot solve problems related to inequality and poverty without additional support. Yet this is essentially what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and most education reforms that preceded it have expected. Almost eight years after the enactment of NCLB, high dropout rates and low achievement are still pervasive throughout this country, particularly in schools where poor children are concentrated.

EN: Do you think the administration’s actions thus far on school choice and charter schooling have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

PN: School choice is an idea that should be supported in principle. It is good for parents to have a variety of schools from which to choose because not all children have the same needs or interests. The greater challenge is ensuring that there are many high-quality schools to choose from and ensuring that choice does not contribute to further segregation in schools. Unfortunately, in many communities that have enacted choice plans, well-organized and informed parents do their best to gain access to the better schools, and invariably, others are left out. Racial segregation in schools has increased in the last 20 years, and poor children have become concentrated in the worst schools. Furthermore, in most choice systems it’s not parents but schools that really do the choosing. The better schools are often able to screen out needy students and limit enrollment. Because of high demand, they can be selective about whom they choose. This often occurs even in charter schools that use lotteries to determine admission but set criteria that are difficult for low-income parents to meet. Those who are not chosen by the superior schools invariably end up in lower-quality public schools with fewer resources.

Many, but not all, charter schools have demonstrated considerable success in educating poor children. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed his support for charter schools, even though in several states, such as Texas and Arizona, the charter schools are often no better, and in some cases are worse, than the public schools. As a trustee of the State University of New York, I am proud to say that the charter schools we authorize consistently outperform similar schools in the communities where they are located. If such quality-control measures can be adopted in other communities, charter schools should be supported as a means to increase the supply of good schools available to poor children.

JW: Choice, in and of itself, won’t bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. But it is difficult to imagine how we can drive that systemic change without choice playing a role. The administration’s actions to limit the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship (K–12 vouchers), for example, were perplexing, if only because the actions were accompanied by empty rhetoric about doing what is best for children. How do we look at low-income families with a straight face and tell them they can’t send their children to better schools because it isn’t the right policy to pursue for the broader system? We need to be doing everything we can to reform the larger system, but by all means, let’s help those families who need good schools now. All of that said, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have provided tremendous cover for the public charter-school movement and have helped shift the focus toward identifying those schools that are doing an outstanding job of educating students and giving them the green light to bring their models to scale.

I have never believed that a voucher or a charter can teach a child to read or do math at exceptionally high levels. That stuff happens in great schools, and vouchers and charter school lotteries offer access to those schools for families who can’t afford to live in affluent neighborhoods or send their children to effective private schools. The key is ensuring that they have an abundance of great schools from which to choose. The public charter-school movement, in addressing both the supply and demand sides of this equation, has emerged as the most promising development in the broader attempt to save public education. The question is whether the charter movement will provide the political spark needed to fundamentally transform our public schools.

EN: Is basing pay on teacher performance essential to school improvement? Is it possible to craft a merit-pay plan that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will endorse? Are teachers unions and existing collective-bargaining agreements an impediment to school quality?

JW: I think we have gotten way too far ahead in this discussion. We are talking about merit pay and performance pay in school systems that recognize neither merit nor performance. Teachers unions are understandably squeamish about this topic because today’s testing regimens were not created to serve this purpose. Until people feel confident in the tests that we are using, it will be difficult to build compensation systems on them.

This is an issue we can’t afford to ignore, however. The unions set out to create a standard of fairness for all teachers. The end result, in many cases, is a system that doesn’t allow itself to view great teachers any differently than it does mediocre teachers. Evaluations rate teachers as merely “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As long as excellence is irrelevant in our schools, we will continue to be stuck in this holding pattern. Wouldn’t it be something if we could strive for systems filled with “excellent” teachers, where excellence actually means something? We’re going to need a lot of help from the NEA and AFT in getting there, since they are holding the keys right now.

PN: Addressing the effectiveness of teachers must be an essential part of education reform in this country. However, judging teachers and awarding bonuses simply on the basis of test scores is problematic. We have already witnessed a large number of schools that have adopted scripted curricula and a narrow focus on test preparation as one way to raise test scores. This tendency will undoubtedly increase if teachers are evaluated exclusively on that basis. Such an approach is likely to discourage good teachers from working in high-need schools and to widen the gap between poor and affluent students. A narrow focus on raising test scores is also likely to deny poor students access to an enriched curriculum that encourages the development of higher-order thinking skills.

It makes more sense to devise incentives, including increased pay, to attract teachers with a track record of effectiveness, to high-need schools and classrooms. Such teachers can be identified through systematic evaluations carried out by principals and peers. If we could combine such a strategy with lower class sizes and extended learning opportunities after school, we could see major gains for struggling students.

In many cities, unions have resisted giving districts greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned, and in too many cases they have made it difficult to remove teachers who are ineffective and inept. Since it seems likely that teachers unions will be around for many years to come, it would be wise to find ways to collaborate with them to devise peer review programs like those that have shown promise in districts such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. In these districts, ineffective teachers are removed in greater numbers than in districts that rely on principal evaluation. Districts should also be encouraged to use the negotiation process to push for greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned to schools.

EN: The president has touted the $5 billion for preschool in the stimulus bill. How can we be confident that the money will fund difference-making programs?

PN: Most of the nations that outperform the United States in educational outcomes provide universal access to quality preschool. Research in child development has shown that the learning that occurs during infancy establishes a foundation for learning throughout life. It is cost effective and in our national interest to expand access to quality early-childhood education for all children.

We know two important things about early childhood education: 1) children who have access to quality programs generally outperform children who do not, and 2) the benefits of quality preschool can be further enhanced if quality of education is maintained in the K–12 system. The situation is similar for elementary schools. Throughout the country we have seen a growing number of successful primary schools and increases in test scores. However, these gains often are not sustained in middle school. This should not be used as a justification to question the value of elementary school nor should similar logic be used to limit expansion of early childhood education.

JW: If high-quality pre-K isn’t such a good idea, why are rich people in my neighborhood running around thinking that the Earth will implode (and their kid won’t get into Harvard someday) if they don’t get a slot in the most sought-after preschool programs? Providing access to high-quality preschool opportunities to the have-nots is an important part of the overall reform effort, as long as those programs successfully help students prepare for the world that awaits them in kindergarten and beyond.

Critics note that finding “high-quality” early-childhood programs, just like finding high-quality K–12 schools, is where the proposition gets iffy. My organization, Democrats for Education Reform, has been pushing to extend state charter-school laws so that charter schools can offer pre-K while being held accountable for their results. Connecting pre-K to early childhood programs that run through 3rd grade would close the gap that exists between what is taught in pre-K and what students need to be able to do in the later grades.

This is about making sure that all students are starting off on as close to a level playing field as possible, whether or not they can afford to make a $100,000 contribution to get a leg up on preschool enrollment.

EN: The Broader, Bolder Approach has made the case that school reform must attend to the “physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills” of students. Should schools and educators be tasked with this? At what point can or should we start to hold educators responsible for student outcomes?

JW: Students clearly have needs that extend beyond merely learning to read and do math. In the most successful schools serving low-income students, we see a wide range of child development activities, including sports, dance, art, chess, and citizenship enrichment activities. The notion that these activities are distractions from academic instruction assumes this is an either/or proposition. The best schools out there today seem to nail both.

This is where issues like better use of time come into play. Many educators decided long ago (seemingly correctly) that it is not possible to meet the complex needs of their students with a school day that ends at 3 p.m. This is particularly true for students who are two and three years behind where they are supposed to be academically.

PN: It is impossible and undesirable to separate academic performance from physical health, character development, and a variety of nonacademic skills. Sick and unhealthy children generally don’t do as well in school as healthy ones, and children who have trouble getting along with others typically don’t do very well either. From their very beginning, public schools have been charged with preparing children for work and citizenship, and such preparation has never focused solely upon academic skills.

To educate the “whole child,” schools must provide students with an enriched education that includes art, music, physical education, and character development in addition to the core subjects. The fact that skills in these areas cannot be easily assessed should not trouble us since most middle-class and affluent children receive such an education already and typically no one asks for evidence that such an approach has an impact on their test scores.

The highest-performing schools never focus exclusively on student achievement. In fact, what typically distinguishes the best schools from the others is the culture—shared expectations, values, norms, and beliefs—that permeate the school environment.

EN: The president has suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the $5 billion in “innovation” education funds, provides an opportunity to “transform” schooling. What are a couple of developments that give you cause for optimism or pessimism? How will we know in a few years if these education funds were spent wisely?

PN: While many public schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of reform, I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity about why past reforms have failed and insufficient understanding about the direction change must take if we are to obtain better results. Why do we still have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher in several cities eight years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and why are so many schools still foundering after substantial investments of public and private funds on reform? Several studies have shown that reforms have failed because we have ignored the nonacademic needs of children, because we have ignored school culture, because we have not evaluated reforms and insisted upon accountability, and because we have been too quick to pursue fads and gimmicks (small schools, technology, testing) while ignoring more substantive issues that support teaching and learning.

More funding is needed in many districts to address the lack of resources, but given the recession, we will need to rely upon better coordination between schools, nonprofits, and local government to respond to student needs. And money alone will not solve the problems facing America’s schools. We need a new vision and a new approach. A Broader, Bolder Approach offers part of the way forward. This must be combined with strategies that improve the quality of teaching and increase the accountability and responsiveness of schools to the communities they serve.

JW: The president and Secretary Duncan seem to have figured out that the leverage that comes from insisting that $5 billion be attached to innovation is tremendous. Even before a single dime was disbursed from the “Race to the Top” fund, we saw state legislatures take actions to support things like charter school expansion: Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Rhode Island were not exactly lining up to help charter schools until Duncan made clear that it would impact these states’ applications for federal funding. For a state like Tennessee, which risked losing $100 million in Duncan’s discretionary spending, the conversation quickly changed. A charter-school expansion bill that had been declared dead and tagged by the political coroners came back to life before our very eyes.

The challenge will come when it is time to convert the leverage Duncan has discovered into ongoing federal appropriations. This will launch a dramatic transformation of the role of the federal government in education. This is where we should be optimistic.

Politically, Duncan and Obama are going to need to tell good stories about what has been unleashed here through the stimulus package. If successful school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First can get help (financially and legislatively) in bringing their models to scale, and if successful education programs can be brought to more and more students, there will be a compelling story to tell. Public education will be on its way to saving itself.

EN: What does BBA’s proposed accountability system look like? How does it differ from NCLB?

PN: The BBA proposal for accountability emphasizes qualitative and quantitative evaluations of schools. That is, rather than relying exclusively on test scores to judge schools, BBA calls for the creation of an inspectorate, similar to that used in other countries with high-performing education systems, that is comprised of experienced educators, policymakers and scholars, to evaluate schools and make recommendations about how they might be improved. Such an approach could be used to provide schools with detailed feedback on how to make better use of resources and employ strategies that will enable them to become more successful in raising achievement and overcoming obstacles to learning.

Under NCLB, schools are judged largely on the basis of test scores, and many schools have figured out that the system can be gamed simply by targeting groups of students with intensive test preparation. Schools that are faced with greater challenges are simply labeled “failing” and targeted with threats and humiliation. The underlying assumption is that the educators are lazy and that pressure can be used to force them to improve. Accountability is essential if we are going to bring about school improvement on a larger scale, but it must be accompanied by real assistance and support.

In some cases, shutting down failing schools, as Secretary Duncan has suggested, may be necessary, but we must acknowledge ahead of time that the number of failing schools is simply too great for this to be the only strategy that we use. It is more constructive and effective to find out why a school has failed and to work with educators and local stakeholders to address the causes.

EN: In the context of EEP’s proposed reforms, how will an expanded federal role make a significant difference? How should new federal funds be distributed?

JW: An expanded federal role will allow our entire nation to cut through some of the political fog that has prevented good, sound ideas about how to change our schools from getting the go-ahead to proceed as part of a major systemic reform strategy. This is about using the tremendous leverage of the federal government to force some really blunt conversations at the state and district level, the kinds of conversations that make people uncomfortable and often lead to political paralysis. We have this tendency, if policy conversations make people feel uncomfortable, to sweep important issues under the rug. This is one of the reasons so little has actually changed despite waves and waves of reforms. We have an opportunity to change that dynamic, but only if President Obama holds firm on his commitment to bring change to public education.

Questions of educational adequacy and school spending have long been a point of contention in school reform. Amid the recent economic turmoil and gaping state budget shortfalls, questions of whether court-ordered funding remedies have delivered—and why they have or have not—have taken on particular import. This forum offers two sharply different takes on our experiences to date, and what lessons they offer going forward. Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth are the authors of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), in which they propose a system of performance-based funding focused on improving student achievement. Michael Rebell is executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the author of Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), in which he proposes a new functional separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to promote education reform and student achievement.

Education Next: Over the past four decades, many states have revised their funding of schools, through either judicial or legislative initiatives, in an effort to improve schools serving disadvantaged children. Too often, however, these actions have not yielded improved student achievement. Looking to the future, what kinds of judicial or legislative remedies are most likely to fulfill the promise of improved student outcomes?

Eric Hanushek and Al Lindseth: This question is particularly timely, as national policies on education embodied in the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law are in a state of flux and likely to change under President Obama. At the same time, an economic crisis has engulfed not only our country, but most of the world, suggesting that significant increases in funding for education budgets are unlikely in the foreseeable future. The challenge is to find ways to develop a well-educated workforce that are not only more effective than those relied on in the past, but also do not depend on significant annual increases in education appropriations.

Since about 1970, the achievement levels of U.S. students on the reading and math tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained largely flat despite massive financial and other efforts to improve them. The problem is particularly acute for poor and minority students, with average black and Hispanic students lagging three or four grade levels behind the average white student. While lack of sufficient funding is often cited as the principal reason for low student performance, the United States already spends more on K—12 education than all but a few countries. Moreover, spending has increased dramatically over the past several decades, with today’s per-pupil expenditures almost four times, in inflation-adjusted dollars, what they were in 1960.

The underlying system, which governs how money is spent, has remained largely unchanged over that period. It is characterized by, among other things, a compensation scheme that pays teachers and administrators without regard to the results they get in the classroom; rules that make it extremely difficult to terminate unqualified teachers or assign the good ones where they are most needed; an assessment and rating system that discriminates against good teachers who are assigned to schools with significant numbers of at-risk students; a monopolistic structure that insulates public schools from competition; and numerous union and other work rules that prevent principals from effectively running their schools. It is a system more concerned with the adults and their rights than it is with ensuring the success of its students. Although some reforms have taken place in the last decade or so—the adoption of statewide standards, limited choice options, and increased accountability—they have not been sufficient to overcome the obstacles posed by the underlying system.

Given this sobering assessment, what can be done in the future to improve student achievement? The solution, we believe, lies in performance-based funding: a system of integrated education policies and funding mechanisms designed to drive and reward better performance by teachers, administrators, students, and others involved in the education process. Such a system will ensure more effective use of education dollars through better decisionmaking, eliminate perverse incentives that reward mediocrity or failure, and most important, energize and motivate those involved in the education of our young people. The essential components of a performance-based funding system cannot be ordered à la carte. These components interlock and depend on each other for their success. While various states have adopted some of these components—state-level academic standards, for example—none have implemented the integrated system we recommend, and the results have been clearly unsatisfactory.

A performance-based system of funding would contain the following nine features:

1) A focus on improving outcomes rather than on increasing inputs. States must set high and uniform achievement goals for every child to strive to meet. While every child may not reach the highest goals, high expectations will encourage children to do their best.

2) Local school administrators and teachers with the flexibility to determine how their schools can best meet high standards. Often even the most dedicated teachers and principals are hampered by severe limitations on spending and programmatic decisions by ineffective state regulations, constraints such as those that come with categorical funding, and a variety of state and local laws and contractual arrangements. The idea is to let those who are most familiar with the problems faced in the schools take the lead in deciding how to solve them.

3) Rewards for both teachers and administrators based on their success in improving student achievement. In almost every school district in the country, teachers are currently paid based solely on their years of experience and degree level, despite a consensus in the scientific community that these two factors bear little relationship to their success in improving student performance. The single-salary pay schedule—which makes it virtually impossible to pay good teachers more, to offer bonuses for teaching in hard-to-staff schools, and to pay higher salaries to teachers in shortage areas, such as math, science and special education—must go, and a pay system implemented based upon the just named considerations.

4) Greater accountability commensurate with increased authority and discretion. Teachers, schools, and principals must be held accountable for results. Just as they should be rewarded if they are successful, they must experience the consequences if they are not. Each state should adopt an accountability plan that sets clear goals as well as significant and enforceable consequences if goals are not achieved within a reasonable period.

5) Rewards and accountability based on factors within the control of the local district. Schools, teachers, and administrators should be judged and, if appropriate, rewarded based on the “value” they add during the school year, not on absolute test scores. The latter may be influenced by students’ homes and neighborhoods and may give teachers in middle-class suburban communities an advantage over those teaching in less advantaged communities. Under current practice, schools with disadvantaged students are almost always labeled “failing,” no matter how good the teachers are. Once value-added assessments are put in place, it will be possible to isolate the contributions made by the schools, teachers, and programs in raising achievement from external factors also affecting achievement and to act accordingly by following a model of continuous improvement.

6) Schooling options for parents and children who judge their school less than satisfactory. Schools must know that, if they are not successful, parents have alternatives for their children. Therefore, the finance system should also support charter and other choice schools.

7) Reasonable funding levels based on the needs of particular student enrollments and other factors outside of district control, but also discretion by local district taxpayers to augment the funding of their schools. Base funding would adjust for district poverty and external labor-market factors. Supplementation should incorporate “equalization” funds by the state to recognize differences in the ability of districts to raise funds locally when levying the same tax rate, but would permit parents and taxpayers to express directly their satisfaction with educational plans and policies.

8) Transparency incorporating value-added measures. Parents, taxpayers, and other stakeholders can then readily gauge how good a job the schools are doing.

9) A commitment to evaluating school and programmatic effectiveness. Expensive new strategies, such as large-scale class-size reduction programs, should be implemented only if they also provide for regular, independent evaluations to determine their effectiveness. Unsuccessful programs should not be allowed to continue and proliferate year after year just because they have strong sponsors.

The path to such reform will not be an easy one. While elements such as state standards, accountability measures, and value-added measures either are not controversial or are gaining acceptance, other important components, especially performance-based pay and increased choice options, are opposed by powerful forces with vested interests in the current system. Most powerful are the politically connected teachers unions. They, for example, clashed with Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee over a proposal to couple higher pay with greater risk of termination because of ineffectiveness. The unions vigorously opposed those efforts, leading Rhee to move instead to improve the teaching force by terminating unqualified teachers. Unless this system is changed, it seems unlikely that outcomes will measurably improve in the district, already one of the highest funded and worst performing in the country.

The responsibility to enact and implement performance-based funding systems will fall primarily on the political branches of government, the state legislatures and governors. Although judicial remedies have played a significant role in school finance in the past, that era is drawing to a close. Beginning in the early 1970s, advocacy groups, frustrated with legislative efforts, began turning to the courts, initially to seek more equity in the allocation of education funds and later to seek vastly increased appropriations from state legislatures through “educational adequacy” lawsuits based on vaguely worded state constitutional provisions. A significant number of state courts responded positively to plaintiffs’ pleas and ordered unprecedented increases in K—12 funding in their states. Unfortunately, basic problems in the underlying systems of delivering education services were often ignored. In this sense, the courts mirrored what had been going on in the state legislatures, and the results were, not surprisingly, much the same: large amounts of money expended, but little or no improvement in student outcomes. An analysis in our recently published book examines the NAEP test-score trends in the four states that have implemented court remedies the longest, and demonstrates that, despite spending increases amounting to billions of dollars, the achievement patterns in three of them—Wyoming, New Jersey, and Kentucky—are largely unchanged from what they were in the early 1990s, before the court-ordered remedies commenced. Only in Massachusetts, where much deeper and broader reforms were instituted, has there been some improvement, although even there the state’s black students have not benefited from the remedy.

Perhaps due in part to this track record, the courts have begun to step back, opting instead to leave decisions regarding education policy and appropriations in the hands of the political branches of government, where they have traditionally resided. In the last five years, court decisions in approximately 15 states have disposed of educational adequacy cases, and, with one or two minor exceptions, the courts have either dismissed the cases or granted minimal relief. While this could change in a number of cases still pending, we believe the likelihood of significant court-ordered remedies in the foreseeable future is small.

Performance-based funding is not by itself a panacea that will solve all problems of substandard achievement or eliminate the achievement gap. Many of the problems that plague American education are beyond the control of the schools and will have to be addressed by other means. Performance-based funding will, however, put the nation’s schools back on the right track, help to raise the achievement of all students significantly, and once again make our students competitive on the world stage.

President Obama has called for increased funding to support NCLB, and Congress has provided substantial stimulus money for schools. A wise use of that money would be to underwrite transition costs in states moving to implement a performance-based funding system. For example, support for the improvement of student testing, for the development of improved databases and value-added measures, and for initial payments of expanded salaries under performance-based pay could provide important incentives for the states to move toward more logical and more effective funding systems.

Michael Rebell: The basic premise of the book and essay by Eric Hanushek and Al Lindseth—and of the question posed by Education Next—is that although “massive” amounts of money have been spent on education over the past 40 years, the results have been meager. Hanushek and Lindseth claim that states in which courts have ordered “extraordinary spending increases,” or at least the select few they have studied, have shown no improvement in student test scores. They then argue that certain “performance-based” accountability mechanisms that they recommend, rather than increased funding, should be the focus of future efforts.

I strongly dispute these premises, and I doubt that the reforms that Hanushek and Lindseth recommend are feasible, or that if enacted, they would constitute the panacea for the nation’s education ills that they imply. Extensive inequities in education funding, by which students with the greatest needs receive the fewest funds, still prevail in many parts of the United States; for that reason, state courts continue to have a critical role in ensuring meaningful educational opportunities for all children. The evidence strongly indicates that money well spent does make a significant difference in student achievement, and as Education Sector’s Kevin Carey has noted in reviewing one of Mr. Hanushek’s books: “There is little evidence that starving schools of needed funds is a catalyst for innovation, or that well-funded schools are more likely than others to be inefficient.” Moreover, although I agree that additional accountability measures are needed, continued involvement of the state courts, working in concert with the executive and legislative branches in a new, functional separation-of-powers mode, is essential for holding all parties accountable and for attaining the nation’s education goals.

Let me first put the spending issues into perspective. Hanushek and Lindseth claim that per-pupil spending in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1960. This is a gross exaggeration. According to recent analyses by Economic Policy Institute research associate Richard Rothstein, the cost of school services, when adjusted by the consumer price index, increased by 157 percent from 1967 to 2005, but when adjusted by the more relevant net services index (which omits shelter rent and medical care. the increase was only 92 percent. Moreover, these general statistics mask the fact that much of this increase has gone to special education, a sector that has dramatically expanded and substantially improved the lives of millions of students with disabilities over this time period. According to Rothstein, from 1967 to 2005 the share of educational expenditures going to regular education dropped from 80 to 55 percent and the share going to special education increased from 4 to 21 percent.

Second, for the past two decades, the United States has been committed to the historically unprecedented mission of simultaneously promoting excellence and equity in education. The standards-based reform movement seeks both to equip all of our high-school graduates to compete in the global marketplace and to narrow the achievement gap between our advantaged and disadvantaged student populations. Obviously, attaining these critical goals will require substantial resource infusions, especially for the high-need schools that historically have been treated inequitably by state education finance systems. Thus far, neither Congress, which has not even come close to fully funding the No Child Left Behind Act, nor most states, which have raised their academic standards but not their funding levels to a commensurate degree, have stepped up to the plate.

Third, Hanushek and Lindseth assert that “the United States already spends more on K—12 education than all but a few countries.” Although the U.S. is fourth among the 30 industrialized democracies that comprise the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) in per-pupil spending on K—12, it is in the middle of the pack (13) in education spending as a percentage of GDP. Moreover, since, comparatively speaking, the U.S. starves health care, economic security, housing, and other areas of social welfare provision, the schools must bear an enormous burden in overcoming the impact of concentrated poverty for the poor and minority children they are committed to educating to high levels. In 2005, the childhood poverty rate in the U.S. was 21.9 percent, the highest, with the exception of Mexico, of the 24 OECD countries listed, and far higher than the 3 percent childhood poverty rate of countries like Denmark and Finland.

Given the extent of poverty in our society and the heavy burden that has been placed on the schools to alleviate its impact, it is astounding how much educational progress has been made. For example, from 1990 to 2007, black students’ scale scores increased 34 points on the NAEP 4th-grade mathematics tests (compared with a 28-point increase for whites), and the black-white achievement gap declined from 32 to 26 points during this period. Nevertheless, even greater progress can and should be made. I doubt, however, that “performance-based funding,” the solution Hanushek and Lindseth offer, will prove to be the silver bullet that will “help to raise the achievement of all students significantly, and once again make the nation’s students competitive on the world stage.”

Hanushek and Lindseth announce their performance-based funding prescriptions as if they will instantly solve the nation’s educational ills. But test-based outcomes, merit pay for teachers, rewards and sanctions, and voucher and charter alternatives have been part of the reform agenda of most states for years. Studies of each of these approaches have generally shown mixed results, and there is no strong empirical basis for dramatically expanding their use. Hanushek and Lindseth have an answer to this criticism: This is not a menu of options that can be ordered à la carte, they say. These components interlock, and they must be implemented as an “integrated system.”

Leaving aside the objections I have to many aspects of their program, full implementation of their “integrated systems approach” is clearly a pipe dream. In a democratic polity, no single reform approach can ever be fully put into effect, much less maintained, in its pure form. Policymaking for public education in a democracy inevitably is shaped by politics, and any reform proposal will inexorably be subject to compromise and modification. Although there was an unprecedented degree of bipartisan support for passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2001, for example, that support came at a high price. As Education Next editors Rick Hess and Chester Finn recently observed, NCLB is a “Christmas tree of programs, incentives, and interventions that are more an assemblage of reform ideas than a coherent scheme. NCLB’s remedy provisions bear all the marks of concessions to various ideologies, advocates, and interest groups, with scant attention paid to how they fit together, the resources or authority they require, or whether they could be sensibly deployed through the available machinery.”

How to forge a better package of education reforms out of the positive aspects of NCLB is the main education policy challenge for the Obama administration, and how to make standards-based reform really work is the parallel problem that state education policymakers need to face. Hanushek and Lindseth’s performance-based funding proposal adds little of real value to this equation. However, the state courts’ wide experience in recent decades with fiscal equity and education adequacy litigations, which these authors roundly criticize, does provide significant possibilities for developing productive policy compromises and significantly advancing prospects for meaningful education reform.

Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that education was not a “fundamental interest” under the federal constitution, education advocates, frustrated by continuing inequities in the funding of public education, have turned to the state courts. As Hanushek and Lindseth acknowledge, a “significant number of state courts responded positively to plaintiffs’ pleas.” In fact, during this era, cases have been filed in 45 of the 50 states, and plaintiffs have won more than 60 percent of them; since 1989, when the legal emphasis shifted from “equity” cases that seek equal funding levels for all students to “adequacy” cases that look to provide all students a basic quality education consistent with state standards, plaintiffs have prevailed in two-thirds of the final high-state-court decisions.

Hanushek and Lindseth claim that the courts have begun to step back from their support of constitutional rights in this area. But, in fact, there has been no diminution in the willingness of state supreme courts to issue strong rulings on students’ basic constitutional right to an adequate education. What has changed in recent years is that more cases have reached the remedy stage and more courts are experiencing difficulty in seeing constitutional compliance through to a successful conclusion. Some courts have cut short their remedial oversight out of frustration with the political complications and complexity of effecting meaningful change.

In other words, the adequacy movement has matured, and the courts are now grappling with many of the same implementation and compliance issues that have stymied governors and legislatures for years. The problems raised by judges in these remedial proceedings call for thoughtful responses and nuanced solutions, rather than the cavalier rejection of “judicial activism” that Hanushek and Lindseth and other opponents of adequacy articulate. (The title of a recent book that Hanushek edited and to which Lindseth contributed accuses judges of “harming our children.” This kind of hyperbole is clearly unwarranted.) As University of Wisconsin law professor Neil Komesar has insightfully pointed out, “All societal decision makers are highly imperfect.” Governors, state education departments, legislatures, and the federal Congress have been unable to solve the nation’s educational problems over the past half century, so why should anyone expect judicial interventions to achieve immediate, decisive results?

Where courts have persevered in their efforts, there have often been substantial improvements in student achievement. Hanushek and Lindseth allude to NAEP test-score trends in a few states with long-standing court orders that they claim have resulted in no improvement in student achievement in three out of four cases. The NAEP scores they focus on do not correspond in most of the cases to the relevant years in which the court orders were actually implemented; they ignore the fact that, as in Kentucky, initial increases in funding are sometimes followed by substantial decreases in later years; and their use of NAEP scores makes no sense in a state like New Jersey, where the court orders covered only a subset of the state’s students ( i.e., students in 31 poor urban school districts) and not the full statewide populations represented by NAEP scores. Recent, more finely tuned data for New Jersey, provided by Peg Goertz, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has closely followed developments in the Garden State, indicate that from 1999 to 2007 substantial gains were made in the Abbott districts, which were the focus of the judicial remedies. For example, in 4th-grade mathematics, the achievement gaps between the Abbott districts and the rest of the state were cut by more than one-third. Similarly, Kentucky, which was near the bottom of the national rankings in virtually all performance indexes before its 1989 court decision, now ranks above the national averages in reading and science and almost at the national average in math.

Despite these gains, to fully meet our nation’s challenging goals for excellence and equity in our public school systems, clearly more needs to be done. What is required is a concerted effort by all three branches of government to bring their relative functional strengths to bear on ensuring constitutional compliance and solving the nation’s educational ills. In a forthcoming book, I propose a “successful remedies model” that is based on the extensive empirical experience that dozens of courts have had in dealing with legislatures, governors, and state education departments in crafting remedies. It is a process approach that is compatible with Hanushek and Lindseth’s performance-funding focus or any other policy perspective, or as is more likely, whatever mix of policies a state’s elected representatives choose to endorse. This process seeks to ensure that, whatever reform path state policymakers pursue, the compromise package they assemble is cohesive, adequately funded, and consistently implemented; moreover, the state should be committed to seeing the reforms through over time so that lasting results can be achieved. “Success” in implementing standards-based reforms under this model is defined not in terms of test scores in a limited number of subject areas, but broadly, in terms of providing all students a sound basic education on a sustained basis.

To achieve such success requires effective, programs and ongoing “colloquy” among the three branches of government. The courts’ role in this process is to outline in general, principled terms the expectation that the legislative and executive branches will develop challenging standards, fair and adequate funding systems, and effective programs and accountability measures, but to leave to the programs and the political branches the full responsibility for actually formulating these policies. Legislatures should make basic educational policy decisions; state education departments and local school districts should determine how best to implement educational reforms. Once the state has decided on its policy position, however, a judicial presence should be maintained to ensure that the chosen policy is fully funded, is implemented in a coherent manner, and results in substantially improved student performance, as measured by validated assessments of academic achievement and of students’ ability to function as capable citizens and workers.

Since significant compliance cannot be achieved overnight, in most cases courts will need to maintain nominal jurisdiction for a multiyear period, probably 10 to 15 years. The mere fact that judicial oversight remains in place can ensure continued adherence to implementation of stated policy goals, and actual interventions should be rare, especially if it is clearly understood that all the courts would be enforcing are the state’s own policy goals. A judicial presence is especially important to ensure that the reform process—and reasonable funding levels—are maintained in times of economic stress or recession like the present, where children’s needs and constitutional values are often given short shrift.

In short, then, my answer to the question posed by the editors of Education Next is that what is most likely to fulfill the promise of improved student outcomes in the future is not any silver bullet remedy, but rather a pragmatic process that allows courts, legislatures, state education departments, and school districts to work collaboratively to implement meaningful reforms on a sustained basis.

Hanushek and Lindseth: Notwithstanding his obfuscation, Michael Rebell’s solution is essentially more of the same. Beginning by misstating spending increases (based on incorrect data and flawed adjustments) and ignoring pertinent performance data, he rewrites the constitution of every state to give judges the major policy-setting role in a “new, functional separation of powers mode.” He further recommends that judges and legislators be guided in their efforts by a “successful remedies model” to be drawn from previous adequacy litigation—perhaps tempting if such “successful” models actually existed. Quite surprisingly, he cites New Jersey’s tortured 35-year-old Abbott litigation as an example of “success,” but neglects to mention that the state’s black students, the principal beneficiaries of the remedy, are still scoring at about the same relative levels on the NAEP tests as in 1992. In Kentucky, he relies on data for all students, which mask the fact that black students, the state’s principal minority group, have regressed compared to their peers nationally during the remedial period.

Our solution may not be a “silver bullet” for everything that ails American education, but it surely presents a better chance for our children than continuing the demonstrably failed practices of the past. In the end, Rebell basically concludes that political forces are too strong to bring about the fundamental changes we recommend, so we should just continue plowing more money into the current system. If we do, no one should be surprised in 2040 when our students are still performing, as they are now, at 1970 levels.

Rebell: If I didn’t know that Rick Hanushek was an outstanding economist and that Al Lindseth was a master litigator, I would think from some of the provocative phrases they use in their writings that they were sensationalist journalists, looking to attract readers with shocking but misleading headlines and catchphrases. They claim that I am proposing to “rewrit[e] the constitution of every state to give judges the major policy-setting role.” A detailed examination of the positions they actually take in their writings, and especially in their recent book upon which this Forum is based, indicates, however, that we agree that money—if well spent—does matter, that education finance cases have had a significant equalizing effect on state education funding formulas, and that court orders can “support legislators who want to address serious problems in education.”

The fact is that the unproven, business-model, and privatization practices they propose as education reforms have no chance of being adopted as an “integrated system,” especially in the present political climate. I would, therefore, ask Hanushek and Lindseth to stop tilting at windmills and to join with me in instituting a dialogue in major areas in which we do agree, like the fact that courts can and should hold states and school districts accountable for better performance, and that “school funding policies must recognize the underlying heterogeneity of students and their educational challenges and ensure that all schools have the means to succeed” (Hanushek and Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses, page 218). That kind of conversation might help to promote real changes that might provide truly meaningful educational opportunities to all of our children.

For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.

But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.

Fortunately, findings from two generations of school improvement efforts, lessons from similar work in other industries, and a budding practice among reform-minded superintendents are pointing to a promising alternative. When conscientiously applied strategies fail to drastically improve America’s lowest-performing schools, we need to close them.

Done right, not only will this strategy help the students assigned to these failing schools, it will also have a cascading effect on other policies and practices, ultimately helping to bring about healthy systems of urban public schools.

A Body at Rest Stays at Rest

Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways.

Examples abound: In the first year of California’s Academic Performance Index, the state targeted its lowest-performing 20 percent of schools for intervention. After three years, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in this category (109 of 968) were able to make “exemplary progress.” Only 1 of the 394 middle and high schools in this category reached this mark. Just one-quarter of the schools were even able to accomplish a lesser goal: meeting schoolwide and subgroup growth targets each year.

In 2008, 52 Ohio schools were forced to restructure because of persistent failure. Even after several years of significant attention, fewer than one in three had been able to reach established academic goals, and less than half showed any student performance gains. The Columbus Dispatch concluded, “Few of them have improved significantly even after years of effort and millions in tax dollars.”

These state anecdotes align with national data on schools undergoing NCLB-mandated restructuring, the law’s most serious intervention, which follows five or more years of failing to meet minimum achievement targets. Of the schools required to restructure in 2004–05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.

A 2008 Center on Education Policy (CEP) study investigated the results of restructuring in five states. In California, Maryland, and Ohio, only 14, 12, and 9 percent of schools in restructuring, respectively, made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by NCLB the following year. And we must consider carefully whether merely making AYP should constitute success at all: in California, for example, a school can meet its performance target if slightly more than one-third of its students reach proficiency in English language arts and math. Though the CEP study found that improvement rates in Michigan and Georgia were considerably higher, Michigan changed its accountability system during this period, and both states set their AYP bars especially low.

Though alarming, the poor record for school turnarounds in recent years should come as no surprise. A study published in 2005 by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on state takeovers of schools and districts noted that the takeovers “have yet to produce dramatic consistent increases in student performance,” and that the impact on learning “falls short of expectations.”

Reflecting on the wide array of efforts to improve failing schools, one set of analysts concluded, “Turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements…. Promising practices have failed to work at scale when imported to troubled schools.”

Like Finding the Cure for Cancer

The second important lesson is the “Law of Ongoing Ignorance.” Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent. A review published in January 2003 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation of more than 100 books, articles, and briefs on turnaround efforts concluded, “There is, at present, no strong evidence that any particular intervention type works most of the time or in most places.”

An EdSource study that sought to compare California’s low-performing schools that failed to make progress to its low-performing schools that did improve came to a confounding conclusion: clear differences avoided detection. Comparing the two groups, the authors noted, “These were schools in the same cities and districts, often serving children from the same backgrounds. Some of them also adopted the same curriculum programs, had teachers with similar backgrounds, and had similar opportunities for professional development.”

Maryland’s veteran state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, agrees: “Very little research exists on how to bring about real sea change in schools…. Clearly, there’s no infallible strategy or even sequence of them.” Responding to the growing number of failing Baltimore schools requiring state-approved improvement plans, she said, “No one has the answer. It’s like finding the cure for cancer.”

Researchers have openly lamented the lack of reliable information pointing to or explaining successful improvement efforts, describing the literature as “sparse” and “scarce.” Those attempting to help others fix broken schools have typically resorted to identifying activities in improved schools, such as bolstering leadership and collecting data.

However, this case-study style of analysis is deeply flawed. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has noted, studies “that look back at factors that may have contributed to [a] school’s success” are “particularly weak in determining causal validity for several reasons, including the fact that there is no way to be confident that the features common to successful turnaround schools are not also common to schools that fail.”

Researchers have noted that the Department of Education has signaled its own ignorance about what to do about the nation’s very worst schools. One study reported, “The NCLB law does not specify any additional actions for schools that remain in the implementation phase of restructuring for more than one year, and [the Department] has offered little guidance on what to do about persistently struggling schools.” Indeed, the IES publication, “Turning Around Chronically Low-Performing Schools” practice guide, purportedly a resource for states and districts, concedes, “All recommendations had to rely on low levels of evidence,” because it could not identify any rigorous studies finding that “specific turnaround practices produce significantly better academic outcomes.”

Still in Its Infancy?

The prevailing view is that we must keep looking for turnaround solutions. Observers have written, “Turnaround at scale is still in its infancy,” and “In education, turnarounds have been tried rarely” (see “The Big U-Turn,” features, Winter 2009). But, in fact, the number and scope of fix-it efforts have been extensive to say the least.

Long before NCLB required interventions in the lowest-performing schools, states had undertaken significant activity. In 1989 New Jersey took over Jersey City Public Schools; in 1995 it took over Newark Public Schools. In 1993 California took control of the Compton Unified School District. In 1995 Ohio took over the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Between 1993 and 1997 states required the reconstitution of failing schools in Denver, Chicago, New York City, and Houston. In 2000 Alabama took over a number of schools across the state, and Maryland seized control of three schools in Baltimore.

Since NCLB, interventions in struggling schools have only grown in number and intensity. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 750 schools in “corrective action,” the NCLB phase preceding restructuring, implemented a new research-based curriculum, more than 700 used an outside expert to advise the school, nearly 400 restructured the internal organization of the school, and more than 200 extended the school day or year. Importantly, more than 300 replaced staff members or the principal, among the toughest traditional interventions possible.

Occasionally a program will report encouraging success rates. The University of Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program asserts that about half of its targeted schools have either made AYP or reduced math and reading failure rates by at least 5 percent. Though this might be better than would otherwise be expected, the threshold for success is remarkably low. It is also unknown whether such progress can be sustained. This matter is particularly important, given that some point to charter management organizations Green Dot and Mastery as turnaround success stories even though each has a very short turnaround résumé, in both numbers of schools and years of experience.

Many schools that reach NCLB’s restructuring phase, rather than implementing one of the law’s stated interventions (close and reopen as a charter school, replace staff, turn the school over to the state, or contract with an outside entity), choose the “other” option, under which they have considerable flexibility to design an improvement strategy of their own (see “Easy Way Out,” forum, Winter 2007). Some call this a “loophole” for avoiding tough action.

Yet even under the maligned “other” option, states and districts have tried an astonishing array of improvement strategies, including different types of school-level needs assessments, surveys of school staff, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, student tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data, and turning over operation of some schools to outside organizations.

It’s simply impossible to make the case that turnaround efforts haven’t been tried or given a chance to work.

A Better Mousetrap?

Despite this evidence, some continue to advocate for improved turnaround efforts. Nancy Grasmick supports recognizing turnarounds as a unique discipline. Frederick Hess and Thomas Gift have argued for developing school restructuring leaders; Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel have recommended that states and districts “fuel the pipeline” of untraditional turnaround specialists. NewSchools Venture Fund, the Education Commission of the States, and the research firm Mass Insight have offered related turnaround strategies.

And the Obama administration too has bought into the notion that turnarounds are the key to improving urban districts. Education secretary Arne Duncan has said that if the nation could turn around 1,000 schools annually for five years, “We could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children.” In the administration’s 2009 stimulus legislation, $3 billion in new funds were appropriated for School Improvement Grants, which aid schools in NCLB improvement status. The administration requested an additional $1.5 billion for this program in the 2010 budget. This is all on top of the numerous streams of existing federal funds that can be—and have been—used to turn around failing schools.

The dissonance is deafening. The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our very worst schools. So why does there remain a stubborn insistence on preserving fix-it efforts?

The most common, but also the most deeply flawed, justification is that there are high-performing schools in American cities. That is, some fix-it proponents point to unarguably successful urban schools and then infer that scalable turnaround strategies are within reach. In fact, it has become fashionable among turnaround advocates to repeat philosopher Immanuel Kant’s adage that “the actual proves the possible.”

But as a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study noted, “Much is known about how effective schools work, but it is far less clear how to move an ineffective school from failure to success…. Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”

In fact, America’s most-famous superior urban schools are virtually always new starts rather than schools that were previously underperforming. Probably the most convincing argument for the fundamental difference between start-ups and turnarounds comes from those actually running high-performing high-poverty urban schools (see sidebar). Groups like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Achievement First open new schools; as a rule they don’t reform failing schools. KIPP’s lone foray into turnarounds closed after only two years, and the organization abandoned further turnaround initiatives. Said KIPP’s spokesman, “Our core competency is starting and running new schools.”

A 2006 NewSchools Venture Fund study confirmed a widespread aversion to takeover-and-turnaround strategies among successful school operators. Only 4 of 36 organizations interviewed expressed interest in restructuring existing schools. Remarkably, rather than trusting successful school operators’ track records and informed opinion that start-ups are the way to go, Secretary Duncan urged them to get into the turnaround business during a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference.

The findings above deserve repeating: Fix-it efforts at the worst schools have consistently failed to generate significant improvement. Our knowledge base about improving failing schools is still staggeringly small. And exceptional urban schools are nearly always start-ups or consistently excellent schools, not drastically improved once-failing schools.

So when considering turnaround efforts we should stop repeating, “The actual proves the possible” and bear in mind a different Kant adage: “Ought implies can.”

If we are going to tell states and districts that they must fix all of their failing schools, or if we are to consider it a moral obligation to radically improve such schools, we should be certain that this endeavor is possible. But there is no reason to believe it is.

Turnarounds Elsewhere

Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed. Far from it. The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields. Writing in Public Money & Management, researchers familiar with the true private-sector track record offered a word of caution: “There is a risk that politicians, government officials, and others, newly enamored of the language of failure and turnaround and inadequately informed of the empirical evidence and practical experience in the for-profit sector…will have unrealistic expectations of the transformative power of the turnaround process.”

Hess and Gift reviewed the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector. The literature suggests that both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more. They concluded, “The hope that we can systematically turn around all troubled schools—or even a majority of them—is at odds with much of what we know from similar efforts in the private sector.”

Many have noted that flexibility and dynamism are part of the genetic code of private business, so we should expect these organizations to be more receptive to the massive changes required by a turnaround process than institutions set in what Hess calls the “political, regulatory, and contractual morass of K–12 schooling.” Accordingly, school turnarounds should be more difficult to achieve. Indeed, a consultant with the Bridgespan Group reported, “Turnarounds in the public education space are far harder than any turnaround I’ve ever seen in the for-profit space.”

Building a Healthy Education Industry

We shouldn’t be surprised then that turnarounds in urban education have largely failed. The surprise and shame is that urban public education, unlike nearly every other industry, profession, and field, has never developed a sensible solution to its continuous failures. After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt. Unfit elected officials are voted out of office. The worst lawyers can be disbarred, and the most negligent doctors can lose their licenses. Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent.

The beginning of the solution is establishing a clear process for closing schools. The simplest and best way to put this into operation is the charter model. Each school, in conjunction with the state or district, would develop a five-year contract with performance measures. Consistent failure to meet goals in key areas would result in closure. Alternatively, the state could decide that districts only have one option—not five—for schools reaching NCLB-mandated restructuring: closure.

This would have three benefits. First, children would no longer be subjected to schools with long track records of failure and high probabilities of continued failure.

Second, the fear of closure might generate improvement in some low-performing schools. Failure in public education has had fewer consequences (for adults) than in other fields, a fact that might contribute to the persistent struggles of some schools. We should have limited expectations in this regard, however. Even in the private sector, where the consequences for poor performance are significant, some low-performing entities never become successful.

Third, and by far the most important and least appreciated factor, closures make room for replacements, which have a transformative positive impact on the health of a field. When a firm folds due to poor performance, the slack is taken up by the expansion of successful existing firms—meaning that those excelling have the opportunity to do more—or by new firms. New entrants not only fill gaps, they have a tendency to better reflect current market conditions. They are also far likelier to introduce innovations: Google, Facebook, and Twitter were not products of long-standing firms. Certainly not all new starts will excel, not in education, not in any field. But when provided the right characteristics and environment, their potential is vast.

The churn caused by closures isn’t something to be feared; on the contrary, it’s a familiar prerequisite for industry health. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan’s brilliant 2001 book Creative Destruction catalogued the ubiquity of turnover in thriving industries, including the eventual loss of once-dominant players. Churn generates new ideas, ensures responsiveness, facilitates needed change, and empowers the best to do more.

These principles can be translated easily into urban public education via tools already at our fingertips thanks to chartering: start-ups, replications, and expansions. Chartering has enabled new school starts for nearly 20 years and school replications and expansions for a decade. Chartering has demonstrated clearly that the ingredients of healthy, orderly churn can be brought to bear on public education.

A small number of progressive leaders of major urban school systems are using school closure and replacement to transform their long-broken districts: Under Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City has closed nearly 100 traditional public schools and opened more than 300 new schools. In 2004, Chicago announced the Renaissance 2010 project, which is built around closing chronically failing schools and opening 100 new public schools by the end of the decade.

Numerous other big-city districts are in the process of closing troubled schools, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, under schools CEO Andrés Alonso, reform’s guiding principles include “Closing schools that don’t work for our kids,” “Creating new options that have strong chances of success,” and “Expanding some programs that are already proving effective.”

Equally encouraging, there are indications that these ideas, which once would have been considered heretical, are being embraced by education’s cognoscenti. A group of leading reformers, the Coalition for Student Achievement, published a document in April 2009 that offered ideas for the best use of the federal government’s $100 billion in stimulus funding. They recommended that each state develop a mechanism to “close its lowest performing five percent of schools and replace them with higher-performing, new schools including public charter schools.”

A generation ago, few would have believed that such a fundamental overhaul of urban districts was on the horizon, much less that perennial underperformers New York City, Chicago, and Baltimore would be at the front of the pack with much of the education establishment and reform community in tow. But, consciously or not, these cities have begun internalizing the lessons of healthy industries and the chartering mechanism, which, if vigorously applied to urban schooling, have extraordinary potential. Best of all, these districts and outstanding charter leaders like KIPP Houston (with 15 schools already and dozens more planned) and Green Dot (which opened 5 new schools surrounding one of Los Angeles’s worst high schools) are showing that the formula boils down to four simple but eminently sensible steps: close failing schools, open new schools, replicate great schools, repeat.

Today’s fixation with fix-it efforts is misguided. Turnarounds have consistently shown themselves to be ineffective—truly an unscalable strategy for improving urban districts—and our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry.

Those hesitant about replacing turnarounds with closures should simply remember that a failed business doesn’t indict capitalism and an unseated incumbent doesn’t indict democracy. Though temporarily painful, both are essential mechanisms for maintaining long-term systemwide quality, responsiveness, and innovation. Closing America’s worst urban schools doesn’t indict public education nor does it suggest a lack of commitment to disadvantaged students. On the contrary, it reflects our insistence on finally taking the steps necessary to build city school systems that work for the boys and girls most in need.

Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

NCLB focuses on having all students proficient in reading, math, and science.  All states had to develop rigorous learning standards and assessments of student performance, and individual schools are required to be on a path leading to universal proficiency by 2014.  Research provides both an understanding of what has and has not worked and a map for useful alterations in the law.

What Have Been the Results of NCLB?

Because test-based accountability is generally applied to entire states, it is hard to infer what might have happened in its absence.  Three separate lines of inquiry, however, provide evidence that existing accountability systems have led to larger gains than expected in a world without them.

First, comparisons of math and reading performance across states from the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP – often called the nation’s report card – provides some insights.  Other things equal, states introducing accountability earlier showed larger gains on NAEP during the 1990’s.  Moreover, students in states with stronger accountability performed better. Second, by comparing students in Florida schools graded “F” on accountability and subject to increasing sanctions with almost identical schools scoring just above at “D”, David Figlio and Cecilia Rouse find positive effects of school accountability.  Finally, from results of individual state tests over time, student achievement gains tend to be larger after the introduction of NCLB than before. Although each is subject to uncertainty, the combined picture shows improved student performance after the introduction of test-based accountability.

Second, accountability, particularly after NCLB, focused attention on achievement of disadvantaged populations.  Evidence indicates that this feature has changed the dynamic within schools, yielding improvements in previously low performing.

Third, the U.S. evidence is consistent with a growing body of international evidence pointing to the value of central exit exams and more regular accountability.  Particularly where there is more autonomy in local decision making, schools facing stronger accountability pressures do better on international math and science exams.

What Changes are Needed?

At the same time, accountability is a relatively new invention, and it needs to be refined and improved.

1. Re-adjust state and federal responsibilities. NCLB has each state set learning standards, assessments, and proficiency levels independently with the federal government determining what actions should be taken when schools fail to make sufficient progress. This division appears backward.  Under NCLB, states have chosen widely different cutoffs for “proficiency.” But, in the face of national labor markets where somebody from Georgia could well end up working in Arizona, these variations make little sense. History suggests stiff opposition to a national curriculum.  But as recently seen, nothing prevents states from voluntarily joining together to develop standards and assessments.  The federal government could support and encourage this.

On the other hand, the diverse circumstances of schools indicate that centrally defined educational processes are unlikely to be effective.  The federal government is not well equipped to determine precisely how schools do their job.  Reforming NCLB could require states to develop their own plans for schools that were failing.  Indeed, recognizing the heterogeneity of schools, the U.S. Department of Education has already permitted variation in plans (“differentiated accountability”) in nine states.  Permitting local autonomy with central testing is, as noted above, a successful strategy consistent with international performance evidence.

2.  Focus accountability on learning growth. NCLB concentrates on the proportion of students below the state determined proficiency level in each year with progress determined by comparing the percentage of successive cohorts reaching proficiency.  But, schools are just one input to education.  Families, friends, and neighborhoods also exert an influence so that looking just at the overall level of a student’s achievement does not capture the school’s contribution to learning. Setting accountability in terms of individual student learning growth implies that schools are assessed much more closely to their value-added to learning. Such improvements are well-recognized with 15 states already authorized to use growth models for their accountability under NCLB.  Additionally, assessing growth across different learning levels rather than just at the proficiency threshold would eliminate incentives to ignore students already above proficiency or too far below to reach proficiency soon.

3. Improve assessments.  The current focus on more basic skills provides advantages and disadvantages.  The intent of NCLB is simply to ensure that all students will be able to participate fully in society and the labor market, but we also want to encourage and develop higher order skills.  For testing efficiency, current tests are generally designed to measure most precisely a limited range of skills.  An attractive alternative, however, is use of adaptive testing, which can improve measurement in the range of higher order skills. A set of screening questions moves the student to the relevant range of test questions – something easily done with computerized testing.  Computerization has two additional advantages.  First, it would provide immediate scoring of tests, getting around current delays in test scoring.  Second, having a large test bank would permit providing each student with a random selection of questions, minimizing any chance of cheating.  Indeed with a large test bank covering the range of relevant material, it would even be possible to make questions available beforehand with the notion that teachers could then productively teach to the test.

4.  Fix the teacher quality requirements. Research has found teacher quality to be the most important element of a good school, and this belief led the NCLB law to require all schools to have only “highly qualified teachers.”  Unfortunately, there are severe measurement problems that make prior interpretations of this requirement hollow at best and harmful at worst.  Teacher quality is not captured by typically discussed characteristics of teachers such as master’s degrees, teaching experience, or even certification – things that states typically monitor.  Requiring such things unrelated to student performance dilutes accountability and detracts from things that would make them more effective.  Fortunately, however, test-based accountability produces the student achievement data needed to assess the value-added of teachers, a more appropriate focus of policy concerns.

Conclusions

Test-based accountability is now a fixture of American education, but it has also become controversial.  Existing research indicates accountability has had a positive impact on school performance but also that it could readily be improved.  Clearly test-based accountability does not do everything, but it is a central part to almost all serious reform efforts.  Thus, improving it rather than eliminating it is the only reasonable course.

In this report, we use 2007 test-score information to evaluate the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an achievement measure that is recognized nationally and has international credibility as well. The analysis extends previous work (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005, and “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006) that used 2003 and 2005 test-score data and finds in the new data a noticeable decline, especially at the 8th-grade level. In Figure 1, we rank the rigor of state proficiency standards using the same A to F scale teachers use to grade students. Those that receive an A have the toughest definitions of student proficiency, while those with an F have the least rigorous.

Measuring Standards

That states vary widely in their definitions of student proficiency seems little short of bizarre. Agreement on what constitutes “proficiency” would seem the essential starting point: if students are to know what is expected of them, teachers are to know what to teach, and parents are to have a measuring stick for their schools. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to determine how student achievement stacks up across states and countries.

One national metric for performance does exist, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP is a series of tests administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center  for Education Statistics. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP tests measure proficiency in reading and math among 4th and 8th graders nationwide as well as in every state. The NAEP sets its proficiency standard through a well-established, if complex, technical process. Basically, it asks informed experts to judge the difficulty of each of the items in its test bank. The experts’ handiwork received a pat on the back recently when the American Institutes for Research (AIR) showed that NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” was very similar to the standard used by designers of international tests of student achievement. Proficiency has acquired roughly the same meaning in Europe and Asia, and in the United States—as long as the NAEP standard is employed.

This is not to say students are proficient either in this country or elsewhere. According to NAEP standards, only 31 percent of 8th graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics. Using that same standard, just 73 percent of 8th graders are proficient in math in the highest-achieving country, Singapore, according to the AIR study. In other words, bringing virtually all 8th graders in the United States up to a NAEP-like level of proficiency in mathematics constitutes a challenge no country has ever mastered.

Comparing the States

Three states—Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Missouri—have established world-class standards in math and reading as the goal for all students. Every other state has established a lower proficiency standard, and some states (for example, Georgia and Tennessee) declare most students proficient even when their performance is miles short of the NAEP standard. By setting widely varying standards, states render the very notion of proficiency meaningless. If Billy and Sally cannot read in South Carolina, they should not be able to pass muster simply by crossing the state’s western border.

We gauge the differences among states by comparing how students do on state assessments with how they perform on NAEP tests. By comparing the percentage of students deemed proficient on each, it is possible to determine whether states are setting expectations higher, lower, or equal to the NAEP standard. If the percentages are identical (or roughly so), then state proficiency standards can be fairly labeled as “world-class.” If state assessments identify many more students as proficient than the NAEP, then state proficiency figures should be regarded as inflated. In short, comparing state assessment results to NAEP scores can help reveal whether states are giving parents and voters the real scoop about where the state’s children stack up when measured against world-class benchmarks.

In Figure 1, we give Massachusetts, Missouri, and South Carolina an A for establishing rigorous expectations regarding what proficient students must know and be able to do. Note that a grade of A does not indicate students are performing at the highest level. Rather, the high grade indicates that the three states have set a high bar for students to reach if they are to be deemed proficient. So, for example, only 25 percent of 8th graders in South Carolina were deemed proficient on both the state reading test and on the NAEP reading test—an honest, if embarrassing, reckoning of the education situation in the state.

The remaining 47 states (information is not yet available for the District of Columbia) had distinctly lower standards. Three states—Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—expected so little of students that they received the grade of F. The state of Georgia, for instance, declared 88 percent of 8th graders proficient in reading, even though just 26 percent scored at or above the proficiency level on the NAEP. According to our calculations, Georgia 8th-grade reading standards are 4.0 standard deviations below those in South Carolina, an extraordinarily large difference. Thus, while students in Georgia and South Carolina perform at similar levels on the NAEP, the casual observer would be misled by Georgia’s reporting that its students achieve proficiency at three times the rate that South Carolina’s students do.

Twelve states—Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia—received Ds because they had pitched their expectations far below other states. Illinois set its proficiency bar for 8th-grade reading at a level that is 1.01 standard deviations below the national average. If you believe those who set the Illinois standards, 82 percent of its 8th graders are proficient in reading, even though the NAEP says only 30 percent are.

In general, the states of the Northeast have the highest standards, while the states of the South and Midwest have the lowest. Western states fall in between.

A Downward Trend

There is some evidence of slippage in standards since our original report card was published in 2005 (see Figure 2). In 8th-grade reading, for example, standards overall are down by 0.2 standard deviations. This means that, in 8th-grade reading, states are reporting a substantial improvement that is not evident on the NAEP. The smallest amount of slippage was in 4th-grade math, where standards fell by 0.06 standard deviations. Most of the slippage at the 4th-grade level is due to the lower standards adopted by those states that were initially slow in complying with the NCLB accountability system; those that have had standards since 2003 have not altered them significantly. But at the 8th-grade level, standards are falling across the board—in both reading and math, and among both the states that had standards in 2003 and the states that have only adopted them more recently.

We also see slight convergence among the states. For example, the variation in 4th-grade math standards narrowed 0.11 standard deviations between 2003 and 2007. The good news is that differences among state standards are shrinking; the bad news is that states are converging downward, not upward.

By and large, the changes that are taking place in individual states are fairly small, perhaps so they do not stir controversy. A few states, though, have made big adjustments since 2003. Colorado and Texas have raised their proficiency bars enough to warrant a grade one letter better than the one given initially. Five states—Arizona, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, and Wyoming—have lowered the bar enough that their grades have dropped by a full letter.

Two years ago, we could see small evidence for a decline in standards but detected no race to the bottom. That is still true for 4th graders. But 8th-grade standards, if not exactly racing downward, are moving steadily away from world-class standards. Those responsible for NCLB reauthorization, as they struggle forward, should first and foremost establish a clear and consistent definition of grade-level proficiency in reading and math, even if it means giving up the cherished but decidedly unrealistic goal of proficiency for all students by 2014.

Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess are editors of Education Next.

For Immediate Release: October 27, 2009
Contact: Andy Smarick, (443) 534-6550, asmarick@edexcellence.net

STANFORD — As the Obama administration pushes states, districts, and education organizations to embrace school “turnarounds” and prepares to spend billions of dollars in federal funds on such efforts, education researcher Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute warns that the evidence strongly suggests that this policy is not the solution for the nation’s mounting number of failing schools.

“We need to begin this discussion by acknowledging that the vast majority of persistently low performing schools remain that way despite interventions,” says Smarick.  His article, “The Turnaround Fallacy,” appears in the forthcoming issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.EducationNext.org.

To illustrate, Smarick points to national data on the results of No Child Left Behind-mandated school restructuring for schools that fail to meet minimum achievement targets for five years or more.  According to a report from the U.S. Department of Education, of the schools required to restructure in 2004-05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.

To get a perspective on the value of turnaround strategies more broadly, Smarick also looked at research from the private sector.

“Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed,” Smarick writes. “Far from it: The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields.” He points to research by the American Enterprise Institute on the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector.  Both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more.

If failure is also the norm for turnaround efforts in the business world, where flexibility and competitive pressure are present, Smarick argues that we should have little confidence that turnaround strategies will be successful in urban school districts, which are subject to severe political and regulatory restrictions.

A better solution is being tried by reform-minded district superintendents who are closing the lowest performing schools and making room for new school start ups and replication of high-performing charter school models that are recording impressive achievement gains.

For decades, states and districts have tried to fix their worst schools, investing incalculable resources into these efforts.  The NCLB restructuring provision provided more resources and gave districts four specific strategies to address these schools and a fifth option that allowed even more interventions.  And yet, we still have thousands of failing schools.  Now the current administration wants to invest billions more in these turnaround efforts.

Instead, Smarick argues that the charter model ought to be applied as a solution.  Schools that fail to live up to expectations should be closed, new schools should be started in their place, and the best schools should be expanded and replicated.

“Our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry,” Smarick says.

Read “The Turnaround Fallacy” available online at www.educationnext.org.

Watch Education Next’s video interview with Andy Smarick, “Should failing schools be fixed or closed?”

Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

This commentary is also posted at the National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog.

Click here to get to the podcast.

Listen to the Podcast

(Also available: Peterson and Finn’s previous discussion of Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data.)

On Friday, Tom Loveless and I published an op-ed in the New York Times that argued that our nation’s highest-achieving students are only making minimal gains in the era of NCLB, while low-achieving students have made huge strides since 2000. Much of the feedback has latched onto this latter point, with NCLB haters decrying our implication that the law has been successful at all. (And they have a point that we shouldn’t have implied causation by writing that “It is clear that No Child Left Behind is helping low-achieving students.” Our original wording was more careful, but alas, we goofed. NAEP can never prove causation of anything, one way or the other. Still, the thrust of our article was to criticize a Center on Education Policy report for being too kind to NCLB! So the reaction is a little ironic.)

But we’ve also heard from quite a few parents of high-achieving children, desperate for good options for their kids. Here’s a note from one such parent; it’s well worth reading.

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your NYTimes Op-Ed piece “Smart Child Left Behind” and your questioning of how well we are doing to educate the gifted.

Certainly in these uncertain economic times, encouraging the full potential of all our children should be the highest priority, if only for the sake of our national competitiveness. But as you noted, many advocates of education seem to be overly concerned with narrowing the achievement gap by improving the scores at the bottom while neglecting the high achievers, as if making a bright child less competitive will make up for those at the lowest achievement levels. It is most odd.

But there are positive trends. A few community colleges in California such as Ohlone College in Fremont offer a K-12 program for motivated students. When my 7th grade daughter in middle school expressed frustration at not being allowed to progress more rapidly in science and math so she could do more in-depth science fair research (she had many great ideas, but lacked the pedagogical disciplines to implement them), we found all doors in the public school system closed to her. She then tested into Ohlone College and has been doing a full-time class load ever since.

The upshot—she is now 14, has completed with distinction courses in freshman college chemistry, calculus, biology, and English literature and composition, and is currently beginning physics. Perhaps more importantly, spending her “8th grade” year at Ohlone focused on chemistry, mathematics and English gave her the scientific skills to engage in a research project and paper the following year under the supervision of her biology professor on the formation of melamine crystals in a simulated kidney environment. This work and other projects allowed her to land a NASA internship this summer in the planetary sciences group (developing and writing a Python simulation on light scattering to predict bacterial growth profiles). She will be applying to universities this fall and graduating in spring.

Rebecca has also found a supportive group of “home school” gifted students who attend Ohlone, one of whom has just graduated from UC Berkeley in physics after two years and is on to graduate school.

Sadly, due to the state budget crisis, Rebecca may be one of the last gifted middle schoolers able to take advantage of this program. Ohlone has been forced to limit admission to most courses severely for K-9, and while 10-12 graders have much more latitude in course selection, they are at such a disadvantage in terms of priority that they have no likelihood of admission to core courses such as chemistry or calculus.

While the risks of taking such a course of action has been high (e.g. one establishes a college record, the student is expected to handle workload and discussions with professors and students directly without parental facilitation), the sense of accomplishment and dedication to her goals have resulted in an enormous amount of personal growth and self-confidence.

Since the regular K-12 public school system seems unable or unwilling to build the skills of our gifted students, perhaps the Ohlone College model of accelerated combined high school / college might be an appropriate alternative path. The breadth of courses is wider than any high school can offer, the classroom is much less subject to disruption and more conducive to study, and the material is taught at a more rapid pace, thus benefiting the gifted student. Finally, since the subjects are taught by subject matter experts (most with Ph.D’s), endeavors such as independent research projects are more feasible.

It is clear that in the rush to pull up the lowest performing students, the gifted students have been neglected, in violation of the essential educational policy that each student must be taught at their level of capability. However, unless there is “competition” for this valuable student population (after all, these are the students that pull up the average for everyone else), I fear that the public K-12 school system will continue to neglect them. The community college system could provide the level of competition for the best and brightest that would motivate the K-12 system to properly assess, promote and educate the gifted at the level they need, thus allowing all to benefit.

Regards,

Lynne Greer Jolitz

Los Gatos, CA

STANFORD — The question about what to do with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, an issue likely to be taken up by Congress this year as it is brought forward for reauthorization, took center stage again as the Obama administration sent signals this month that it is planning to strengthen the law, a clear message that the President supports an even stronger federal role in education policy.

The new issue of Education Next (Summer 2009) brings the debate to the public, presenting the opposing viewpoints of education historian Diane Ravitch, who feels the time has come to end NCLB, and Hoover Institution Koret Task Force member John E. Chubb, author of Learning from No Child Left Behind (Hoover Press, 2009), who calls for improving it.

Here’s a sampling:

Education Next: What do we do with NCLB — Mend it? Or end it?

John E. Chubb: “The role that NCLB sets out for the federal government — setting national goals while leaving states and districts to decide how to reach them — is sound, and surely superior to the hodge-podge of state accountability systems that preceded it. The challenge now is to improve how our federal-state partnership works.… We should learn from the law — as it is beginning to help our children learn — and not expect 50 uncoordinated states to get the nation where it needs to be in the demanding world of the 21st century.”

Diane Ravitch: “A few tweaks here and a little tinkering there cannot fix this fundamentally flawed legislation. The time has come to discard it altogether and begin to think afresh about how the federal government can provide useful assistance to states, districts, and schools that are trying to improve. What we need is a clear recognition of the federal role in education and a deeper understanding of the meaning of a good education. Perhaps with a sense of the limits of federalism and of the limitless potential of education, we might be able to free ourselves from the sterility, rigidity, dogmatism, and narrow anti-intellectualism of NCLB.”

Education Next: Has NCLB had a positive impact on student achievement?*

John E. Chubb: “Student achievement has grown much more rapidly in the last decade — the NCLB era — than during the 1990s, especially for the lowest achieving and most-disadvantaged students in the nation. Achievement is what NCLB is all about, so the law has met its most basic test.… Disadvantaged kids are achieving far more today than ever before, and those gains are attributable to higher standards and tougher accountability that began in the states in the 1990s and accelerated with NCLB.”

Diane Ravitch: “NCLB has produced meager gains in achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assesses student achievement in reading and mathematics every other year. Despite the intense concentration on reading and mathematics required by the law, the gains registered on NAEP since the enactment of NCLB have been unimpressive.”

*Education Next Editors’ Note: Because the 2002 enactment of NCLB followed the launch of accountability systems in many states, education experts disagree as to whether or not student achievement prior to 2003 can be attributed to the law. Depending on what year you begin tracking NCLB’s impact on student achievement, its policies have either been a boon or a bust.

Education Next: Is NCLB’s focus on assessment shrinking our schools’ curricula?

Diane Ravitch: “NCLB may in reality be dumbing down our children by focusing the attention of teachers and administrators solely on basic skills. Our students are not being prepared to compete with students from high-performing nations in the world. Many are not getting an education based on a coherent, content-rich curriculum in history, geography, the arts, science, foreign languages, and literature…. If we want a future workforce that is smart, creative, independent, and resourceful, we are not educating to get what we want.

John E. Chubb: “Perhaps the single greatest virtue of NCLB’s approach to assessment and accountability is that it shines a bright light on student performance, as measured against explicit standards of proficiency. The nation finally knows which schools are raising proficiency in reading and math and which are not. Before NCLB, such information was spotty at best. A weakness, however, is that the bright light does not shine on all subjects that matter for kids and their future.”

Chubb and Ravitch also tackle:

• NCLB’s goal of universal proficiency by 2014;
• Sanctions for persistently failing schools;
• NCLB’s “remedy” provisions—including public school choice and supplemental educational services;
• The best method for defining and measuring proficiency.

Read “The Future of No Child Left Behind: Mend It? Or end It?” available online and in PDF format .

John E. Chubb is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is a founding partner, executive vice president, and chief education officer of Edison Schools.

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, was one of the charter members of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education (1999–2008). She is a research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

By Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder

Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, 2008, $19.95; 263 pages.

As reviewed by Chester E. Finn Jr.

Some may take this wrong-headed book seriously, given the credentials of lead author Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education columnist, all-around smarty, and veteran maneuverer on the education-policy chessboard. Its timing is deft, too, as it savages the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and offers recommendations for its overhaul (overthrow, really) just as a new administration and Congress face itsreauthorization.

Rothstein and a pair of junior colleagues advance three central theses, all of which are wrong—though they’ll appeal to a strange alliance of progressive educators and (up to a point) conservative Republicans.

First, and most NCLB-relevant, “We should get the federal government out of the business of monitoring education at the school or student level.” But it’s not just Uncle Sam who should quit judging performance by students (and schools and districts) via “short-term test score measures of basic skills.” So, too, should the states. The authors view all such accountability measures as agents of educational corruption.

That’s because, thesis two, education has in their judgment eight “fundamental goals,” of which “basic academic knowledge and skills in reading, writing, math, science and history” are but one. The others include physical and emotional health, social skills, work ethic, appreciation of the arts, and community responsibility. These are equally important, insist the authors, and must all be incorporated into any self-respecting accountability system.

Third, they want NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, rolled back to a reporting system that contains no standards or cut scores, only a numeric scale that nobody understands. At the same time, they would widen its subject coverage to span all eight “fundamental goals,” employing “performance assessments” of various sorts to appraise progress in areas unsuited to paper-and-pencil testing.

This is not just wrong-headed; it’s dangerous. It plays into the hands of union-backed efforts to exonerate schools from responsibility for student achievement. It aligns with a faction within the Democratic Party (and some key Obama advisors) as they seek to gut standards-based reform in general and NCLB in particular. It also appeals to the yearning of some GOP lawmakers and libertarian policy wonks to get Uncle Sam completely out of the school-accountability business (though they’ll gag on Rothstein’s demand for buckets more in federal dollars for those unaccountable schools and sundry other services to kids). And it would leave educators, policymakers, and parents with fewer navigational aids as they try to determine whether American students and schools are making progress in a competitive world.

It’s true that NCLB’s laser-like focus on reading and math skills in grades 3 through 8 encourages schools to concentrate their resources and teachers their energies on those subjects. It’s also true that the law’s use of a single proficiency “cut score” to judge school performance discourages attention to kids who are already succeeding—and those so far below proficiency as to have little chance of getting there. Dozens of other NCLB critics have reached similar conclusions, and scads of proposals for that law’s rewrite offer remedies, such as including more subjects in the accountability system and giving schools credit for student growth across the achievement spectrum.

Rothstein is correct, as well, that NCLB’s reliance on states to define “proficiency” however they like has produced wildly discrepant results across the land. (It escapes me why he then urges that states be placed in sole charge of school standards and accountability with no federal involvement at all.) But he draws a bizarre link between that problem and his scorn for NAEP’s achievement levels, wrongly asserting that the National Assessment Governing Board’s decision to fix the “proficient” level at an ambitious “aspirational” level was folded into NCLB’s mandate to states to set their own proficiency targets. That’s crazy. Had Congress and the White House had the political guts in 2001 to use NAEP, rather than states’ own inconsistent standards, as the primary No Child Left Behind benchmark, we’d have avoided some of today’s woes, including the paltry aspirations promulgated by many states.

The authors’ misunderstanding of NAEP is comprehensive, however, as is the harm that would be done were it to be reshaped to their liking. They yearn for a NAEP-that-never-was, rattling on for 20 nostalgic pages about the glories of a 45-year-old plan prepared by a high-status committee of educators chaired by the late Ralph Tyler, most of which was ignored from day one by Congress, the executive branch, and the National Assessment Governing Board.

Rothstein ardently dislikes the board’s execution of a 1988 statutory mandate to establish “appropriate student performance levels for each age and grade in each subject area to be tested” under the National Assessment. (That’s the correct language; Rothstein misquotes it.) The board, on which I served for eight years and chaired for two (though Rothstein also misstates how I got there, apparently not knowing that board members are appointed by the secretary of education, not the president), after gathering extensive advice from every quarter, opted to set three such levels and to designate the second of those “proficient.” After gathering tons more advice as to what method to use for applying those levels to actual assessments, the board settled on a process named (sorry about this) the “modified Angoff method.” And to make a long story short, the terminology, the method, and the changed way of reporting NAEP results have been under fire ever since from analysts and educators, even as they’ve gained traction in the real world.

Those performance levels turned out to be as useful to policymakers, parents, and journalists—a true gauge of student progress at the state and national levels, the closest America has yet come to any sort of national standards—as they are unloved by some experts. Note, though, that critics such as Rothstein never suggest a better way of setting such levels. They just don’t like this one, or don’t want any standards in the first place, preferring the inscrutable “scale score” reporting system that renders no judgments about “how good is good enough.”

If the authors were to prevail, NAEP would become blurry and weak, standards-based reform would nearly vanish, and NCLB would be undone rather than revamped. Let us hope that right-thinking people, encouraged by this review, will see the errors of Rothstein et al. and opt to ignore them.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and senior editor of Education Next.

Last August a public-interest law firm in California, Public Advocates, thought it had found a chink in the Department of Education’s interpretation of the “highly qualified” teacher provision of NCLB. In Renee v. Spellings, filed in a federal district court in San Francisco, Public Advocates argued that the department had flouted the law by permitting employment of teachers still in training.

NCLB required that all of the nation’s public school teachers be “highly qualified” by the end of 2005–06 and set as a standard that they have a bachelor’s degree, meet state licensure requirements, and demonstrate competence in a core subject. Many of the nation’s teachers, especially in the poorest urban districts and in the 5,000 school districts classified as rural, had fallen short of that standard. Congress’s approach to this shortage of formally trained teachers was to decree that it was unlawful.

When a law and social realities are seriously at odds, as in this case, administrators must employ flexibility and ingenuity to make the law “work,” or appear to. One of several approaches devised by the department was to allow so-called alternative-route teachers to teach for up to three years while seeking certification. (An “alternative route” is meant to facilitate entry of teachers who have not followed a standard teacher-training curriculum.) Attacking the three years of grace as a “major loophole,” Public Advocates asked the court to strike it down, asserting that 100,000 teachers nationwide had slipped through the loophole, 10,000 in California alone, which it took to be a measure of injustice but might be thought from a different political perspective to be an indicator of districts’ needs. The will of Congress is deeply ambiguous, because the law says both that alternative-route teachers satisfy the mandate and that full licensure cannot be waived provisionally.

A more tantalizing target of NCLB litigation has been a provision, dating from the mid-1990s and authored by Republicans who were trying to protect state governments from unfunded mandates, that says, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to…mandate a state or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this act.”

In 2005 two sets of litigants mounted suits with this language in an effort to secure more federal funding or relief from federal requirements, but were not expected by legal analysts to get far (see “NEA Sues over NCLB,” legal beat, Fall 2005). The state of Connecticut, most of whose claims have been dismissed by a federal judge in New Haven, in fact has not gone far. And the other case, which was brought by the National Education Association in collaboration with several school districts in Michigan, Texas, and Vermont, appeared headed for oblivion when the trial judge dismissed it. But the plaintiffs appealed, and in January of this year a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled 2 to 1 in their favor (see “Accountability Left Behind,” features).

Rather than oblivion, Pontiac v. Spellings, as this case is known, could be heading eventually for the Supreme Court, which has the last word on states’ obligations under grant-in-aid statutes. The case has been remanded to the district court with an admonition that statutes enacted under the spending clause of the Constitution must provide “clear notice” of their liabilities should states accept the federal funding, along with the majority’s judgment that in NCLB, Congress failed to do that.

In the meantime, Congress continues to struggle with reauthorizing NCLB, and if some of the law’s critics have their way (see “The Enforcers,” legal beat, Fall 2007), the revised version will expand the opportunities to sue.

Joshua Dunn is assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

The decision in School District of the City of Pontiac v. Secretary of the United States Department of Education has the potential to significantly undermine NCLB’s focus on accountability and student achievement (see “Court Jousters,” legal beat).

To understand the ruling of the Court of Appeals, it is necessary to know a little about the spending clause of the United States Constitution. The spending clause gives Congress the power to spend tax money in ways that it sees fit. Congress often uses that power to encourage states to adopt congressional policies by promising to send the states federal funding if they oblige. In many ways, laws passed pursuant to the spending clause are like contracts between the federal government and the states. There is a wrinkle, however; the Supreme Court has held that any law imposing conditions on the receipt of federal money pursuant to the spending clause must describe the conditions “unambiguously” to provide “clear notice” to recipients.

NCLB is a good example of a law passed pursuant to the spending clause. No state is required to follow NCLB—unless, that is, it wants to receive federal money for its education system. For states choosing to accept federal funding, NCLB does require that they implement a number of education policies. For example, the legislation obliges such states to test student performance in core subject areas and to disclose results on school and district report cards. States also must implement laws that hold schools and districts accountable if they fail to make “adequate yearly progress” in improving student achievement. Thus, states promise to comply with the accountability and other requirements of NCLB in exchange for federal funding.

The source of the challenge by the NEA is an obscure provision of NCLB (often referred to as the “unfunded mandates provision”) that states, “Nothing in [NCLB] shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to…mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under [NCLB].”  Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings had long interpreted the unfunded mandates provision as one that restricted federal officials from imposing additional requirements on states and school districts (that is, requirements above and beyond the ones expressly described in NCLB). Put differently, Secretary Spellings had interpreted NCLB as mandatory: if states wanted federal money (which they all did), they would have to comply with all of the act’s requirements.

Even after the states were aware of the secretary’s interpretation of the unfunded mandates provision, they kept taking the money. In other words, the states were willing to accept accountability and other obligations in exchange for the billions of dollars of federal funding authorized under the act. Nevertheless, the NEA and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit claiming, among other things, that NCLB’s funding conditions were too “ambiguous” to be enforced. The plaintiffs argued that they should be required to comply with NCLB only if the federal government fully covered the cost.

In 2005, the trial court hearing the case agreed with Secretary Spellings. The court concluded that states and school districts are legally required to comply with NCLB if they accept federal funding, regardless of whether that funding is enough to cover the costs of compliance. Because it decided the case based exclusively on its view of the law, the trial court did not receive any evidence about the costs of complying with NCLB.

On appeal, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, disagreed with the trial court. The Court of Appeals determined that the unfunded mandates provision could have led states and school districts to believe that they needed to comply only with portions of NCLB that were “fully funded” by the federal government. Therefore, the court concluded, the conditions under which the states and school districts agreed to accept federal funding were not unambiguous, as demanded by the spending clause. In other words, the court concluded that recipients of federal education funding may not have understood the need to comply with NCLB’s requirements, even though the head of the agency in charge of handing out the money had expressly told the recipients what was expected before they accepted it. If the decision of the Court of Appeals stands, the plaintiffs will be excused from any NCLB requirements that they can prove are not fully funded by the federal government.

Secretary Spellings has asked the full Court of Appeals to reconsider. If the decision is not reversed during further appellate proceedings (including possible Supreme Court review), the case will head back to the trial court for a determination of whether, in fact, federal funding fully covers the cost of complying with NCLB. The trial could be long and complicated given the breadth of NCLB and the tens of billions of dollars annually appropriated by the federal government to pay for it. At trial, the plaintiffs likely would need to disentangle all of the various state requirements from what NCLB demands in order to isolate the costs of complying with NCLB. Given that many states were already adopting testing and accountability regimens before NCLB was passed, that task could prove insurmountable. If there is a trial, it likely will involve a battle among competing expert witnesses. For example, in their complaint the plaintiffs cited a number of studies purporting to show that the costs of complying with NCLB, in particular the goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014 (see sidebar), exceed a billion dollars per year in some states. Some of those same studies conclude that the federal government currently is funding less than 5 percent of the estimated costs. Such studies may lack scientific merit, but, junk science or not, it will nevertheless be necessary for the government to bring in its own experts and conduct its own studies to rebut them.

If the plaintiffs can succeed in proving that federal funding does not cover the full cost of complying with NCLB, they may, in effect, be exempt from all of NCLB’s requirements (at least for schools located in the Sixth Circuit). Because money is fungible, a state or district potentially can justify any particular noncompliance as a result of a deficiency in federal funding. In this instance, the large amount of flexibility given states in the use of federal funding could work against the federal government, essentially allowing the states and school districts to choose which requirements are “unfunded.” In other words, states and school districts could continue to receive federal funding under NCLB without the need to comply with any of the requirements of the law—a result that would gut NCLB’s emphasis on accountability.

Of course, Congress can eliminate the basis of the Court of Appeals decision by deleting or revising the unfunded mandates provision if and when it decides to reauthorize NCLB. Eliminating or modifying the unfunded mandates provision may prove difficult politically, however, and the decision of the Court of Appeals may add considerable complexity to the reauthorization process. For the moment, though, the plaintiffs have won the first round in their efforts to shed NCLB’s accountability requirements while, at the same time, retaining NCLB funding.

Rocco Testani and Joshua Mayes are attorneys with the Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Georgia, law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, which has represented a number of states in complex school finance litigation.

“We need to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. We must not tolerate a system that gives up on people.”
—George W. Bush, 2006

Two presidents speaking 224 years apart declared the importance of challenging every American child to achieve the potential that lies within each of them. Education and the responsibility of our government to provide it have been part of the political debate since our nation’s earliest days. At our founding, Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry would serve as the ultimate guardian against the threat of an oppressive government.

That remains true today. But the twenty-first-century global marketplace demands more of our education system. When President George W. Bush called upon our schools to “leave no child behind,” he did so because he understands, like most people in this country, that a well-educated America is also an economically competitive America. In his sobering book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman warns against assuming that “because America’s economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be” in the forefront. In fact, he calls the notion that America will forever be the economic powerhouse it is today a “dangerous illusion.”

In today’s Information Age, the ability to process knowledge and out-innovate the competition separates economic winners from losers. Education is the new capital and gives us that competitive edge. But by most measurements today, our schools, at best, get mediocre grades. In 2005, Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan group concerned with preparing young people for work and college, released “Rising to the Challenge: Are High School Graduates Prepared for College and Work?” College professors polled said that approximately half of all incoming students at their schools were not prepared to handle college-level math and writing. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently gave this critical assessment of our education system: “Education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K–12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged—preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.”

More and more Americans agree. A joint survey done by Peter Hart Research Associates and The Winston Group last year for the Educational Testing Service (ETS) found that Americans are worried our education system will be unable to meet the needs of the future and sustain the quality of life we enjoy today. People instinctively sense that our schools are not adequately preparing our children for the competitive world of the twenty-first century.

The Politics of Education

It is important, when looking at education through a political lens, to understand that it is far more than an issue. Education has morphed into something personal. For most Americans, it has become a basic value that defines, in part, who we are. For the poor it is the path out of poverty, for immigrants the chance to find freedom and opportunity. Education gives the middle class a shot at the brass ring, and for every parent, it fuels the hope that their children’s lives will be better than their own.

Because education has become such an intrinsic part of American life it may well have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 2008 presidential race, just as it did in 2000, the closest presidential election in recent history. That year, voters said in exit polls that education was the second most important factor in making their presidential choice, just slightly trailing the economy and jobs. This was a significant shift from 1996, when education tied for third place with the issue of the deficit, coming behind the economy and jobs and Medicare and Social Security. Among voters who said education was their top issue in 1996, Clinton beat Dole by a remarkable 62 points, 78 vs. 16 percent.

In 2000, however, George W. Bush and congressional Republicans structurally changed the education debate, as decades of Democratic education policies ran up against reality. Voters recognized that the education status quo was failing too many children. Bush and congressional Republicans called for an end to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and a focus on achievement outcomes. Together, they pushed an education reform agenda, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that emphasized higher standards and more accountability, a results-based approach that parents liked.

A majority of voters who cited education as their number-one concern in 2000 still pulled the lever for Democrat Al Gore. But in making education a focus of his campaign, Bush kept Gore’s advantage on this important issue to only eight points, 52 vs. 44 percent. A number of issues and factors affected the outcome of that election, but the very closeness of the race made swing voters, for whom education is a top priority, particularly crucial. While Bush didn’t win the “education vote,” he closed the margin dramatically on this traditionally Democratic issue, especially with swing voters.

Since 9/11, education has taken a political back seat to national security and the economy. In 2004, education came in seventh on the list of voters’ top issues in exit polls. In the 2006 congressional elections, exit polls didn’t address the question of education at all. Still, private surveys showed that education was an important issue for many swing voter groups then and has remained remarkably steady over the past seven years. In a New Models survey conducted by the Winston Group in May 2007, married women with children, a key swing voter group, ranked education second in importance, only a single point behind defense and terrorism. In 2008, the same swing voter groups that played such a decisive role eight years before could again provide the margin of victory for the winning presidential candidate.

A Republican Education Agenda

Republicans have a significant opportunity in next year’s election to win on the education issue by continuing their push for a reform-based education agenda and arguing against the idea that more money without real structural reform can fix the ills of our education system. For decades, Democrats have embraced the status quo, calling for increased federal spending as the solution to declining test scores and increasing numbers of students ill prepared for the future. Between 1980 and 2000, Department of Education (DOE) spending rose by a staggering 174 percent, from $14 billion to $38.4 billion, with little to show for it. The Democrats got what they wished for, but the bleak record of education achievement in the 1980s and 1990s shows their funding-based approach simply doesn’t work. The central premise of the Democratic Party’s education policy—that a lack of money is the problem with America’s schools—has been debunked by years of negative student outcomes.

All of which explains why George W. Bush was able in the 2000 election to connect with voters on the education issue. When he spoke of “leaving no child behind,” it resonated with parents who wanted a new approach to the challenges facing their children’s schools. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act emphasized accountability, higher standards, parental involvement, and increased resources to help students and schools most in need. It took effect in January 2002 and put American education on a new course.

Stick With No Child Left Behind

Republicans can make a persuasive case that they have been the agents of real change in our schools. They should stick with the principles of the No Child Left Behind Act. The NCLB reauthorization debate will give Republicans an opportunity to contrast their approach of accountability, parental involvement, and targeted spending with the Democrats’ traditional “show us the money” education policy.

Although in effect for a relatively short period of time, the programs mandated by NCLB are beginning to show results. The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Nation’s Report Card, showed that nine-year-olds made “more progress in reading over the past five years than in the previous 28 years combined…and posted the best scores in math in the history of the report.” The same tests showed that 13-year-olds had the “highest math scores ever recorded,” which included all-time high scores for African American and Hispanic students. Other scores showed improvement in urban districts and in narrowing the gap between whites and minority children.

The vast majority of Americans, 76 percent, support reauthorization of NCLB, according to the ETS survey; parents of school-age children (K–12) favor reauthorization at an even higher rate. Even school teachers and administrators, some of the act’s biggest critics, favor reauthorization by 75 percent and 78 percent, respectively, although with modifications.

Yet it would be a mistake for Republicans to rest on NCLB’s early gains. If all students are going to be achieving at grade level or better in reading and mathematics by 2014, progress must come faster. That will take some changes to the provisions. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recognizes that fact. Talking about the NCLB reauthorization, she said, “we can use the knowledge we’ve gained to strengthen and improve the law…continuing the workable, common sense approach that we’ve developed together with states.”

Demand Tougher Standards and Higher Expectations

Republicans should also argue that dramatically improving our schools may require a tougher attitude toward failure on the part of parents, teachers, and taxpayers. With countries like China and India focusing their education systems on preparing workers to compete against our children, the excuses that have kept our schools mediocre for years are no longer acceptable. Moving from 6 percent of Washington, D.C., 4th graders scoring proficient or advanced on the 2000 NAEP math test to 11 percent in 2005 is progress. But real achievement means no child scores below proficient. With America’s economic future riding on our schools’ ability to produce a competitive twenty-first-century workforce, “failure isn’t an option.”

That means setting world-class standards. But today we have a mishmash of state standards that often leave parents unable to assess the quality of their children’s schools. What one state deems a high standard may appear low in another. If a standard is deficient and state tests are geared to it, schools will not see real achievement. Only when external tests such as NAEP expose failing students and schools will parents realize their state standards simply don’t make the grade. But by then it may be too late for their children.

Implementing tougher standards has always been a Republican idea and will be again in 2008. At the heart of Republican education policy is a core belief: if we ask more of American students, they will produce more. The Republican agenda calls for higher expectations for students themselves. School systems must look critically at what is working and what is not working in their schools. That means putting money into initiatives that will bring achievement for all students: historically low performers, who must be able to compete in a world that demands higher skills; average students, who need to care more about their studies if they are going to succeed; and top students, who will drive the country’s future innovations.

School choice, school vouchers, merit pay, teacher standards, and a raft of other education reforms are key elements of the Republican education agenda and in 2008 will once again offer voters innovative ideas to address our education challenges.

Reject the Traditional Funding Debate

Democrats reject most of these reforms out of hand, fearing the loss of political support from education special interests. Instead, as they have done in election after election, they will likely embrace an attack strategy decrying Republicans’ “failure” to fund education.

The facts tell a different story. At the end of his second term, Bill Clinton signed a $42 billion DOE budget. All told, Clinton increased education spending by 6 percent ($2.7 billion using constant 2007 dollars) over his Republican predecessor, which earned him the praise and political support of the education establishment.

Under President George W. Bush, the 2007 DOE budget hit $67.4 billion. Bush increased education funding over Clinton by 38 percent (nearly $19 billion), yet Democrats tell the American people that education is underfunded (see Figure 1). This election, Republicans should dispel the Democratic myth because the education debate ought to focus on what’s really important—the need for dramatic education reform based on student outcomes.

A Tough Question for ’08

All of which brings us back to the core education question of the 2008 campaign, a question that deserves an answer from the men and women, Republican and Democratic, who aspire to lead this country:

As political leaders, how will you transform our schools from a model that tolerates failure and gauges success by the size of the school budget to an Information Age model that measures success by student achievement and ensures that every child can succeed in the global economy?

The full impact of an ineffective system of public education may not be evident for many years. But one day America will pay a heavy price for accepting and excusing mediocrity in our schools: generations of American children unprepared for the modern workplace.

In 2000, “education” voters said, “Stop processing students, stop looking at them as profit centers, and start preparing them for a tough, competitive world out there.” Republicans listened, promised change, and put the country on a path of education reform. The 2008 election will determine whether the country continues down that path and is ready to compete in the future.

-David Winston is the president and founder of The Winston Group, a Washington, D.C., survey research and strategic communications firm, and former director of planning for the Speaker of the House and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The Easy Way Out by Sara Mead

Charters as a Solution? by Nelson Smith

While No Child Left Behind does mark an unprecedented extension of federal authority over states and local schools, the law’s accountability measures were not, for the most part, newly developed in 2001. No Child Left Behind was the cumulative result of a standards-and-testing movement that began with the release of the report A Nation at Risk by the Reagan administration in 1983. The movement gained momentum with the 1989 education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors set broad performance goals for American schools. By 1991, President Bush’s “America 2000″ proposal included voluntary national testing tied to “world class” standards, a provision that led to the bill’s death by Republican filibuster. In 1994 President Clinton signed into law “Goals 2000,” which provided grants to help states develop academic standards.

The sea change came with the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which signaled a nationwide commitment to standards-based reform. The reauthorization required states to develop content and performance standards for K-12 schools. Congress also adopted the notion of “adequate yearly progress” that later became the linchpin of accountability in No Child Left Behind. States were required to make “continuous and substantial” progress toward the goal of academic proficiency for all students. However, there was no deadline for doing so; indeed, consequences were largely absent from the law. State standards were supposed to be in place by 1997-98, assessments and final definitions of adequate yearly progress by 2000-01. But the administration never withheld funds from states that failed to meet these timelines. The Clinton administration, concerned that cracking down would rile the Republican Congress, focused on providing states with assistance in the development process. As of the original 1997 deadline, the American Federation of Teachers found that just 17 states had “clear and specific standards” in English, math, social studies, and science. Nevertheless, the 1994 reauthorization jumpstarted the process of developing standards and tests in most states.

By the mid-1990s, then, the themes of No Child Left Behind were already on the table. In many ways the final ingredient was President George W. Bush, who persuaded some Republicans to accept proposals that they had rejected just one session of Congress earlier and tacked with Democrats toward common ground. In so doing, however, agreements in principle sometimes papered over real disagreements regarding policy particulars. This meant that many key issues in No Child Left Behind were postponed until implementation. As a result, the Education Department’s rule-making process and its enforcement practices will be vital in determining how seriously states and schools will take the new requirements.

The Late Clinton Years

The lesson that many policymakers and analysts took from the 1994 reauthorization was that federal dollars needed to be tied more explicitly to measurable gains in student performance. In April 1999, Andrew Rotherham of the Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute summed up the key elements of this view in an influential white paper. In it he wrote that Congress, to rectify the Title I program’s status as “an undertaking without consequences” for everyone except students, should set performance benchmarks and terminate aid to districts that failed to meet them. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s 50-plus separate, categorical grants would be reduced to five broad “performance-based grants” funding the Title I compensatory-education program, teacher quality, English proficiency, public school choice, and innovation.

As the next reauthorization cycle rolled around, conservatives were supportive of the idea of state flexibility combined with performance goals, but they favored an even broader block grant approach that would give states enormous discretion over how they spent federal education funding. This would prove to be a major sticking point, as Democrats tended to oppose broad block grants that threatened programs with specific purposes. The proposal that reached the Senate floor included a pilot block-grant program giving spending discretion to 15 states. It also held kernels of the language that would find its way into No Child Left Behind two years later. It still allowed states to define what adequate yearly progress meant, but the state plans had to ensure that each racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup of students would be proficient within ten years. Any school identified as “needing improvement” was required to offer students the chance to transfer to another public school and to pay the transportation costs. This was to happen after two years of failing to make adequate progress.

The bill wound up satisfying no one. Liberal Democrats sought a substitute amendment protecting existing programs from block grants and pushing President Clinton’s triumvirate of class-size reduction, school construction, and teacher training. New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg and other conservative Republicans demanded a far larger block grant and a voucher program that would be further-reaching than the public-school transfer provisions in the bill. New Democrats, led by Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, pushed a modified block-grant proposal. Like Rotherham’s Progressive Policy Institute agenda, it created five major grants, raised overall funding by $35 billion over five years (targeted to poor school districts), kept the class-size reduction program, and added $100 million for public school choice. In the end, the New Democratic proposal got just 13 votes. As a long list of riders on unrelated issues like gun control bogged down floor debate, both sides decided to take their chances on the imminent presidential election.

Thus, for the first time in its history, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was not reauthorized on time. Instead, the old law was simply rolled over for an additional year. Rotherham complained, “At the national level, the debate about how to address education has broken down along predictable and partisan lines” and urged that the New Democratic proposal be the basis for the new administration’s first move on education reform. Surprisingly, in a way it was.

Add One “Compassionate Conservative”

In 1999 Texas governor George W. Bush was on the presidential campaign trail, pitching himself as a “compassionate conser-vative.” The compassion was for students trapped by what Bush frequently called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The conservatism lay in maximizing parental choice and local spending flexibility. However, Bush also envisioned a strong national role in education policy. This put him at odds with Republicans who cared mainly about keeping the national government out of local schools. In fact, Bush had to lobby to eliminate language calling for the abolition of the Department of Education from the 2000 Republican platform.

For Bush, focusing on education had potential risks, given its association with voters as a “Democratic” issue. In July 1999, for example, a Pew Research Center poll found that by a margin of 52 to 29 percent, voters trusted Democrats to do a better job on education. The very title of the Bush campaign position paper on the topic, “No Child Left Behind,” was cribbed from the liberal Children’s Defense Fund, whose (now trademarked) mission is “to leave no child behind.”

However, education reform was a major issue in Texas, and Bush realized its potential for a Republican presidential hopeful. As governor, he had promoted the state’s program of annually testing all students in grades 3-8 and rating schools based on their performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) exams. On the campaign trail he touted steadily improving TAAS scores, especially among black and Latino students.

Developing these themes for the campaign was a small policy staff that included Alexander “Sandy” Kress. Kress was a Dallas attorney, a school board member who had worked with Bush on Texas’s accountability statutes–and, as Bush liked to point out, a Democrat and Democratic Leadership Council member. As such, Kress was familiar with Rotherham’s paper and the various 1999 bills and borrowed widely from them.

Soon after Bush’s victory was sealed by the Supreme Court, the president-elect invited about 20 members of Congress to Austin to discuss education policy. Along with Republican leaders–Boehner, Gregg, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont–New Democrats such as Sen. Evan Bayh, Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, and Georgia senator Zell Miller were prominently featured. So was Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., a major education player in the House whom the president was soon calling “Big George.” Ted Kennedy was conspicuously absent, illuminating the president’s intention to seek a coalition of Republicans and New Democrats. Warned that pushing hard on private school vouchers would end that prospect, Bush gave his reassurances: vouchers were not a make-or-break issue.

As Congress opened its doors in January 2001, “No Child Left Behind” emerged, not as a piece of draft legislation but as a 30-page legislative blueprint. The proposal, released just three days after the inauguration, closely tracked Bush’s campaign agenda. It included a broad block-grant program providing new spending flexibility to “charter states,” and it consolidated categorical grants into five areas of focus, modified slightly from the New Democrats’ proposal. It called for the annual testing of students in grades 3-8 and the release of state and school report cards showing the performance of students disaggregated by ethnic and economic subgroups. States would be required to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) each year as a double check on the results from state assessments, and schools receiving Title I compensatory-education funds would be required to show that disadvantaged students were making adequate yearly progress. The proposal did not spell out the requirements for “corrective action” when a school or district continued to fail, but public school choice and, later, “exit vouchers” toward private school tuition or for supplemental services were to be included. Schools and states that succeeded “in closing the achievement gap” would receive funding bonuses from the federal government; those that did not would lose funding for administrative operations.

The blueprint, in short, borrowed liberally from several competing proposals made in the waning years of the Clinton administration. Bush “essentially plagiarized our plan,” one Lieberman aide told the Washington Post, but others in Congress could have made the same claim. What is called plagiarism in academia wins political points in Congress; the Bush proposals were well received on Capitol Hill.

Horse Trading

In Texas, Governor Bush had found success in producing broad statements of principle instead of legislative drafts. Perhaps remembering the 1993 health-care debate–when majority Democrats insisted that the Clintons produce a complete bill, then sniped at its fine print until it sank–Republicans did not demand more from Bush. The administration had thus set itself up to claim credit at the end of the process while Congress squabbled over the specifics. As one Democratic staffer put it, “This was great political strategy. When you put out legislation, then you’re fighting for colons and sentences and subheadings. The White House had orders: don’t get bogged down in details.”

Lawmakers, of course, thrive on detail, notwithstanding the devil’s reputed place of residence. But as the stalemate in the previous Congress made clear, reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would require building bipartisan coalitions; after all, the present Congress was even more closely divided. Here the Bush administration’s shrewd brand of alliance politics enabled it to avoid a partisan showdown in the Senate’s education committee. Kress, the president’s point man on No Child Left Behind, was dealing mainly with Gregg, who clearly called the Republican shots. Meanwhile, he also cultivated the New Democrats, using those discussions to lure Kennedy to the table. While Kennedy had been left out of the Austin summit in December, the senior senator was a consummate dealmaker, expert in the issues and perturbed by the prospect of a major bill in his bailiwick moving forward without him. Bush and Kress began to woo him; Kennedy, for his part, “bought himself into the game” by agreeing that some form of program consolidation and block-grant flexibility, along with supplemental services portability, could be part of the Senate bill.

The result was a three-way coalition among conservative Republicans, New Democrats, and the Democratic regulars. Jeffords’s momentous decision in late May to quit the Republican caucus, throwing the Senate to the Democrats, had little impact on the education bill. Kennedy’s decision to deal with the White House had made him a major player already.

The coalition was almost derailed in late April over the definition of adequate yearly progress, prompting what one Senate staffer colorfully called “hell week.” Governors had been pressuring the White House to weaken the bill’s requirement that states make adequate yearly progress. As it stood, the Senate language required annual progress by each individual subgroup of students in such a way that all would become proficient within ten years. But states were worried that too many schools would be identified as failing–an expensive, and embarrassing, label. Jeffords’s staff fueled this with analyses claiming that a majority of schools, even wealthy ones in states that invest heavily in education, would “fail” under the bill’s formula.

Not everyone agreed that these charges were accurate. Whatever their validity, though, they had clear political utility. The governors (and some committee members) leaped at the chance to gut the disaggregation and testing requirements of the bill. And Bush’s negotiators seemed surprisingly sympathetic. After cutting out Jeffords for months, “suddenly Kress was backing up Jeffords’s staff.” The new language required at least a 1 percent improvement in test scores each year per group. However, progress would be judged over a three-year period and the scores of the lowest achieving students would be weighted more heavily, giving schools credit for closing the achievement gap.

The new formula was attacked as unworkable by states and unfair by civil rights groups. Kress didn’t try very hard to defend the compromise, calling it “Rube Goldbergesque”–but settling the adequate yearly progress debate for the present kept the bill moving forward.

In the meantime, the challenge was to hold on to the majority Democrats who hoped to boost funding. By wide margins senators agreed to $181 billion in special-education funding over ten years; they also agreed to boost authorized spending on compensatory education by $132 billion over the same period. Ultimately, 89 programs were included in the Senate version of the bill (up from 55 in existing law and 47 in the House bill), with a price tag of $33 billion (compared with $19 billion in the president’s plan and $23 billion in the House’s). “A function of being on the floor too long,” moaned a GOP aide, as debate reached seven weeks and 150 amendments.

The members of the bill’s formulation group, however, had pledged to suppress amendments that cut at the core of the basic deal. For example, the late Paul Wellstone, a Democrat from Minnesota, failed in his attempt to defer the new annual testing requirements unless funding for compensatory education was tripled; Kennedy, Lieberman, and Bayh all voted against it. A small voucher pilot program was also defeated, 41-58, with 11 Republicans in the negative. Finally, on June 14, the bill was resoundingly approved, 91-8.

Like Gregg, John Boehner, the new chairman of the House Education and the Workforce committee, was an unlikely convert to an increased federal role in education, having previously urged elimination of the Department of Education. But Boehner was dedicated to cementing Bush’s disputed electoral victory with an undisputed legislative success, and he knew how to count. That is, he knew there were 30 to 40 House Republicans who would never support the sort of testing regime Bush had promised, especially without vouchers. Given the slim Republican majority in the House, the need for Democratic votes was simple fact. And for Democrats to support annual testing, the Republicans would need to give ground on vouchers and block grants.

An emblematic compromise in the House created “transferability,” which shifted spending discretion across the many different programs not just to states but to school districts as well. No one (outside the New Democrats, who proposed it) truly liked this; but Boehner was worried that planned efforts to add even the Senate’s pilot version of a block-grant program would scare off Democrats and scuttle the bill. The first committee roll call stripped vouchers from the draft; markup then had to be suspended so that Boehner, with Kress, could hold a closed-door meeting to mollify committee conservatives, promising a floor vote.

Boehner had achieved bipartisanship, as promised–the final committee vote was 41-7–but with a rather Democratic flavor. In general the president had no desire, as Undersecretary of Education Eugene Hickok later put it, “to sacrifice accountability on the altar of school choice.” This naturally upset those who felt that accountability required choice. GOP dissenters complained that “the bill . . . contains very few provisions of the president’s original proposals.”

The floor debate put those dueling definitions on display. Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., urging members to vote against a voucher amendment, argued, “This amendment has no accountability in it. We take the money with the voucher from the public school to a private school, and then there is no accountability there. No test, no trail, no nothing.” Majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, retorted, “We do not ask the Catholic schools to be accountable to the government, we ask them to be accountable to the parents.”

In the end, the committee bill passed the House largely intact. The attempts to add vouchers were defeated; so too, after intensive White House lobbying, was a coalition of the far Left and far Right (led by Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.) seeking to eliminate annual testing. The ultimate vote was lopsided 384-45, with Republicans making up three-quarters of the “no” votes. Still, holding a skittish membership together had been no easy task. And given the differences between the House and Senate, the task was far from over.

Conference Calls

During the summer of 2001, No Child Left Behind came under fire from all sides: from local officials who didn’t want national norms; from teacher unions that didn’t want mandatory testing; and from conservatives who thought that with vouchers dead the rest of the bill might as well be. The National Conference of State Legislatures called the bill’s testing provisions “seriously and perhaps irreparably flawed.” And new reports argued that both the House and Senate provisions for adequate yearly progress would result in a large number of schools’ being identified as failing. On Capitol Hill, House Republicans had calculated that with a Republican Senate they could gain back their concessions in conference, but now that chance was gone. Democrats began to wonder too: after all, didn’t the president need this bill more than they did?

The conference committee, then, had to repair the bill’s bipartisan armor–and bridge some 2,750 divergences between the House and Senate versions. It would not merely revise but rewrite many provisions that had been pushed through with the promise of a later “fix,” maximizing the remarkable degree of discretion delegated to congressional conferees.

During the summer recess, staff members representing all 39 members of the conference–the Senate, to represent its coalition’s various blocs, had named an astounding 25 conferees–met daily to hammer out more than 2,000 agreements. Even September 11 and the anthrax scare did not push No Child Left Behind off the agenda.

With periodic presidential exhortation, accountability provisions slowly took shape under the watchful eyes of the “Big Four”: Boehner, Miller, Kennedy, and Gregg. Language providing additional targeting of compensatory education funds to poor districts was approved. A pilot block-grant program was grafted to “transferability.” Final supplemental services language was developed. Extra money for charter schools was found (though money for special education was not; indeed, most of the Senate’s funding levels were slashed). Announced last, or nearly so, were the adequate yearly progress requirements. While the conference’s basic stance on this was in place by late September, it was kept quiet to allow additional tinkering and to avoid interest group pressure.

The final language required all students, in all groups, to reach proficiency within 12 years. However, it allowed districts to average results across three years. No punishment would be imposed on states for low test scores. And though Bush endorsed “an objective check on state accountability systems” (specifically naming NAEP), this issue was settled by requiring states to participate biennially in the 4th- and 8th-grade NAEP exams, but prohibiting penalties based on the states’ NAEP performance. These changes, though hardly satisfying all critics, made the final version more workable than either the House or Senate versions.

At once numbingly detailed and comfortably vague, the conference report was adopted by the House and Senate in December, with opposition again limited to an odd amalgam of the discontented far Left and far Right. The process, said Roemer, had “brought the middle together, and held it.” An impressive legislative victory was in place.

The Implementation Challenge

Many factors contributed to No Child Left Behind’s passage: the tentative alliance between moderate New Democrats and much of the Republican caucus; the need for the newly elected president to succeed on a campaign priority; Bush’s willingness to embrace Democratic positions and leaders; and the media attention that resulted from the debate’s “man bites dog” quality-a Republican president pushing a supposedly Democratic issue.

Cooperation among legislators was made possible by the willingness to move past divisive issues–itself possible because the conversation was newly framed by a common vocabulary centered on “accountability.” Accountability was hard to be against, but elastic. It served as a way for Democrats to talk about reform without simply talking about increased spending; it was also a selling point for additional resources, since ordinarily skeptical Republicans could console themselves that the new funds went to a system newly worthy of investment. While accountability was unproved as a reform tool, there was also no conclusive evidence that it did not work. In the absence of empiricism, aphorism took hold, as with Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s athletic metaphor: “If you want to win the football game, you have to first keep score.” How one defines accountability matters greatly in practice, but it proved to matter far less in politics-in other words, to the term’s usefulness in providing a unifying theme for the No Child Left Behind debate that could garner broad agreement in principle even when policy specifics proved elusive. The latter could be compromised or, as often happened, deferred from campaign to committee to floor to conference to implementation. But when the bill became law in 2002, it could be deferred no longer.

The compromises of No Child Left Behind avoided both extremes of the policy spectrum. Democrats, for example, resisted granting wide discretion to local districts on the one hand and to parents on the other. The number of categorical programs did not diminish significantly. In principle, public school choice has been greatly expanded, but it is not clear how well this will serve students in far-flung rural districts or in urban systems where most or all of the public schools are identified as needing improvement. And experimentation with voucher programs will have to await the baby steps of the supplemental services program and continued local efforts, albeit encouraged by the Supreme Court’s June 2002 Zelman decision.

Meanwhile, Republicans resisted efforts to require strong state accountability to the federal government. The first bullet point in the House fact sheet on the conference report trumpeted, “No National Tests.” There are no consequences linked to NAEP participation or for states that fail to attain adequate yearly progress. The text of the law left the states to set their definition of proficiency and to use their own assessments to measure it, leaving open the possibility that states will lower their expectations.

Both sides ducked the fact that the federal government is just a “7 percent investor” in a huge company owned by someone else, as Kress put it, referring to the fact that states and localities fund 93 percent of K-12 public education. This limits the degree of change the federal government can leverage. Even if it were willing to use its sticks, the Department of Education has small sticks to brandish. The law’s titular commitment to the success of every child made it hard to compromise on the adequate yearly progress requirements, but this does not make it feasible policy. During the next reauthorization, scheduled for 2007, a lower figure (90 percent?) may be substituted at the halfway point of the 12-year countdown to prevent states from lowering proficiency standards.

Of course, the passage of legislation does not end the story. The political compromises written into No Child Left Behind make the regulatory process crucial, even determinative, and here the secretary and the department are key actors. In a series of congressional hearings in 2002, the department touted its progress and promised to hold firm on enforcement in the face of skeptical Democratic questioning.

State flexibility has been granted in some areas. Draft rules on testing released in March 2002 indicated that states would be allowed to use different tests in different areas, potentially undercutting their comparability. The department also signaled a hands-off stance on judging the quality of state standards and assessments. The rules released in July 2002 allowed states to use either criterion-referenced tests linked to state standards or norm-referenced tests that measure how students perform compared with their peers, modified somewhat to reflect state standards. It remains unclear whether states will be forced to develop standards-driven tests or whether “augmented” commercial exams will be ultimately acceptable.

This flexibility suited the Bush administration’s interpretation of the law’s intent; in other areas, that interpretation was more stringent. In July 2002, for example, the department listed some 8,600 schools that had failed to meet state standards for two consecutive years. Under No Child Left Behind, students in those schools were to be offered the chance to attend a better-performing school in the district starting in September. In an October letter to state school chiefs, Paige warned that state plans to “ratchet down their standards in order to remove schools from their lists of low performers” were “nothing less than shameful.”

The final regulations were not released until late November 2002 in advance of a January 31, 2003, deadline for the submission of preliminary state plans to achieve adequate yearly progress toward full proficiency. While states remained worried that too many schools would be identified as failing and asked for additional leeway, the department continued to take a tough line. The first round of state plans (produced on time, though some were incomplete) varied wildly. Their specifics depended in large part on how stringently states defined proficiency and how closely the new law tracked existing requirements. Some states proposed complicated statistical techniques for gauging school progress; others backloaded their predicted progress, with far greater gains toward the end of the 12-year timeline. Most states, noted a January report by the Education Commission of the States, had a long way to go. And by spring, despite Paige’s warning, many states were trying to rework their standards to downgrade the definition of proficiency.

The early outcomes of the rulemaking process seemed to indicate the Bush administration was holding the line on its substantive priorities such as choice and assessments, giving the president a clearer legislative victory than it initially appeared. On the law’s first anniversary, Bush declared, “We can say that the work of reform is well begun.” George Miller, however, accused the administration of implementing regulations in a manner “inconsistent with the way the law was approved by Congress” and called Bush a “truant from sound education policy.”

This opening chasm means many questions remain as the story continues. How will the secretary balance state experimentation and national rigor? Budget issues are a prominent part of the equation: while Democrats were satisfied with the funding levels provided in fiscal year 2002, this was not true for fiscal 2003 or 2004. Complicated by revenue shortfalls and budget cutbacks in many states, the funding/mandate balance promises to be an ongoing source of friction. Furthermore, as the scene shifts to the states and the bureaucracies, interest groups–surprisingly dormant in the narrative above–may reassert themselves. One target may be the testing regime itself, if states (and key suburban voters) continue to gripe.

John Adams once observed that “the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.” More than two centuries later, that is how government still works, even in the textbooks. For the students in America’s public schools, the ways in which No Child Left Behind is implemented will determine how government works in real life.

Andrew Rudalevige is assistant professor of political science at Dickinson College. This essay is adapted from Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West, eds., No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of Accountability, forthcoming from the Brookings Institution Press.

Though the federal government is the driving force behind NCLB, the states will ultimately be responsible for its outcome. A critical provision requires every state education department to develop and implement an annual accountability plan. Beginning with the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, each state was required to devise a substantive definition of the skills and knowledge that a child should learn in each grade. States were then to develop tests to examine whether schools and students are meeting the standards. Starting with the 2005-06 school year, NCLB requires that states administer reading and mathematics tests annually in grades 3 through 8. By 2007-08 states will need to assess achievement in science as well. Within 12 years, states are expected to have all their students performing at an academically proficient level in core subject areas.

Each state, district, and school under NCLB will be expected to register “adequate yearly progress” toward meeting these goals. Progress is to be measured both for all students and for students disaggregated into various subgroups, including disadvantaged students, those with limited English proficiency, students with disabilities, and those from racial or ethnic minority populations.

School performance will be publicly reported via state, district, and school “report cards.” Schools that do not achieve adequate yearly progress will be subject to increasingly stringent sanctions-notifying all parents of the failure, allowing students to switch schools, and ultimately reorganizing under new leadership. Districts failing to make adequate progress face similar sanctions imposed by states.

Meeting these requirements will pose a major challenge for states lacking much experience with accountability. A recent Education Commission of the States report indicates that just 15 states currently have testing programs that conform to the new requirements (see Figure 1). Many more lack the infrastructure needed to support the level of data collection, disaggregation, and reporting that the new law requires.

Achieving full compliance with the new law may prove a less formidable task in states like Texas and North Carolina, where mature accountability systems are already in place. However, already having some type of accountability structure in place could turn out to be a mixed blessing. In some cases, the challenge may be to sustain whatever public acceptance a previous statewide accountability effort has garnered while making the changes necessary to make it compliant with the new federal guidelines.

The Education Commission of the States has developed a unique database that identifies the extent to which each of the 50 states is meeting the law’s requirements. Using the database, we calculated a national average score for NCLB compliance and then assigned each of the 50 states to one of three categories: 1) high-readiness, 2) mid-readiness, and 3) lower-readiness. From these three groupings, we selected three high-readiness states, two mid-readiness states, and three lower-readiness states as case studies. Florida, New York, and Texas fell into the first category; California and South Carolina represented the second; and Missouri, New Hampshire, and Washington the third. Collectively these eight states educate more than 18 million children, nearly 40 percent of the country’s school population.

In an effort to identify where individual states are situated as they attempt to conform to the new legislation, we conducted informal, open-ended, structured interviews with key policymakers in each of these states. The aim was to understand their perceptions or estimations of their readiness for NCLB, to hear about the challenges they have confronted, their chief concerns, the degree to which popular support exists for enhanced accountability, opposition (if any) to statewide testing programs, and other salient features of each state’s situation.

New Politics

Our sample of states ranges from Texas, which for obvious reasons was the inspiration for NCLB’s view of accountability, to New Hampshire, which has yet to even begin rating schools based on their performance. States like Texas and California have more than a decade of experience with assessment and accountability, while Missouri and New Hampshire have only recently been pulled into the standards-based reform movement by federal mandates.

Nevertheless, our interviews with state officials showed that policymakers are confident about their state’s ability to comply with the law, though some are more ready than others. Making things easier, state officials report, is the steady subsiding of organized group opposition to school accountability in most of these states. “The naysayers are falling off now and people are realizing that reform and accountability are good things,” said Rob MacGregor, Washington State’s assistant superintendent for school improvement. This partially reflects the fact that most states had accepted the ideas that schools should be held responsible for student performance and that results from standardized tests should play a large role in determining consequences (to view the consequences for schools failing to make adequate yearly progress, see Figure 2). Consider that before the passage of NCLB, 30 states had already developed and implemented statewide school rating programs that were in place during the 2002-03 school year. Other states were in the midst of developing programs that will start up in the next year or two.

In states where accountability had yet to take root, the federal legislation seems to have changed the political landscape. For example, in New Hampshire, a state with a long history of local control, legislators had failed on several occasions to pass accountability legislation. NCLB speeded things along immensely. By early 2003, state officials had proposed accountability legislation that passed the state senate and as of May was under consideration by the state house of representatives’ finance committee. Once enacted, it was expected to open the door for the development of a true statewide accountability system. Paul Ezen, deputy commissioner for the New Hampshire Department of Education, says that NCLB supported the direction “that both the state board and the legislature have been trying to go in the past.”

In other states, NCLB has in a strange way brought local and state-level policymakers together. For example, teacher groups in California had previously voiced discomfort with the state’s accountability program and Academic Performance Index for all schools. Now, with the requirements of NCLB looming, many one-time critics express their affection for the performance index. To some extent, federal policymakers are playing the “bad guy,” making state-level requirements appear far more reasonable in those states with longstanding accountability systems.

Of course, not everyone is breaking bread, and opposition is coming from some surprising sources. In New York, well-publicized boycotts of state tests have been organized in wealthy, high-performing suburbs of New York City like Scarsdale. In South Carolina, too, Jo Anne Anderson, executive director of the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee, reports, “We still get most of our grumbling from suburban systems that expect higher ratings than the system shows.” Ira Schwartz, New York State’s coordinator for administrative accountability and policy, contrasted suburban opposition with support from large urban districts, which he felt welcomed an accountability system that gave them “an opportunity to demonstrate their progress and some of their successes, even though they are the ones that typically have the most schools at risk.”

Nonetheless, widespread support for accountability could crumble under the increasing financial pressures facing the states. Nearly all of the officials we spoke with expressed strong concerns that NCLB demands increased expectations and efforts at a time when districts are experiencing budgetary shortfalls and even staff reductions. Nowhere was this problem more evident than in New Hampshire, which boasts a well-known state law forbidding “unfunded mandates.” The school superintendents association has published a widely disseminated report highlighting the “hidden costs” of NCLB, estimating that for every $70 of federal funds coming in, it would cost $570 of state monies to comply with the law. “You can’t mandate anything without paying for it,” says New Hampshire’s Ezen. “That’s going to be a real trigger for us. I think if the [hidden] cost issue continues to eat away at people, that may be the stumbling block.”

Officials in other states hypothesized that reluctant educators have thus far cooperated with accountability requirements in return for the promise of financial assistance for both high-performing and low-performing schools. However, if the state is unable to deliver its end of the bargain, support for accountability is likely to suffer.

Protests

Support for NCLB is by no means universal among state officials. Interestingly, it was the education officials from states with more “mature” accountability systems who expressed the most detailed reservations about NCLB. While policymakers in some states struggle to get their assessments and ratings systems off the ground, high-readiness states worry about technical issues related to schools’ ability to meet their targets for adequate yearly progress. For instance, officials in Florida, a high-readiness state where the “A+ Accountability System” doles out vouchers to students in low-performing schools, doubt that states can meet NCLB’s long-term proficiency goals. John Winn, Florida’s deputy commissioner for accountability research and measurement, says, “No Child Left Behind has to change. . . . The biggest disconnect that has to be addressed is this expectation of 100 percent proficiency after 12 years.” Florida, he noted, is a rapid-growth state, experiencing a constant influx of immigrants lacking English proficiency. The expectation that schools can achieve complete proficiency under conditions that are by no means under the state’s control is unrealistic. For Winn, a better alternative would be to base accountability not on a student’s academic “status” at any one point in time, but instead on documented “growth” in achievement.

While Bill Padia, director of the policy and evaluation division at the California Department of Education, thinks California’s state accountability plan is “relatively close” to full NCLB compliance, he too reports that California educators are skeptical of a system where “you just raise the bar every year and the bar will be up at 100 percent in 12 years.” Of special concern are simulations showing that within five to six years, practically every school in the state would fail to meet the progress requirement. “If you’re going to tell 89 to 95 percent of the schools that you’re not making it,” says Padia, “what good is it to have accountability?” Striking a similar note, South Carolina education official Jo Anne Anderson asked, “Will people just roll their eyes and see it as a meaningless expectation, or will they really roll up their sleeves and think we’ve got to do something about this?” Given the potential for large numbers of schools to fall short of adequate yearly progress goals in many states, several officials questioned the viability of the school choice provisions of NCLB. After all, if nearly all schools in California are labeled as failing in a few years, what choices will the students and parents have?

Officials in low-readiness states expressed some concerns about these issues as well. Rob MacGregor of Washington State presides over a system that, while it has assessments in place, does not formally rank all of the schools in the state-only the low performers are identified. Yet he still harbors doubts about NCLB’s long-term prospects, at least in its current form. “Based on the idea that a school has to fail to meet [progress goals] for two consecutive years, we can project that . . . we’ll probably have 90 schools in school improvement next year. Then, the following year, there will probably be 450 or more. And we may have more in the coming years.” He said it was possible that a rigorously enforced NCLB would drive people out of their careers in education. “I hope we don’t have good people leaving the profession,” he remarked.

Tripped Up

One challenge that officials in high-readiness states routinely cite is their ability to change mature accountability systems that took years of hard-fought political battles to create. Such officials oversee systems with well-established regulations and procedures and are understandably reluctant to overhaul them. They are also concerned that asking teachers to buy into yet another shift in policy will undermine the credibility of state department of education officials themselves. “All that we ask,” said New York official Ira Schwartz, “is that we be given sufficient flexibility so that we can meet the spirit of No Child Left Behind without having to dismantle what we think is, and what has been judged by others to be, a very effective system of standards, assessment, and accountability.”

There could be many circumstances, officials noted, in which schools that score high on state systems fail to meet NCLB’s requirements for progress. One of the key reasons for a possible disconnect is the law’s requirement that not only the entire school but also racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups within the school make adequate yearly progress. This method of calculating a school’s progress has been referred to as a “trip wire” system, in which poor performance by one subgroup in one subject area can “trip up” an entire school. Paul Ezen of New Hampshire asked, “Is the special ed population in the school going to throw a school into [adequate yearly progress] failure when the majority of the student body is making the goal?” According to NCLB, the answer is yes, and this worries many policymakers. They believe that progress among all student subgroups in a school is an important goal, but that this measure of performance is bound to be problematic, especially in an ethnically diverse state like California, where subgroups within a school can number in the double digits. In such circumstances, it is difficult to avoid statistical “mischief” and false negatives because test scores can bounce around from year to year for reasons other than genuine changes in student achievement.

One subgroup that has raised particular concern is students with limited English proficiency (LEP). Criss Cloudt, associate commissioner for accountability reporting and research in the Texas Education Agency, said, “The problem with the LEP group is that, once those students become proficient, they exit the group.” The natural question is, how will that subgroup of students meet the performance targets when students who score at proficient levels are quickly taken from the group?

A related concern of policymakers is whether federal officials will get involved in the setting of proficiency levels. A clear incentive exists for states to set these levels low so as to avoid failure on the scale noted above. The state officials we interviewed indicated that their states had high proficiency standards and were not likely to lower them simply to increase their chances of meeting federal guidelines. However, the possibility of this type of gamesmanship is real and should be watched carefully.

In addition, a few states that have embraced accountability have the technological capacity to assess schools’ performance on the basis of the degree to which individual students improve each year. For example, a few states use longitudinal growth models that, in as careful a way as possible, measure the “value added” by a given school in the course of a year. Clearly, such a model does a better job of measuring school “effectiveness” than a model that simply provides a snapshot of the percentage of students scoring above a given benchmark. Ironically, however, it is not clear that these growth models would fulfill the more simplistic federal requirements for adequate yearly progress, which dictate that the performance of students at each grade level be measured against a fixed standard of proficiency. Should these states have to discard their existing system and move toward one that is more likely to fulfill federal requirements but is less desirable according to most experts in testing and measurement? Of particular concern are states such as North Carolina that use scaled scores to measure students’ academic growth longitudinally across the entire spectrum of student performance. Would we want to discourage a system that provides incentives to pay attention to students at all levels of proficiency in favor of one that might encourage educators to focus exclusively on those students near proficiency cutoff scores?

In California, Padia reports, a consensus has emerged in favor of trying to make NCLB work, but without necessarily sacrificing valuable features of the state’s existing accountability system. However, with regard to adequate yearly progress, state officials do not expect a great deal of flexibility from federal officials and have conceded that their current accountability measure, the Academic Performance Index, is not likely to meet federal regulations. As a result, California intends to overlay federal requirements onto its own system.

Bert Schulte of Missouri’s Division of School Improvement predicts that his state will make adequate yearly progress simply another indicator of school performance within the present accountability system. The aim, Schulte explained, is “to marry what we’re doing with the No Child Left Behind expectations as fully as possible . . . and not let the No Child Left Behind process serve as a trump card that overrides a lot of the things that we already have in place.”

A common perception in education circles is that there is no need to take any particular reform effort too seriously, if only because in short order it will be supplanted by something else. If this is not to be NCLB’s fate, some measure of accommodation from the federal government will be critically important. State education officials-many of them, at any rate-have labored diligently to persuade teachers and school administrators (groups typically not strongly in favor of testing initiatives) to support the strengthening of accountability measures. Care must be taken, then, not to interpret and apply NCLB in ways that diminish the credibility of its strongest supporters. Remember that some of the gravest concerns come from officials in states like Texas, New York, and Florida-states that are already the vanguard of the accountability movement. It seems important that their efforts not be inadvertently thwarted by the imposition of federal strictures they simply cannot accommodate. As Texas’s Criss Cloudt put it, “I’m hoping [federal officials] will find some ways to give . . . states greater flexibility, particularly those that have a demonstrated track record of holding schools accountable.”

While flexibility is key to the successful implementation of No Child Left Behind, states must remain true to the law’s intent. So far, the news is mixed on this front. The good news is that, in a Rose Garden press conference held on June 10, President Bush celebrated the approval of all the states’ accountability plans. Each plan outlines how the state will meet the requirement for adequate yearly progress, leading to the ultimate goal of 100 percent proficiency by the year 2012.

Whether these plans will leap from paper to practice remains to be seen. But already there is evidence that federal officials are not holding the line on key NCLB requirements. Iowa, for example, still has no statewide academic standards or benchmarks. If the Department of Education is not defending No Child Left Behind at the planning stage, what will happen when it comes time to enforce its full-scale implementation? Moreover, if federal officials are seen as being flexible with states that ignore the spirit of the law, while officials in other states are dutifully modifying long-existing accountability programs to conform with the technical details of NCLB, much credibility will be lost.

-Gary W. Ritter is an assistant professor of education and public policy, and Christopher J. Lucas a professor of education, at the University of Arkansas.