Naming President George W. Bush’s signature education law the “No Child Left Behind Act” was one of the greatest strokes of political branding in modern U.S. history.
To oppose the law was to be OK with leaving some children behind. Who could be in favor of that?
No matter that the law mandates that every single child in a school — special education, non-English speakers, students who just showed up at the schoolhouse door the day before testing – must, by next year, be “proficient” on standardized reading and math tests.
Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” toward that goal are publicly branded as such. If the school is one that gets federal aid to help educate large numbers of impoverished students, harsh sanctions follow. The school has to pay for tutoring and bus rides for students who chose to go to other schools. Eventually the principal and staff could be replaced.
Schools tried mightily to meet the federal mandate. Teachers taught to the tests and other subjects were given short shrift. In many places, recess, arts, and music were cut back. States jiggered their definitions of “proficiency.” In some cases, cheating scandals erupted.
As the 2014 deadline approached for achieving proficiency with 100 percent of students, no exceptions, everyone finally realized it was an impossible task. Well-regarded local schools like Camp Hill, Cedar Cliff, Central Dauphin, Cumberland Valley and East Pennsboro high schools were falling to meet the federal mandate.
With Congress too gridlocked to reform the law, the Obama Administration began offering relief from the impossible requirements. Last week, Pennsylvania became the 41st state to get a federal waiver from NCLB’s most onerous provisions.
Pennsylvania will be freed to use a kinder, gentler system for rating schools with more realistic benchmarks. Schools will get a numeric score, from zero to 100, instead of a stark “not making adequate yearly progress.” High-poverty schools where students do well will get as-yet unspecified rewards; those with low-scoring students will be pressured to do better.
Some critics of No Child Left Behind worry that in handing out waivers, the Obama administration is being just as unrealistic and punitive toward struggling schools.
In New Jersey, a long list of educators and community leaders signed onto a letter complaining that the state’s waiver sets “a punitive accountability system that disproportionately impacts school districts populated by low-income children of color.”
At this stage, Pennsylvania’s new school “accountability” measures are pretty vague, so it’s hard to tell how onerous or effective they will be.
Ten-plus years of No Child Left Behind have proven that there are no easy answers to improving education in an ethnically diverse and economically stratified society.
One popular nostrum — school choice – works, when it’s the schools that get to choose their students. (Ask Harvard about that.)
As for charter schools, some are better, some are worse, but most are about the same. (Along the way, though, the charter movement has enriched many educational entrepreneurs, some of the politically-connected or outright crooked variety.)
Traditional public education, where schools must take whomever comes through the classroom door, faces a unique challenge. The biggest influence on educational success is a student’s home life. Parents with high education and a comfortable income produce easy-to-educate kids.
If you live in an area full of those families, you’ll have good neighborhood schools. If a school serves large numbers of students living in poverty and other social dysfunction, effective education takes heroic (and expensive) efforts.
Breaking the tyranny of geography in public K-12 education can help. City-wide open enrollment and magnet schools (like Harrisburg’s Sci-Tech) are ways to do that.
High-poverty schools can spend extra money to ensure students are safe, reach out to parents, and provide essential social services and counseling on site. Smaller classes, especially in the early grades, make some difference, if for no other reason than to minimize the number of disruptive students in any one class.
After ten years, No Child Left Behind’s legacy is decidedly mixed. It ramped up pressure on schools to do better with harder-to-educate students. It combatted the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
But it also branded schools and teachers as ‘failures’ for situations that were far beyond their control. Too often, it turned schools into test prep factories and made education little more than “drill and kill.” It sapped the creativity and enthusiasm that’s essential for effective teaching.
Despite coming from a ‘conservative’ president, NCLB represented liberal ideals. It assumed that an all-too-human institution – public schools – could be made perfect. It assumed that the right kind of government intervention could produce better human beings. But schools are not factories, and students are not widgets that can be produced with a zero defect rate.
No Child Left Behind didn’t work. It’s definitely time for Plan B.