A Smarter Mind than Mine Takes on NCLB

My topic today is the No Child Left Behind Act. A bi-partisan Congress and the President approved the act in January, 2002. Most observers regard it as one of the most important pieces of education legislation in many years. President Bush described his signing of the Act as the most significant educational event since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Act is sweeping in its aims and provisions. It contains hundreds of detailed pages; the table of contents alone runs to 29 pages. A year and a half later we are still trying to understand its many implications and effects. The Act includes provisions on such matters as the teaching of reading, family literacy, delinquency and dropout prevention, advanced placement programs, teacher training, civic education, the teaching of traditional American history, language instruction for immigrant students, charter schools, counseling programs, economic education, arts in education, women’s equity, environmental tobacco smoke, and school prayer. For our purposes today, however, we shall focus upon the Act’s core strategy of standards, testing, and accountability.

The law requires the states to adopt a specific approach to testing and accountability. The federal government has assumed a more forceful role in elementary and secondary education, one that makes unprecedented demands on states and local school districts to raise academic achievement and to take direct action to improve poorly performing schools.
States must adopt challenging standards in reading and mathematics, annual testing for all students in grades 3-8, and annual statewide progress objectives ensuring that all groups of students reach proficiency within twelve years. Assessment results and State progress objectives must be broken out by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and limited English proficiency to ensure that no group is left behind. The test results will be used to hold educators, schools, districts and students themselves accountable for academic achievement.

States are required to follow a precise timeline to close achievement gaps between different racial, ethnic, and income groups, and other groups noted above. Beginning after school year 2001-2002, states have twelve years to move all groups of students to the benchmark set by the state for proficiency in mathematics and reading. States must set regular targets for increasing achievement over that period, using as a starting level the average achievement of the lowest performing group of students or schools in the state.

Each school must test at least 95% of its students, and each group of students in a school must meet or exceed the annual objectives set for them. Students that do not reach state performance objectives will be subject to various forms of assistance, intervention, and other actions, depending on how long the failure persists.

If a school fails to meet performance objectives for two consecutive years, then it must receive technical assistance from the district to help it improve, and its students will have the option to transfer to another public school in the district.
In the third consecutive year of failure, technical assistance to the school and public school choice will continue. In addition, students will have the option of using their share of Title I funds to pay for tutoring and other supplemental educational services either from their own school or from a state-approved outside group, such as a for-profit company or a private non-profit entity.

In the fourth consecutive year, technical assistance, public school choice, and supplemental services will continue, but the failing school must also change its staffing or make another fundamental change.

In the fifth consecutive year, the governance of the failing school must be changed – for example, by converting it to a charter school, turning it over to a private management company, or having the state take it over.

Obviously, the Act creates a far more aggressive (some would say intrusive) role for the Federal government in a sphere of activity traditionally reserved to localities and the states. For much of our history, its provisions would have been unthinkable. (Consider the remarkable fact that the Act is supported by the same Republican party that a scant twenty years ago sought to abolish the federal Department of Education.) Our task today is to look at what is good about the Act, to understand some of the problematic issues it has raised, and to think about ways to realize the Act’s positive effects while minimizing the problems it creates.

To whet your appetite I have distributed a mini-case study scenario. It doesn’t deal with the Act per se, but it raises many of the same issues, and is a contemporary drama torn from the searing pages of the New York press. Our goal in discussing it is not to reach agreement on how to solve the problem, but to get some issues on the table and stimulate your thinking about them.

(Mini-case study: Setting the Cut-Off Score)

I realize that we have opened a discussion, not concluded it. But for the time being let’s put it aside while I talk about the NCLB Act itself. I hope we’ll have time for questions or comments before we finish at 5:00.

According to Jack Jennings, the Act has two major purposes: to raise student achievement across the board and to eliminate the achievement gap between groups of students from different backgrounds. To accomplish these ends, the law requires states and school districts to deal forcefully with schools that are not improving achievement and to ensure that all students are taught by highly qualified teachers. “In our opinion,” Jennings writes, “these are worthy goals for the country.” Indeed they are. So far, so good.

And there is more with which one can readily agree. NCLB attempts to achieve its goals through standards, testing, and
accountability. I believe in high standards. As Commissioner I did my part to introduce high standards in New York State and served for a time as chair of the board of the national New Standards project.

New high standards can improve education in a number of ways. First, they can promote greater clarity of purpose, a more specific understanding of what students should come to know and be able to do. In the past, we have sometimes been guilty of fuzziness. We require “three years” of math, but we don’t spell out what three years of math means. How do we know when English 9 is over? Because it’s June, that’s how. We should do better than that. In some schools and districts new standards are providing structure and direction to programs that have lacked it, and are focusing attention on what needs to be taught and what needs to be learned.

Second, the new standards can provide greater quality of purpose. All along the spectrum of academic achievement we are selling many students short by not demanding enough of them. If we frame standards and assessments that require students not only to learn facts, but to apply their knowledge, raise new questions, and think with what they are learning as well as memorize it, we can go a long way toward improving the quality of their education.

Third, new standards can promote greater equity of purpose. No more dual systems: first-class standards for those in favored socioeconomic conditions and lower standards for those less well off. Having two sets of standards – one for the have’s and the other for the have-not’s – is undemocratic and unfair.

And fourth, new standards can promote greater consistency of purpose. We are, after all, one society, and there is a legitimate state and perhaps national interest in promoting a certain level of education for all. We are also a mobile society, and the education our children receive in one community should prepare them for life in all the other communities and states in which they may spend their adult years.

So I believe in standards. I also believe in testing and accountability. Tests can give us helpful information about how students are doing, and all of us should be accountable for meeting our responsibilities in the education process. The question for me is not whether we should have standards, testing, and accountability. The question is what kind of standards, testing, and accountability shall we have?


And that’s where the rub is.

What accounts for the developing opposition to this program of standards and testing? That a backlash has begun is undeniable. The Washington Star Tribune reported in May that “Only a year after President Bush signed the Act into law, Washington is hearing cries for relief. In Montana, Republican Governor Judy Martz told Congress that the state can’t meet the requirements without some flexibility. In Alaska, the State Board of Education passed a resolution asking for help after discovering ‘compliance difficulties.’ And in Nebraska, a showdown is brewing, with officials warning that the plan will overload public schools. On Capitol Hill, four U.S. senators – including Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota – are promoting a bill that would allow states and school districts to get waivers from the requirements.

"Reflecting the growing disenchantment with the new law," the Star Tribune continues, "the flexibility bill has won the backing of the National PTA and groups representing school administrators, principals and social workers. It has been referred to the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for consideration."

NCLB, as we noted, was enacted with bipartisan backing. However, many prominent Democrats have since withdrawn their support. For example, Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri recently described the Act as “a phony gimmick.” Many in the academic community have spoken out against it. Robert Linn, the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association, has said that “The severe sanctions (called for by the law) may hinder educational excellence because they implicitly encourage states to water down their content and performance standards in order to reduce the risk of sanction.” Richard Elmore of Harvard has called NCLB “the single largest, and the single most damaging, expansion of federal power over the nation’s education system in history.”

The criticism is not limited to an elite few. In schools and districts across the country parents and teachers have expressed their concern in a variety of ways, ranging from stiff questions at PTA meetings to statewide boycotts of certain tests. On May 31 the Washington Post reported that “the latest generation of high school exit exams is stirring a backlash across the country. Legislators in a growing number of states, including Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, California, and North Carolina are facing pressure to delay or scrap the tests because of the number of students who are failing them.” (We talked about such a situation in New York earlier this afternoon.)

So we are faced with a question: if the Act’s purposes are unassailable (and they are), and if the majority of Americans want standards and testing (as polls tell us they do), how does one explain this backlash from such a substantial minority, a backlash that is nation-wide, well-informed, increasingly organized, and adamant?

I offer three sets of reasons for your consideration. Let’s think of them as start-up problems, implementation problems, and conceptual problems – the latter arising from the Act’s limited understanding of teaching and learning. (My computer would call these conceptual problems “fatal error” problems.)

That there would be start-up problems was inevitable. NCLB is a prodigious undertaking, fraught with political complexities, daunting problems of scale, and endless possibilities for things to go wrong. Murphy’s Law asserted itself. In some cases, tests were not aligned with standards. (This problem is not yet entirely resolved.) In some cases, the assessment companies, their resources stretched thin, failed to produce results on time. In some cases, results came in on time but were the wrong results – much to the dismay of those who were told erroneously that they had to go to summer school, that they could not graduate from high school, or that they no longer had a job. In some cases, the tests were too hard (or the cut-off scores were set too high). In some cases, the tests were too easy (or the cut-off scores were set too low). In one case the tests rewrote literature with inspired political correctness, excising any references to Jewish people from a story written by Isaac Bashevis Singer about Jewish people. It would be easy to ridicule such lapses, but doing so (with the possible exception of the bowdlerized New York State Regents exams) would be a cheap shot. As I said, start-up problems were inevitable; they are no reason for criticizing the essence of the program.

Of more importance are the problems of implementation. There is no way to bring all students to high levels of achievement and to eliminate the gaps between higher-scoring and lower-scoring groups without providing the needed financial resources, developing the needed professional capacity, and allowing the needed time. NCLB does none of the above, or egregiously not enough of it. Some supporters of the NCLB initiative seem to believe that all we need to do to achieve the desired outcomes is to legislate them. In their view, there is no need to find new resources or develop capacity; raising scores is simply a matter of will. Set the standards, test the students, report the results, kick ass and take names, and people will shape up.

But while money won’t do the job alone, it is impossible to do the job without it. As Jack Jennings wrote last year, "President Bush has proposed a modest 2.8 percent budget increase for education in fiscal year 2003, which falls well short of what will be needed for states and school districts to carry out the requirements of the new law, making it an 'unfunded mandate' for states. Meanwhile, the worst economic downturn in a decade has led governors and lawmakers to slash their education budgets, leading to significant cutbacks in staff and funding." As Michael Rebell’s triumph in the CFE case has established, the state must provide the conditions necessary for students to achieve the sound, basic education to which they are entitled. To require students to meet high standards and deprive them of the means for attaining them is stupid, wrong, and, at least in NY State, unlawful.

Many of the supporters of the Act similarly slight the need to develop the professional capacity of teachers and other school workers. We are asking teachers to do something we – or perhaps any large and diverse society – have never done: to raise all students to a high level of academic achievement. It is not entirely clear that we know how to do this. But the assumption made by NCLB is that teachers know perfectly well what to do and how to do it, but for some perverse reason resist doing so. Thus we need to test their students more often and hold the results up to public scrutiny. That will get them to teach better.

I guess if you’re one of McGregor’s Theory X people you might believe that. But I don’t. I side with those who say that most teachers want to succeed, and that you don’t fatten the hog by weighing it. Teachers need time and support to acquire the new skills, knowledge and habits they need to achieve the ambitious agenda we have set. We would not attempt a military campaign without training our armed forces, and we should not attempt an educational campaign without preparing our teaching staff to do the job.

And then we must be realistic about time. Schools are not fast-food establishments. They work in their steady way season after season, year after year. Progress is not linear, as the Act seems to contemplate. It is episodic, re-cycling and cumulative. Spurts of growth alternate with placid periods; we teach not only by imparting but by cultivating the strength that unfolds from within. The whole process takes time. Educating a group of children is like nurturing a garden; things need to be tended steadily and slowly, and it doesn’t help to pull them up by the roots and measure them too often. Recently I watched a public television program about migratory animals. It seems that every year millions of monarch butterflies leave their home in Mexico and fly northward into the North American continent, heading for the cooler climes of the upper middle west and Canada. The trip takes thousand of miles, and no one butterfly makes the whole distance. Instead they fly northward, pause, lay eggs, and die. The larvae pupate, morph, take wing, and fly farther northward. It takes three generations of butterflies to make the trip. We should embrace that wisdom. The schools will not reach their intended destination within the term of any single president or Congressperson or state education commissioner. The policy clock and the pedagogical clock are not synchronized. Let’s understand that truth, and quiet our rhetoric down. The question is not only did the scores go up this year; it is whether we have persisted in our journey, noting progress, but respecting at all times the nature of butterflies and flight.

So there have been start-up problems and problems of implementation, and they help to explain why a strong backlash has developed. But there is a third category of problems, problems more fundamental because they have to do with the ideas themselves. I have said that I believe in standards. They are a good idea. But history teaches us that every good idea contains the seeds of its own heresy. And I believe that in many places and many ways standards and testing as now implemented are a heretical distortion of the original intent.

First, one of the goals of the standards movement is to strengthen the curriculum. But in many places we are pursuing standards and accountability in such a way that we are dumbing down the curriculum. We are limiting what we teach (and what students learn) to the skills and knowledge we can easily measure, and, as Alfie Kohn says, “We are being sold a bill of goods when it comes to talking about tougher standards for our schools. The standards movement is pushing teachers and students to focus on memorizing information, then regurgitating fact for high test scores. The shift is away from teaching students to be thinkers who can make sense of what they’re learning.” In many places, all learning activity is focused on the test. In these places, children no longer read literature – they read disconnected passages and answer practice questions based upon them. They fill in the blanks, memorize facts, and choose a, b, c, or all of the above. No more creative writing. No more reading for enjoyment. It is precisely the best of educational practice that gets crowded out in the frenzy to teach to these tests.


Second, at a time when we should be opening doors to the future, we are fossilizing an obsolete curriculum and the kind of teaching practice that goes with it. As Marion Brady has written,

There is almost no dialogue about fundamental curricular issues because it seems to be widely assumed that there are no serious problems with the traditional curriculum. What should the young be taught? Without hesitation, policy makers and politicians answer, "They should be taught what those of us who are educated know." This is the philosophical underpinning of the latest educational fad: the standards movement.

Enter, center stage, the people Susan Ohanian has called the "Standardistos." No need, in the Standardisto view, to identify and clarify an overarching reason to educate. No need to decide what new knowledge belongs in the curriculum. No need to agree on what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. No need to weigh the merit of alternative ways of organizing knowledge. No need to introduce students to the integrated, mutually supportive nature of all knowledge. From the Standardisto perspective, all that is necessary is to determine what most "well-educated" people know, organize it, distribute it to the schools, and demand that teachers teach it and students learn it. In the name of reform, the Standardistos are freezing in bureaucratic place the worst aspects of traditional education.

I don’t pretend to know the "right" way to define and organize a curriculum for this new century – if there is a single "right way" – but I know that what we are doing now is not the only way. The current orthodoxy stifles creative thinking about the possibilities. Nowadays we reward school people not for creativity, but for compliance.

We used to talk about "top-down support for bottom-up reform." Today we look for "bottom-up support for top-down reform." It won’t work.

Third, some people seem to confuse standards with standardization. Yes, we should all aspire to the same goals and measure our progress by the same broad standards. But that doesn’t mean that all students should pursue the same curriculum in the same way, and spend our time preparing to take the same tests. In a state as large and diverse as New York, for example, it makes no sense to ask every one to do the same things in the same way. What works in Bensonhurst may not work in Buffalo, and so on. Curriculum and teaching should be shaped to fit the needs and circumstances of students with differing needs and backgrounds in differing kinds of peer cultures and communities. But in many states the new testing programs define precisely and completely what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, and how it is to be measured, imposing a stifling uniformity of practice. I don’t think we know enough to justify such demands. I have served at the local level, and I have served in Albany, and I am here to tell you that the folks on high have no monopoly on knowledge of best practice. We should be encouraging the imagination and creativity of our best practitioners, not stifling it. Cliché or not, one size does not fit all.

Fourth, in many places we are doing students an injustice by making their future depend on a single high-stakes test. Standardized tests can provide useful information, but they should not be the only way we measure students’ progress. Students should have many different ways to show their learning, with many different kinds of evidence. We should heed the advice of the recent National Research Council study on this matter: High-stakes decisions such as tracking, promotion, and graduation should not automatically be made on the basis of a single test score but should be buttressed by other relevant information about the student’s knowledge and skills, such as grades, teacher recommendations, and extenuating circumstances.

Fifth, we do not give all students adequate opportunities to learn the material they need to know in order to pass the tests. We say we believe in equality of educational opportunity, but we all know we don’t have it. Some students have access to well-trained teachers, appropriate curricula, up-to-date learning material. Some don’t. Those who don’t are usually poor and disproportionately of color. You don’t need to take my word for it . Listen once again to what trial court Judge Leland DeGrasse said in the CFE case:

The court holds that the education provided New York City students is so deficient that it falls below the constitutional floor set by the Education Article of the New York State Constitution.

The Court of Appeals has agreed.

A sixth heresy, another unintended consequence of the standards movement, is the shift in the locus of policy decision-making from local school districts to the state and federal government. More and more of the shots are being called from Washington and Albany and Sacramento and Boston. As governors and legislatures, as well as state boards and education departments – not to mention the President and the Congress - take an active role in determining education policy, the more vulnerable our tradition of "local control" of education seems to be. It is true that our system has never been purely local; and we do have an informal, de facto national system of education set by textbook publishers, schools of education, professional associations, and the dead hand of past practice. Perhaps our society has grown so complicated and interconnected that an overhaul of our governance structure is needed. But before we mindlessly jettison the decentralized system of the past, we ought to think a bit about its virtues. I would argue that for all its acknowledged shortcomings, our "loosely coupled" system has kept the people closer to the schools than, say, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Certainly it has prevented demagogic individuals and groups from seizing authority over the school curriculum. But with the centralization of power in state capitols – for that is where the standards are being set and the tests that determine curriculum mandated – the danger of politicizing the schools is heightened. Few things are more important than what our children learn in school; we ought to think twice before we surrender our policy-making influence to people more remote from our lives. Just when did the people in local school districts decide to forfeit their right to help shape curriculum policy? When did we decide to transfer power to the state?

The seventh heresy is the apparent belief that the sole purpose of education is academic achievement. High marks, good test scores – that’s all that matters. No one denies the central importance of academic achievement in school. But it is not all that matters, not now and not historically. Schools are places where children come together to learn, and it turns out that the coming together is as important as the learning. Or rather, the coming together enables learning of a different kind – establishing an identity among peers, taking responsibility for one’s actions, learning to tolerate and maybe appreciate diversity, balancing one’s own interests and desires with a sense of the common good. A good education helps children become competent, wise, and just. Competence alone is not enough. Our education reform efforts need to be informed by a deeper and more spacious conception of teaching and learning. Reducing the potential richness of a child’s education to a standardized test score is indeed heretical.

What then should we do? How can we shape the standards/assessment movement so that we realize its promise without accepting its unfortunate, unintended side-effects? Surely there must be a sane middle ground between accepting a narrow orthodoxy on the one hand, and seeing the movement collapse of its own weight on the other.

I believe a sane middle course can be found. I can only outline it in the time available; I leave it to you to pursue it in your own work over the coming months and years. Here are a few suggestions:

Limit state (and federal) standards to a tight, essential core of the curriculum. Do not try to set standards for all subjects in all grades. Balance central consistency with local autonomy.

Write the standards to emphasize depth of instruction as well as breadth. The goal is understanding and application, not mere recognition. Dropping names at cocktail parties is not the hallmark of a good education. Raising important questions and knowing how to pursue them is.

Assess academic progress in multiple ways. Make no more high-stakes decisions on the basis one test. Students should have many different ways to demonstrate what they have learned. The more rich and varied the curriculum, the more rich and varied the assessment program should be.

Reduce the amount of testing. The tail should not wag the dog. Make greater use of program evaluation through sampling. Stress the importance of teachers’ grades as well as standardized testing.

Fund the program adequately. No, money alone won’t do it. But without money it can’t be done. (Do we have to have this discussion every time money comes up?)

Provide time and other support for developing the capacity of teachers. Tests don’t teach children – teachers do.

As Jennings said, be flexible and sensitive to the complex and varying circumstances found in states and school districts. Don’t treat all schools the same. The goal is quality, not uniformity.

Develop an attitude of purposeful patience. Lower the rhetoric and immediate expectations. Work hard, but understand that the job well may last beyond your own horizon. Remember the monarch butterflies.

Can we do these things? I think so. Will we do them? I am not sure. The political tides have been running against the kind of education many of us value, and relief is not yet clearly in sight. I suspect that in the end, much may depend on you, because it is your generation that will have to come to terms with these issues.

Coda

Meanwhile, I hope that these few ideas make sense to you, and that you will be influenced by them as you continue your own education and shape the education of others. I acknowledge that I have little faith in our plans and strategies to bring about quickly the conditions we want. The world changes too rapidly for linear thought to catch it; all schemes seem out of date, all solutions contextual and temporary.

But the outlook for the future is more promising. My wife says I’m becoming a cynic, but she’s only partly right. I’m a short-term cynic but a long-term idealist. I think that great things are possible if we remember who we are and what we’re about. Over the past six months I have delighted in the growth of my ninth grandson, Colin. I have watched the squint leave his eyes as they gradually opened, his hands reach out until they could grasp, the smile of recognition freely given, his sitting up and turning over, the resonance with which he greets your mood, the joy of each new taste or sensation. Cliché or not, it is indeed a miracle. Aristotle was right: all men by nature desire to know. I ask myself, what do I want for Colin, and what by extension do I want for all children? I want him to grow strong in an environment blessed by love; I want him to discover his powers and use them fully; I want him to taste life and live it joyously; I want him to live decently and productively among others and his surroundings; I want him to understand all he is capable of understanding, give all he is capable of giving, live as fully as he is capable of living.

All of this is a long way off from standardized test scores. But as I watch him grow while I decline, something I cannot name tells me that this is what life and education are about. Walt Whitman said it best:

There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

May the child in you go forth to spacious tomorrows, and may those you serve and lead look upon you and be touched by your loving spirit and useful hand.