Brookings: Topics - No Child Left Behind

A New Approach to K-12 Education Reform

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.

The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.

We need a fundamentally new approach.

Read the rest of Whitehurst's piece at Education Next »

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Publication: Education Next

Image Source: © Mike Segar / Reuters

Obama Administration Guts No Child Left Behind

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:16:00 -0400

The White House announced details today of its long-signaled intent to use waivers to states to sidestep the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and to advance its own education agenda. States that adopt “college- and career-ready standards” (a code phrase for the national learning standards promoted by the administration), teacher and principal evaluation systems based on student test scores, and turn-around strategies for the lowest performing schools will be allowed to design and implement their own accountability systems and will have greater flexibility in how they spend federal dollars.

The political calculus is straightforward. States and school districts are chaffing under the accountability provisions of NCLB, in large part because the law took what in the ordinary course of federal action would have been an aspiration goal (“every child proficient in reading and math by 2014”) and turned it into an actual requirement, with teeth. States are no where close to getting there, and having exhausted the remedies that can be derived from gaming the law, they are eager for relief from Washington. The administration, no longer having billions in stimulus funds with which to bribe states to adopt its education policies, is substituting relief from the requirements of law as its carrot. It expects Congressional leaders, who are none too happy with this usurpation of their authority, to be relatively powerless to act because doing so would involve crossing swords with their state governors and education chiefs, most of whom will want the waivers.

But this is a dangerous and internally conflicted path for the administration to go down. It is dangerous because it takes boilerplate secretarial waiver authority, present in almost all major legislation and intended to allow an administration, with informal congressional approval, to tweak laws to make them fit realities on the ground, and turns it into a virtually limitless authority for the executive branch to substitute its preferred policies for the law of the land. Imagine the person as president you could least imagine being suited to that position armed with this precedent.

It is internally conflicted because it provides further leverage for states to adopt common national standards—which the administration touts as essential to comparability between states—but gives away common accountability in exchange. Standards and accountability go together like Sonny and Cher. Separate them and, well you know what happens. So we’re to have the same college- and career-ready standards for what children should learn in Minnesota and Mississippi, but different definitions of what schools and teachers are to be held accountable for accomplishing against those standards? Where does that get us? It is like the federal government requiring that car manufacturers meet common standards for fuel efficiency but allowing each automobile maker to have its own definition of miles per gallon.

The federal role in K-12 education is not working nearly as well as is needed. It must be seriously rethought and restructured. Congress is about this work. The administration can address the pressing issue of too many schools being identified as in need of improvement by such simple means as setting back the proficiency deadline from 2014 to 2016, or capping the percentage of schools within a state that are subject to the accountability provisions of NCLB. It would surely get the nod from Congressional committees for pursuing such temporary and practical fixes. In contrast, gutting NCLB and setting its own policy direction using the waiver authority is misguided, confused, and will prove to be counterproductive.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: Â© Rick Wilking / Reuters

President Obama Rewrites the No Child Left Behind Act

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:38:00 -0400

The White House has announced its plan to grant waivers of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to states that agree to put in place the education reforms favored by the administration. Thus states that agree, for example, to adopt the Common Core state standards for what students should learn and to evaluate teachers for tenure based on student test gains will be freed from the consequences facing schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress goals under NCLB. The reforms the administration seeks as a condition of granting waivers are the same that it put forward in its Blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB, and that it advanced in its Race to the Top competition using the $5 billion in discretionary funds made available to it by Congress under the Stimulus Act.

There is no question that schools are being over-identified by NCLB as requiring intervention. Whether the proportion is the hyperbolic 80% predicted by Secretary Duncan or half that, as seems more likely, states and districts cannot handle that many schools being branded as needing improvement, either administratively or politically. Something needs to be done if the whole accountability system isn’t to be seen as a joke and its provisions widely flaunted. If Congress won’t or can’t act, then it is reasonable for the administration to indicate that it invites waiver requests. NCLB clearly grants the secretary of education the authority to grant waiver requests from states that can successfully propose alternative means of improving the quality of instruction and enhancing student achievement.

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law. The NCLB waiver authority does not grant the secretary of education the right to impose any conditions he considers appropriate on states seeking waivers, nor is there any history of such a wholesale executive branch rewrite of federal law through use of the waiver authority.

The administration is surely counting on the support of the congressional delegations of individual states to support the waiver request from their state. And with the majority of states likely to submit waiver requests, the administration may well have the political clout it needs to overcome the ire of key committee chairs whose authority to legislate has been undercut.

If you’re a fan of greater presidential control of education (and domestic policy in general), it’s celebration time. If you like the separation of powers or thought that the reauthorization of NCLB might be an opportunity to put more control of schooling in the hands of parents at the expense of district, state, and federal bureaucracies, this is not your party.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: Â© Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Is "No Child Left Behind" Working?: A View from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:46:00 -0400

Schools across the nation are held accountable under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for raising student achievement in math and reading. But each state gets to be its own policeman by designing the tests its students take and determining the scores that count as success. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered every two years in grades 4 and 8 to representative samples of students from each state, serves as a check on what the states report using their own assessments. It also provides a measure of trend over time, something that is often lacking in the states’ own data because of frequent changes in state assessments.

Much is typically made in policy circles of the contrast between the percentages of students reported to be proficient on NAEP vs. on state tests. For example, NAEP rates 28 percent of Tennessee’s eighth graders as proficient in reading whereas the state of Tennessee finds more than 90 percent of its students to be proficient. Such disparities fuel the drive for common standards as embodied in the Common Core effort led by the National Governors Association and supported by Race to the Top funding from Washington. However, both the state and the NAEP standards for proficiency are arbitrary. It is far more informative to examine scale scores and ask if there has been progress. While state tests and NAEP convey very different messages with regard to how many students are deemed proficient, they are largely in sync in marking whether scores have moved up or down.

NAEP reading scale scores are up in 2009 at eighth grade compared with 2007, and unchanged at fourth grade. This mirrors the results for mathematics that were released in December. Historically gains have been more likely and larger at fourth grade than at eighth grade, so the shift of the action to eighth grade is interesting. It probably reflects children who benefited from better instruction in elementary school a few years ago now being tested in eighth grade, or education reforms that were focused on elementary school moving into middle school, or both.

The magnitude of the overall improvement in scale scores since 2007 is small: eighth grade scores were 1 point higher than in 2007. However, this represents about a month of additional schooling, which is not trivial. Gains were twice as large for the lowest performing students.

When a two-year testing cycle for NAEP was introduced in 2003, replacing a roughly four-year cycle, it became less important to look at the changes from one testing to the next, and more important to examine longer trends. Through this lens there is more to celebrate. Since 2002, reading scores for Black students at fourth grade are up 6 points, equivalent to about two thirds of a year of schooling. They’re up 5 points for Hispanics. At eighth grade the gains have been smaller but real for these two groups, 1 point for Blacks and 2 points for Hispanics. Gains over this time frame have been much larger for mathematics, e.g., 9 points for Blacks at eighth grade.

Commentators on NAEP, from cabinet secretaries to casual bloggers, can’t seem to resist the temptation to opine on whether the results mean that NCLB is working. With the Obama administration’s blueprint for reauthorization just released, the appeal of this line of speculation will be overwhelming. In fact, NAEP isn’t up to that task. Many things have changed during the time frame of NCLB, including a dramatic shift in the demographics of the school aged population, the growth of charter schools and home schooling, and policies for including students with disabilities and limited English proficiency in assessments. And let’s not forget changes in the culture as a whole that affect academic performance such as the growth of use of the Internet and digital media by school-aged children and the reduction in the teenage pregnancy rate. Besides, NCLB and the administration’s blueprint aren’t single things. They’re packages of many different policies and programs. Forget NAEP and dig into the research on those individual policies and programs if you want insight on what works.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: © Charles Platiau / Reuters

Is Education on the Wrong Track?

Diane Ravitch and Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In a March 2010 education symposium held by The New Republic, Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Diane Ravitch and Guest Scholar Ben Wildavsky present the merits and pitfalls of market-based education reform.

From: Diane Ravitch
To: Ben Wildavsky
Subject: The education reform "consensus" ignores teachers, the very people needed to carry out change in classrooms.

Ten years ago, I would have written the same things that you wrote for this symposium. I too would have been hopeful that the business model of schooling would inject new dynamism into American education. I too would have been impressed by the lingo and data-talk of the corporate suits. I too would have imagined that deregulation was the answer to our problems and that the market would produce competition and improvement. The point of my book is to explain that these strategies don’t work and to supply the evidence for my conclusions.

Ben, I am no critic of the market economy. I love having choices about where I shop. But, as I point out in the book, going to school is not the same as shopping. Most parents want a stable school that is within a reasonable distance of their home, so that they can drop off their child in the morning and pick her up at the end of day or get to school quickly if she gets sick in the middle of the day. Schools operate differently from, say, shoe stores, which open and close in response to consumer demand. Schools are essential community institutions, like firehouses. They are cooperative enterprises, where the adults are expected to work closely with one another towards common goals. Teachers should not compete with each other for extra dollars (Edward Deming says that this kind of competition doesn't even work in business, that it demoralizes the workplace). Teachers should share what they know, not hoard their trade secrets for their private benefit.

Ben, you ignore the evidence that charter schools, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Charter students have been tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, and they have never done better than regular public schools. Charters have the supposed advantage of deregulation, non-union teachers, longer hours, longer years—and, in some cases, the extra money contributed by generous philanthropists, yet they have not outscored regular public school students on NAEP, which is the gold standard of educational testing. One sector or the other may get a blip one year, but there has been no sustained advantage for students in charters, be they black, Hispanic, low-income, or residents of urban districts, compared to their peers in regular public schools.

Nor has test-based accountability produced genuine improvement in education. The era of NCLB has been marked by lowered state standards, cheating, and widespread gaming of the system. While the states claim big leaps forward, NAEP shows very little improvement. In math, the gains were larger before NCLB than after it was implemented. On eighth grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998, even though these are the students who grew up with NCLB.

Read Diane Ravitch's full letter here »

From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education.

Diane, I appreciate your spirited rebuttal to my essay. I’m not surprised to hear you repeat what you say in your book--that you have no objection to the market economy per se (although you somewhat undermine your case when you toss around silly phrases like “corporate suits”). It is the entry of market principles into public education that bothers you. Schools, you say, are like firehouses and police stations, not shoe stores. To give teachers extra compensation based on effective job performance undermines the fundamentally cooperative nature of schools. And so on.

You are quite right that markets are no panacea, contrary to what John Chubb and Terry Moe once wrote. I did not claim that markets have such magical powers. It seems to me that we should regard markets as an enabling condition for the changes that public education badly needs. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made this case eloquently, arguing last week that both choice and accountability “provide invaluable opportunities to rethink schools and systems that are too often hobbled by anachronistic policies, practices, stifling contracts, and cultures.” Accountability and choice, then, are simply means to an end.

You chide me for allegedly ignoring evidence that charter schools, on average, don’t perform any better than conventional public schools on the NAEP. I never said they did. It’s widely acknowledged that, so far, charter schools have been highly uneven in quality. But that doesn’t mean the charter principle is a failure. For one thing, charters can be closed down for poor performance (although this hasn’t happened often enough). For another, the quality and motivations of charter authorizers matter a lot to charter success. As charter laws were enacted, political pressures—notably union pressures—put many of the entities opposed to charter schools in charge of them. Washington, D.C., is a great example. Two charter authorizers were initially established. One was the regular school board, which had no love of competition and permitted a number of terrible charter school to operate with little or no oversight. The other, an independent board established just to authorize charters, came to be highly regarded and now oversees all of the city’s charters.

Overall, charters seem to have done no harm, and, in a number of high-profile cases, they have done a lot of good. As you know, there are many efforts underway to study and replicate the very best charter chains--just what one might expect in, well, a market. We’re still in a period of experimentation. But the flexibility of the charter philosophy—and the availability of comparable achievement data across schools—permits educators to try new things and to measure whether they’re working.

Even as you disparage the performance of charters, you complain (echoing a longstanding claim of Richard’s) that they cream the most motivated parents and students, leaving the neediest kids in regular public schools. Isn’t this a contradiction? If your assertion is true, wouldn’t we expect charters to outperform regular public schools? The allegation of creaming also raises an important philosophical question—in fact, a moral one—that Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research touched on at the AEI forum where you spoke last week. Isn’t it preferable for some kids to have superior alternatives than for all kids to remain in underperforming schools? If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of charter schools, including the KIPPs and Achievement Firsts, would you really be doing kids in those schools a favor by sending them back to the crummy institutions they escaped? It seems to me that we can simultaneously provide appealing charter options that will cause some students to exit while doing much more to meet the educational needs of the kids who remain in regular public schools.

Read Ben Wildavsky's full letter here »

Authors

Diane Ravitch
Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

Education's Tea Partier

Ben Wildavsky — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Almost 20 years ago, as a young editor at The Public Interest, I wrote an admiring review of The American Reader, an anthology compiled by Diane Ravitch. At the time, a battle was raging over multicultural education, and Ravitch joined the fray with a wonderful collection of speeches, songs, essays, and poems spanning the nation’s history. She had a philosophical goal--setting forth a positive version of multiculturalist history that emphasized pluralism rather than identity politics--and also a practical one--creating a content-rich textbook that wasn’t, like so many others, homogenized and excruciatingly boring.

Today, Ravitch tells us in The Death and Life of the Great American School System that she still has a keen desire for students to be taught a rich curriculum in a variety of subjects. And who could disagree? But Ravitch then links this belief with her contention that the two central philosophies guiding today’s bipartisan reform movement--test-based accountability and school choice, both of which she used to embrace--have undermined teaching, learning, and content. It's here that her argument falters.

Indeed, while her closely argued polemic offers some useful insights into the inadequacies of many reform efforts to date, ultimately, she doesn’t deliver the goods. Ravitch fails to make the case that the broad philosophies governing today’s reform movement are off-target.

Perhaps most striking to me as I read Death and Life was Ravitch’s odd aversion to, even contempt for, market economics and business as they relate to education. She writes repeatedly, in withering terms of “corporate style superintendents,” the “tycoons and politicians” driving wrongheaded reform efforts, the “managerial mindset” behind experiments with value-added assessment for teachers, and the hopeless inapplicability of such business terminology as “return on investment” for foundations seeking to gauge the educational results of their grant-making. Decrying the “unfettered market” (cautionary tale: Wal-Mart!), she claims that “the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers.” Her populist ire is such that one almost expects her to announce that she will be spearheading a new Educational Tea Party movement.

Ravitch's rhetoric is so overblown that it doesn’t seem in keeping with her record of analytical gravitas. Who says markets are antithetical to community? Democratic capitalism in the United States, after all, has generally coexisted quite nicely with thriving communities. Moreover, who is to say that businesses and foundations (sorry, make that “mega-rich foundations”) shouldn’t participate in school reform? Are they not part of the civic fabric that Ravitch so commendably wants to nurture?

As for her claim that entrepreneurs see charter schools “as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry,” that hardly jibes with reality at the most admired charter organizations. As far as I know, nobody at Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, or KIPP, all non-profits, is getting rich from those organizations’ notably successful efforts to help low-income kids learn. But if--if--for-profit charter operators are able to operate good schools, why shouldn’t those educational entrepreneurs get rich? Isn’t the point to make sure kids learn? It is not as if profit is an alien notion in the world of public schools. As Ravitch knows well, a vast industry of contractors, curriculum specialists, and the like was getting rich off public schools long before charters came along. (Ravitch also missed important aspects of the charter movement: its relentless self-examination, eagerness to weed out poor performers, and desire to take to scale those approaches that are really helping kids.)

Read the full review here »

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

Budget 2011: Funding for the Department of Education

Alan Berube — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:06:00 -0500

In a FY 2011 budget that freezes non-defense discretionary expenditures, the Department of Education has attracted some attention for being one of the few places in the federal government that would attract an increase in funding if the plan is enacted. But the old stuff in the administration’s proposal is at least as interesting as what’s new.

The budget foresees about a $3 billion increase overall for the department, a 6 percent rise over the FY 2010 request. More money for K-12 programs authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), more recently known as No Child Left Behind, accounts for all of this increase, and the administration is signaling that it will put a good deal of energy behind its proposal to strengthen teaching standards as part of a broader ESEA overhaul.

Meanwhile, next year’s budget seeks to build on some of the significant, competitive education programs that were embedded in the stimulus package (ARRA) and are just coming online now. With the first round of state applications for the competitive $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) Fund recently arrived at the department, the budget requests another $1.35 billion to continue the race in FY 2011. States will probably welcome the opportunity to compete for additional federal education funds next year, with their budgets still in crisis, just as the administration would surely relish the opportunity to continue its signature domestic “reform” program. And cash-strapped local governments could jump at the chance, too, as the budget signals that the next round of RTT would make school districts eligible for awards as well.

In the same vein, the budget seeks another $500 million for the Investing in Innovation (I3) Fund, which received $650 million from ARRA. As we’ve written previously here, I3 seeks to experiment with new schooling and instructional models, and to scale up successful practices, through a growing network of educational entrepreneurs in collaboration with local school districts. Applications for the first round will probably be due sometime this spring.

Finally, building on the competition and innovation themes that the ARRA programs exemplify, the budget seeks to streamline existing programs in ways that would give the executive branch new flexibilities. The administration’s proposed ESEA overhaul will seek to consolidate a plethora of narrow, yet often overlapping, programs, many of which originate from its Office of Innovation and Improvement, and eliminate a few more. (Sara Mead and Andy Rotherham called for this sort of shift in approach in a paper they wrote for us laying out a framework for what became the I3 Fund.) Similarly, its Workforce Investment Act (WIA) reauthorization proposal (which I’ll write about in a future post) would consolidate several programs and establish a new joint Labor-Education partnership to administer $260 million in competitive funds.

Big picture, as reported by Seyward Darby, Secretary Duncan earlier this week said, "We're absolutely philosophically and strategically moving more money, a lot of money, into a competitive basis.”

ARRA clearly laid down an important marker for how the Obama administration intends to use federal education funding to stimulate innovation and drive change. A year on from that emergency program, however, Arne Duncan and company will have some tough battles to wage with a hyper-partisan Congress (which still loves its small formula grants), in the middle of an election year no less, to continue that transformation.

Authors

Alan Berube

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Smart Child Left Behind

Tom Loveless and Michael J. Petrilli — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:58:36 -0400

As American children head back to school, the parents of the most academically gifted students may feel a new optimism: according to a recent study, the federal No Child Left Behind law is acting like a miracle drug. Not only is it having its intended effect — bettering the performance of low-achieving students — it is raising test scores for top students too.

This comes as quite a surprise, as ever since the law was enacted in 2002, analysts and educators have worried that gifted pupils would be the ones left behind. While the law puts extraordinary pressure on schools to lift the performance of low-achieving students, it includes no incentives to accelerate the progress of high achievers.

Yet the new study, by the independent Center on Education Policy, showed that more students are reaching the “advanced” level on state tests now than in 2002. This led the authors to conclude that there is little evidence that high-achieving students have been shortchanged.

If only that were so. But like many miracle-drug claims, this conclusion is deeply flawed, for several reasons.

First, under the federal law, state tests are supposed to measure whether students are meeting grade-level expectations — whether the average third grader knows the mathematics taught through third grade. But high achievers usually work above grade level, so the state tests are very poor instruments for measuring how well top students are learning.

Second, the way the study’s analysts depicted state trends creates a misleading national picture. They calculated “trend lines” in each state — for example, whether more fourth graders in Georgia reached the “advanced” level in math, whether they made gains in reading and so on for each grade and subject.

For their conclusions, they added together all the up, down and sideways trends to give a national snapshot, saying that 83 percent of trend lines showed gains, while 15 percent showed declines. The problem with this system is that it treats all states equally, regardless of size. So a gain among high-performing students in North Dakota has the same weight as one in California, which has more than 60 times as many students.

Third, the analysis does not compare today’s students with those of earlier eras. High-achieving students might be making incremental progress — but is this new? If they were making similar gains before 2002, then might recent progress have nothing to do with No Child Left Behind? And how did their progress compare with trends for lower-achieving students?

Thankfully, there is a more suitable tool to help answer such questions: the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks achievement changes in 4th, 8th and 12th graders across the country. It found relatively little progress among our highest-achieving students (those in the top 10 percent) from 2000 to 2007, while the bottom 10 percent made phenomenal gains. For example, in eighth-grade math, the lowest-achieving students made 13 points of progress on the national-assessment scale from 2000 to 2007 — roughly the equivalent of a whole grade. Top students, however, gained just five points.

We also learned something from the data from the 1990s. For the most part, both high- and low-achievers made tepid annual gains. But there was one exception: In the states that already had accountability systems similar to those that would eventually be required by No Child Left Behind, there were much larger gains at the bottom than at the top.

So what does all of this mean? It is clear that No Child Left Behind is helping low-achieving students. But it is also obvious that high-achieving students — who suffer from benign neglect under the law — have been making smaller gains, much as they did before it was enacted. Alas, this drug is producing no miracles.

No doubt, some will claim victory: We are closing the achievement gap between our top and bottom students! But is that our only national goal in education? What might happen if federal law encouraged educators to improve the performance of all students? Our analysis of the federal data identified tens of thousands of high achievers who are black, Hispanic or poor. They are excelling at their studies, often against great odds. Shouldn’t we be addressing their educational needs?

As we look for ways to improve No Child Left Behind, we must recognize that our top students still have much to learn.

Authors

Tom Loveless
Michael J. Petrilli

Publication: The New York Times

The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Tom Loveless — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Introduction

The watchword of this year’s Brown Center Report is caution—caution in linking state tests to international assessments—“benchmarking” is the term—caution in proceeding with a policy of “algebra for all eighth graders,” caution in gleaning policy lessons from the recent progress made by urban schools. State and local budget woes will restrain policymakers from adopting costly education reforms, but even so, the three studies contained herein are a reminder that restraint must be exercised in matters other than budgets in governing education well. All too often, policy decisions are based on wishful thinking rather than cautious analysis. As education evolves as a discipline, the careful analysis of high-quality data will provide the foundation for meaningful education reform.

The report consists of three sections, each discussing a separate study. The first section looks at international testing. Powerful groups, led by the National Governors Association, are urging the states to benchmark their state achievement tests to an international assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After comparing PISA to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the other major international assessment in which the United States participates, the Brown Center analysis examines findings from a chapter of the 2006 PISA report that addresses student engagement. The chapter presents data on students’ attitudes, values, and beliefs toward science.

Benchmarking proponents argue that PISA offers policy guidance to American school officials by identifying the characteristics of successful school systems around the world. The Brown Center analysis calls that claim into question. The PISA report makes causal claims from cross-sectional data that cannot support such inferences. The chapter on student engagement presents inferences based on selective treatment of data, with policy recommendations going beyond the evidence adduced to support them.

Moreover, PISA poses questions that contain ideological bias. To define scientific literacy as encompassing beliefs as well as knowledge—a definition also embraced by skeptics of evolution—is a dubious position for any science assessment to take. PISA wants to assess whether students are capable of applying science to public policy. Fair enough. That capacity can be evaluated, however, without making a judgment about students’ political beliefs. PISA asks students whether they support several environmental policies and then creates an index of “responsibility for sustainable development” from the responses. Responses in favor of the policies are responsible; those opposed are not. That kind of questioning is inappropriate on a science assessment. Without serious reform, PISA is inappropriate for benchmarking.

The second section tackles another hot topic in policy circles—whether all eighth graders should take an algebra course. California recently adopted a universal eighth grade algebra policy that will be implemented in 2011, joining a Minnesota policy with the same objective and implementation date. Are all eighth graders prepared to take an algebra class? National data are examined from eighth grade math classes in 2005 to answer that question.

Low achievers in mathematics, those scoring in the bottom tenth of all students, function several years below grade level. A shocking percentage of these low achievers, 28.6 percent, were enrolled in advanced mathcourses—Algebra I, Algebra II, or Geometry—in 2005. A policy of algebra for all eighth graders will dramatically increase the proportion of these misplaced math students. Sample math items are presented to illustrate the large gaps in the misplaced students’ mathematical knowledge, in particular, their poor grasp of fractions, decimals, and percentages. The misplaced students are described in terms of demographic characteristics, the schools they attend, and the teachers who are instructing their math classes. The portrait is deeply troubling. The misplaced students are some of the nation’s most vulnerable youngsters. The analysis raises questions about the feasibility of an “algebra for all” policy until we know how to reduce the number of underprepared students and how to effectively teach algebra to students who struggle with basic arithmetic.

The final section of the report is a good news story. The 2001 Brown Center Report presented an analysis of academic achievement in big city school districts. That study compared test scores for school districts serving the top fifty cities in the 2000 U.S. Census to the average test score in the cities’ respective states. Not surprisingly, the big city districts lagged far behind. This year’s report replicates that study using the most recent achievement data. Big city schools have made significant gains. While all school districts have notched achievement gains, the big city districts made even larger gains than other districts. They are closing the gap with suburban and rural districts, slowly, to be sure, but they are clearly making progress.

The analysis does not hazard a theory as to why big city achievement is rising. One possible catalyst is mayoral control, a popular urban reform in recent years. The data neither support nor refute the effectiveness of mayoral control. Another possible influence is No Child Left Behind. The law targets low-performing students, and studies of test scores at both state and national levels have shown greater progress at the bottom of the achievement distribution than at the top. Having a disproportionate share of low achievers, big city schools benefit from that trend. As noted above, cross-sectional data are limited in what they can reveal about the causes of events, so whether NCLB has played a role in the progress of big city schools is merely speculative. In addition, not all big city districts have made gains.

A daunting obstacle to determining the drivers of academic trends is that there is no authoritative source that documents the policies that local districts have adopted, along with such details as when particular policies were started, when they were modified, what policies they replaced, and how they were implemented. The Brown Center Report ends with a call for a periodic national inventory of district policies across the country. We are getting much better at determining how well students are learning and tracking trends in test scores as they unfold over time. But policy analysis lags behind. Explaining why students are learning more or less—and really pinpointing the causes of trends in achievement—will take much more information about the policies and practices of our schools.

Download the Press Release »
View Tom Loveless's Presentation on the Use and Misuse of International Assessments »
View Tom Loveless's Presentation on Urban School Achievement »

Downloads

Download

Authors

Tom Loveless

Reading Second

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:52:46 -0500

Dear Colleagues,

Former President George W. Bush finished his tenure without having won congressional renewal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That task will now fall to the new administration and congress.

A key component of NCLB is Reading First (RF). Created to encourage the use of scientifically based research as the basis for reading instruction, RF aims to ensure that all children learn to read well by the end of third grade. Reading is a foundational skill that affects the rest of a child's opportunities for learning from the earliest grades in school. However, the scientific evidence for RF was weaker than acknowledged at the outset. Now, after six years of implementation, the program has not met its lofty goals.

Where do we go from here? Program advocates want to stay the course on the assumption that more time will be sufficient for RF to realize its potential. This is a leap of faith. Opponents would roll funding for reading instruction into the Title I block grant for education of the disadvantaged, with minimal federal strings-a failed tactic of the 1990s.

There is another way: Extend the state-based standards and assessment provisions of NCLB down to grades K-2 for reading, while removing federal specifications for reading instruction. The strongest pillar of NCLB is its requirement for aligned standards and assessments coupled with public reporting of results. Yet, current requirements for reading start at grade 3, which is too late for the nation's weakest readers.

A requirement for clear state or regional standards for what children should accomplish in reading, starting in kindergarten, along with annual assessments aligned to those standards, should be a core reform of the next version of RF. Those standards should include not only the ability to translate print into speech but also the vocabulary and background knowledge that children need in order to comprehend what they read. More investment in R&D on reading instruction and better mechanisms for encouraging utilization of research findings in the classroom are also needed. Each is an appropriate federal role and a promising basis for the design of the second version of Reading First.

You can download the full report below. I look forward to a robust debate on Capitol Hill and in the education community.

Regards,

Russ Whitehurst Director, Brown Center on Education Policy

Read the paper » (PDF)

Downloads

Download

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind

Tom Loveless — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Tom Loveless examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) in a report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Included in this report are results from a national teacher survey, by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group.

In 1972, Commissioner of Education Sidney P. Marland Jr. presented a report to Congress on the education of gifted and high-achieving children in the United States. The Marland Report argued that America had too few challenging programs to meet the needs of its high-achieving students. Just fifteen years earlier, the Russian launch of Sputnik had led to a flurry of programs promoting mathematics and science. Within a few years, however, these programs were eclipsed by a focus on societal inequities—especially those related to race and poverty—and efforts were launched to eradicate similar inequalities in U.S. schools. Gifted programs came under fire for being elitist. Some dwindled away from lack of funding. In addition to urging that gifted programs address a broad array of talents and abilities, the Marland Report warned Congress that bright minority students are particularly vulnerable:

Intellectual and creative talent cannot survive educational neglect and apathy. This loss is particularly evident in the minority groups who have in both social and educational environments every configuration calculated to stifle potential talent.¹

Attitudes toward bright children have waxed and waned over the decades. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 sought to fuse equity and excellence into a single initiative, promoting academic achievement in the pursuit of equity.² Historically, the federal government provided additional revenue to schools serving disadvantaged children, ostensibly so that schools could offer services that would help poor children learn. The architects of NCLB sought to transform the federal education dollar from a school entitlement into an incentive to prod schools towards better performance.³ Universal proficiency became the nation’s foremost education goal.

Incentives shape behavior. Some analysts today express the concern that, by focusing attention on the education of students at the bottom of the achievement distribution, NCLB is surely encouraging schools to neglect high achievers. After all, schools face consequences for failing to move lowachieving students to proficiency. Students in schools that fail to make adequate progress for two consecutive years must be offered the option of transferring to another public school. A school that continues to fall short faces possible replacement of its teaching staff, conversion to a charter school, or state takeover. Nothing, however, happens when schools fail to boost the learning of already-proficient students to higher levels. As Susan Goodkin argued in the Washington Post, “By forcing schools to focus their time and funding almost entirely on bringing low achieving students up to proficiency, NCLB sacrifices the education of the gifted students who will become our future biomedical researchers, computer engineers, and other scientific leaders."⁴

Are these concerns well founded? Do the incentives of NCLB create a Robin Hood effect, yielding gains for low-achieving students but at the expense of high achievers? That’s what we set out to investigate.

Read the full report »

Read Tom Loveless's Response to Gregory Camilli's Review »

_{1 Sydney Marland Jr., Education of the Gifted and Talented—Volume 1: Report to the Congress of the United States by the U. S. Commissioner of Education (Washington, DC: Office of Education, 1971), 6.
2 Equity and excellence are two major themes of school reform. See Tom Loveless, “Uneasy Allies: The Evolving Relationship of School and State,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 20, no.1 (1998): 1–8.
3 Tom Loveless, “The Peculiar Politics of No Child Left Behind,” in Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap: Lessons for No Child Left Behind, ed. A. Gamoran (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2007), 253–85.
4 Susan Goodkin, “Leave No Gifted Child Behind, Washington Post, December 27, 2005, A25.}

Reprinted with permission from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 1016 16th St NW, 8th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. All rights reserved."

Authors

Tom Loveless

Publication: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap: Lessons for No Child Left Behind

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 22, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Room
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Is No Child Left Behind enhancing educational opportunities for our most disadvantaged students? According to Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap: Lessons for No Child Left Behind, past efforts to raise educational standards have done little to help poor children. Some strategies seem promising, such as requiring teachers to master their subjects, assessing core academic content, and offering free tutoring to struggling students. However, poor implementation of such reforms has curtailed their potential positive impact.

At this Brown Center event, four of the book’s authors provided an overview of findings, explained key details in the areas of teacher quality and supplemental tutoring, and offered recommendations for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.

Purchase the Book

Event Materials

Participants

Moderator

Adam Gamoran

Professor of Sociology and Education Policy Studies and Director of Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Panelists

Laura Desimone

Associate Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Rachel Durham

Research Scientist, The John Hopkins University

Andrew Porter

Dean of the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Get Congress Out of the Classroom

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0400

Despite the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.

The main goal of the law — that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 — is simply unattainable. The primary strategy — to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year — has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools.

Unfortunately, the Congressional leaders in both parties seem determined to renew the law, probably after next year’s presidential election, with only minor changes. But No Child Left Behind should be radically overhauled, not just tweaked.

Under the law, the states devise their own standards and their own tests. Based on the test results, every school is expected to make “adequate yearly progress” in grades three to eight so as to be on track to meet that goal of universal proficiency by 2014. Schools that do not meet their annual target for every group of students — as defined by race, poverty, language and disability status — are subject to increasingly onerous sanctions written into the federal law.

Schools that fail to meet their target for two consecutive years must offer their students the choice to go to a more successful public school; if they fail the following year, they must provide tutoring to their students. If the students continue to miss their target, the entire teaching and administration staff may be replaced, or the school may be turned over to state control, or it may be converted into a charter school.

Yet these tough sanctions thus far have been ineffective. Federal agencies report that only about 1 percent of eligible students take advantage of switching schools and fewer than 20 percent of eligibles receive extra tutoring.

In inner cities, where academic performance is weakest, only a handful of students move to successful schools because there are very few seats available to them. In rural America, choice is limited by the small number of other schools in the geographic area. Furthermore, neither research nor experience validates any of the “remedies” written into law. There is little evidence that failing schools improve if they are turned over to state control or converted to charter status.

No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best. The federal government is good at collecting and disseminating information. The states and school districts, being closer to the schools, teachers and parents than the federal government, are more likely to be flexible and pragmatic about designing reforms to meet the needs of particular schools.

However, under current law, state education departments have an incentive to show that schools and students are making steady progress, even if they are not. So the results of state tests, which are administered every year, are almost everywhere better than the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the benchmark federal test that is administered every other year.

Many states claim that 80 percent or more of their students are proficient in reading or math at the same time that the federal assessment shows only a minority of students in those states reaching its standard of proficiency. We will never know how well or poorly our students are doing until we have a consistent national testing program in which officials have no vested interest in claiming victory.

Under current law, Congress now decides precisely which sanctions and penalties are needed to reform schools, which is way beyond its competence. The leaders of the House and Senate Education Committees are fine men, but they do not know how to fix the nation’s schools.

The obvious solution is to reverse roles. Washington should supply unbiased information about student academic performance to states and local districts. It should then be the responsibility of states and local districts to improve performance.

Congress should also drop the absurd goal of achieving universal proficiency by 2014. Given that no nation, no state and no school district has ever reached 100 percent math and reading proficiency for all grades, it is certain that the goal cannot be met. Perpetuating this unrealistic ideal, however, guarantees that increasing numbers of schools will “fail” as the magic year 2014 gets closer.

Unless we set realistic goals for our schools and adopt realistic means of achieving them, we run the risk of seriously damaging public education and leaving almost all children behind.

Authors

Publication: The New York Times

Excellence in the Classroom: Improving the Quality of Teaching in America's Schools

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

March 28, 2007
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

As Congress considers reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, policymakers, advocates, and parents are concerned about how to meet the requirement that states provide every student with high-quality teachers. To address these concerns, Brookings and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School released the latest volume of The Future of Children journal, "Excellence in the Classroom."

On March 28 a slate of panelists including members of Congress, journal contributors, and other researchers and administrators, discussed options for improving teacher quality including in-service training, mentoring, and the recruitment of new, high-quality teachers.

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20070328

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Brian Jacob

Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University; Visiting Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan

Congressman Michael Castle

R-Delaware

Congressman George Miller

D-California

Deborah Jewell-Sherman

Superintendent of Schools, Richmond, VA Public Schools

Kate Walsh

President, National Council on Teacher Quality

Randi Weingarten

President, United Federation of Teachers

Thomas Kane

Professor, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University

The 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are Our Students Learning?

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 18, 2006
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

The 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education evaluates the role that student happiness and confidence play in achievement, and examines whether states are artificially inflating the number of students meeting proficiency standards mandated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001.

On October 18, Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and author of the report, discussed the results of his research. The report, based on national and international testing data, also questions recent gains in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national assessment of U.S. students that is often referred to as the nation's report card.

Since 2000, the Brown Center has explored the state of education and specific policies and practices that influence the academic success of K-12 students.

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20061018

Participants

Panelists

The 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Tom Loveless — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

This report launches the second volume of the Brown Center Report on American Education. The five issues of volume one were published from 2000 to 2004. Volume one included regular reports on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state assessments, analysis of student achievement in charter schools, a study of trends in homework, evaluations of the federal government's Blue Ribbon Schools Program, an investigation of the academic performance of high schools with powerhouse sports teams, analyses of student achievement in urban school districts and rural schools, a survey of exchange students from countries abroad to see what they think of American schools, and a survey of the mathematics preparation of middle school math teachers. Volume two will explore similar topics related to how well American students are learning.

As in volume one, the reports of volume two will be divided into three parts. Part one reviews the latest data on student learning in the U.S. In this issue, the most recent results from both NAEP tests, the long term trend and the main, receive attention for what they reveal about American students' progress in reading and mathematics. Part two looks at the "happiness factor" in education, analyzing international data to see whether students' self-confidence and enjoyment of math and the relevance of lessons that students experience in classrooms are correlated with higher math achievement. Do nations with happier students score higher on math tests than nations in which students are not quite as happy?

Part three looks at how states have responded to the No Child Left Behind Act. Several analysts have recently concluded that states are "racing to the bottom" by artificially inflating the number of students who demonstrate proficiency on state tests. It is indisputable that states report larger numbers of proficient students than the NAEP test. But the studies have overlooked some key questions. Is NAEP such a good test that it should be used as a benchmark for judging state assessments? Can NCLB be blamed for the discrepancies between reported levels of proficiency on NAEP and state tests? How large were the discrepancies before NCLB?

We hope readers will consider this issue of the Brown Center Report as interesting and provocative as previous ones. On a personal note, this also is the first issue that will be published without Paul DiPerna on hand for the release. After six and a half years in the Brown Center, Paul has moved on to bigger and better things at the Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis. We thank Paul for his tireless work on behalf of the Center and wish him a terrific career in Indianapolis.

PART I: The Nation's Achievement

PART II: The Happiness Factor in Student Learning

PART III: Are States Honestly Reporting Test Scores?

View the Powerpoint Presentation

Downloads

Authors

Tom Loveless

The Peculiar Politics of No Child Left Behind

Tom Loveless — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

This paper was originally presented at the "Will Standards-Based Reform in Education Help Close the Poverty Gap?" Conference on February 23-24, 2006 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This paper will be included in a forthcoming Brookings Institution Press book, tentatively titled, Will "No Child Left Behind" Help Close the Poverty Gap?, to be edited by Adam Gamoran.

The modern era is considered one of the most politically polarized in history. On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans frequently engage in highly charged ideological battles. A notable divergence from the strident partisanship occurred in 2001 as a left-right coalition formed that successfully steered the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) through Congress. When President Bush signed the bill into law in January 2002, Senator Edward M. Kennedy stood by his side. Four years later, NCLB faces stiff resistance from state and local authorities. Ironically, given the bipartisan support for the law, the rebellion against NCLB also seems to come from both Democrats and Republicans—from the political left and the right. On the one hand, some states and local school districts feel they are getting a raw deal because the federal government is not doing enough, especially in terms of funding, to help local educators meet the requirements of the act. The state of Connecticut, for example, is suing the Department of Education for more NCLB money to cover student assessment. The state of Utah, on the other hand, has a more fundamental objection, that NCLB trespasses on state sovereignty over educational matters. Only scaling back the law's ambitious reach, not more money, will satisfy this complaint.

Most of what we know about anti-NCLB sentiment comes from press coverage. Scant research has methodically examined the politics of NCLB or marshaled empirical evidence to investigate support and opposition to the act at the state level. This study analyses national polling data to assess public opinion on NCLB and examines the political activities of states and localities to evaluate political resistance to the act.

The political opposition strikes at the heart of NCLB. The goal of making schools more equitable, in particular, of improving the education of children from poor families, brought together the bipartisan coalition supporting NCLB. Prior to NCLB, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) operated as a typical federal program pursuing redistributive objectives; it allocated additional resources to low income schools to purchase supplies, personnel, curricula, and other educational materials that schools in impoverished communities could not otherwise afford. Educators used these additional resources to improve the education of poor children. Reauthorizations of ESEA through 1994 left this arrangement intact. The theory was simple: more money produces better education, and high poverty schools need more money.

The theory of NCLB is different. Resources are viewed as incentives. In exchange for federal monies, local educators agree to produce certain outcomes. If they do not produce the promised outcomes, federal funding is cut off. With the exception of the teacher quality portions of NCLB, the law takes an agnostic position on how educators should convert resources into student achievement. The sanctions of NCLB—parental choice, supplemental services, reconstitution of schools—are components of the new incentive structure and do not produce new revenue streams. Schools that do not make adequate yearly progress with black, Hispanic, or poor children face the threat of these sanctions. Putting a new incentive structure into place creates winners and losers, and we can expect those interests to play out in the politics surrounding NCLB's implementation.

After this introduction, the paper is organized by five sections. The first section reviews national polling data on NCLB. Opponents to NCLB have argued that the more people know about the law, the more likely they are to oppose it. Is this true? More generally, as the accountability provisions of NCLB are now being enforced, is public support for the law waning? The second section turns to state politics. What does the research literature say about how have states responded to NCLB?

The third section explains empirical methods employed to analyze state reactions. I devised a scale to reflect the magnitude of state rebellion against the act. On one end of the scale are states that have taken legislative or legal action against NCLB. On the other end of the scale are states that have either taken no action against the act or have defeated legislative efforts to circumvent NCLB. Using this scale, I test several factors that may influence a state's response to NCLB, among them, political culture, student achievement, demographic characteristics, and resource constraints. The fourth section describes the findings of the analysis.

The fifth section of the paper concludes by assessing whether state and local opposition to the implementation of NCLB has weakened the foundation of NCLB's political support. What obstacles must NCLB overcome to survive? The left-right coalition that originally supported No Child Let Behind rallied around the belief that NCLB would help children in poverty. Has that changed? Has opposition to NCLB undermined the view that the law represents a legitimate means of improving the education of poor and minority students?

Downloads

Download

Authors

Tom Loveless

No Child Left Behind: How To Give It a Passing Grade

Martin R. West — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has the potential to improve many of America’s schools, but this potential is currently undermined by serious flaws in how the program evaluates school performance. Because NCLB’s measurement system compares only students’ performance at a single point in time against state-determined standards, the information generated on school performance is often misleading and creates perverse incentives for states to lower their expectations.

Fortunately, new measures of school performance based on the academic progress made by individual students over time offer a promising alternative to the law’s current approach. And a recently announced NCLB pilot program allowing up to ten states to use growth-based school accountability models represents an important step toward making the law more effective. But the pilot’s effectiveness will depend ultimately upon whether the Department of Education allows states sufficient flexibility in devising such alternative accountability schemes.

Policy Brief #149

An NCLB Primer

NCLB's overarching goal is that all American students reach math and reading proficiency by 2014. As a condition of receiving federal aid, the law places three key requirements on the states: to assess the performance of all students annually in grades three through eight and once in high school against state-determined proficiency standards in math and reading; to disclose the results to the public; and to sanction and eventually intervene in schools and districts where students (or one of several student subgroups) fail to meet statewide performance goals. In short, NCLB mandates that states adopt comprehensive accountability systems for identifying and improving underperforming schools.

Less than four years after the path-breaking law's passage, it remains too soon to assess definitively its impact on student achievement. There is little doubt, however, that by providing a wealth of new information about the performance of students against state standards, NCLB has shined a light on ethnic and racial disparities in achievement in both urban and suburban schools, while creating new pressure for reform and innovation. The law has thus maintained the support of the Education Trust, the Council of Great City Schools, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, and other respected advocates for disadvantaged students from across the political spectrum.

Yet NCLB also has its detractors. The teachers unions and a growing number of states and school districts are working actively to soften key provisions, to use them as leverage to extract more federal dollars for public education, or to do both at once. Congressional Democrats allege that the Bush Administration has not spent the money it promised on the law's implementation, even as legislatures in several Republican-dominated states complain of an unwarranted federal intrusion.

While some of these objections are no doubt questionable, another line of criticism must be taken more seriously. Many policy-makers and researchers who are sympathetic with the law's goals and its emphasis on annual testing are nonetheless unhappy with NCLB's specific approach. Officials in various states contend that if allowed greater flexibility, they could do a better job of determining which of their schools are improving student achievement and narrowing gaps between lowperforming and high-performing student subgroups. Unfortunately, their particular concerns are frequently ignored in mainstream discussions.

An Unfunded Mandate?

Indeed, public debate over NCLB has focused not on the substance of the law's accountability system, but rather on the money allocated to put it in place. A point of contention in the 2004 presidential campaign, the issue has remained in the public eye in part as a result of separate lawsuits filed in 2005 by the National Education Association and the state of Connecticut, lawsuits alleging that the law is an unfunded mandate and requesting relief. Are such allegations credible? More to the point, is more federal money what is needed to improve American education?

Set aside the fact that NCLB is not, by any legal definition, an unfunded mandate. Because the money is offered to states as a grant-in-aid, states are free to turn it down if they dislike the strings attached. Claims that the law is underfunded also fail on the merits. As the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has shown, test-based accountability is an intrinsically inexpensive reform strategy. Nationwide, cost estimates run as low as $9 per student, on average, for the type of tests currently used, and nearly all independent estimates of the costs of testing come to less than $50 per student out of the roughly $10,000 per student currently being spent on their education. Nor have the law's provisions requiring that students in persistently failing schools be offered public school choice and supplemental services yet placed much of a fiscal burden on states and school districts.

But to delve too deeply into the debate over funding levels is to miss the forest for the trees. Simply put, America's educational woes have little to do with the amount we spend on the public schools. International comparisons place us at the very top in per pupil expenditure but near the bottom (24th out of the 29 OECD countries participating in a 2003 assessment of mathematics literacy among 15-year-olds, to cite one recent example) in terms of student achievement. Moreover, while school spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled since 1970, student achievement remains disappointing, and high-school dropout rates have increased. Of course, this pattern is not determinative: More money may ultimately be needed to achieve NCLB's lofty goals for student performance. Because no national school system has achieved near-universal proficiency in core academic subjects, we simply don't know what doing so will require. Yet it is foolish to invest evermore resources into a failing system that has shown few signs of improvement.

NCLB was drafted with this record in mind. By requiring states to establish a rigorous accountability system as a condition for receiving federal funds, it aims to convert federal aid for education from a subsidy for state school systems as they currently exist into a lever for making those systems more effective and more equitable. The generally positive results seen from test-based accountability systems – states that adopted such systems in the 1990s significantly improved their relative standing on the federally administered National Assessment of Educational Progress – suggest that the law's general approach makes sense.

A Flawed Measuring Stick

But the effectiveness of accountability systems in education, as in other fields,depends in the first instance upon the accuracy of their performance measures. If a school accountability system identifies schools where student learning flourishes, it can provide useful information to parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, state policy-makers, and the public at large. The most pressing shortcomings of the NCLB accountability system therefore involve the measuring methodology states are required to use. NCLB's current method for assessing school quality provides misleading information about schools both within and between states.

Within States

Under NCLB as it is currently implemented, states must evaluate schools based primarily on their students' performance at a single point in time. Schools are said to be making "adequate yearly progress" when their students (and all student subgroups above a minimum size) meet statewide targets for the percentage of students who are proficient according to state-determined standards. States must raise these targets at regular intervals until 2014, by which time all students are expected to be proficient.

Unfortunately, this level-based accountability system provides little information about how much students in a school are actually learning each year. In fact, according to my research on Florida's school system, the gains in reading performance made by students attending schools that made adequate yearly progress during the 2003-04 school year were, on average, no larger than the gains made by students in schools not making adequate yearly progress. In math, students in schools making adequate yearly progress made gains that were 3 percent of a standard deviation larger, a negligible difference. At least in Florida, which is unique in the quality of data it has made available to investigate these issues, a school's rating under NCLB seems to have more to do with the composition of its student body than the progress its students were making in the classroom. Schools not making adequate yearly progress in the law's second year had, on average, 40 percent more poor students and a substantially greater share of minorities.

The problem is that the NCLB methodology for measuring school performance does not pay enough attention to the vast differences in students' academic preparation when they arrive at school – differences that have clear consequences for their subsequent test scores. Schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students can be deemed failing for not meeting statewide proficiency targets even if their students are making dramatic progress. Conversely, schools in affluent communities may appear to be effective despite the fact that their students are learning less than the state's average student from one year to the next.

Seeking to compensate for these problems, a few states and school districts have developed alternative measures of performance, termed growth models, that incorporate information on where students began the year in addition to where they end up. Not surprisingly, these measures often provide a quite different picture of schools' performance. In Florida, for example, 62 percent of the state's schools did not make adequate yearly progress in the 2004- 05 school year. But more than a third of those failing schools did well enough to earn an A or B on the state's 5-category school grading system, which awards half of its points based on the percentage of students who improved their performance against state standards over the previous year. Local officials in Florida, who have no stake in either the state or federal accountability system, almost uniformly contend that the state's growth model does a better job of identifying effective schools.

Between States

But the difficulties of the NCLB measuring methodology extend beyond the borders of particular districts and states. Because NCLB allows states to create their own tests and to define the level of achievement required for students to be deemed proficient, states vary widely in their expectations of what students should know. The share of students in a state who are proficient therefore contains little information about the relative effectiveness of its schools. Indeed, it is the states with the highest expectations for their students – most of whom set their standards before NCLB's passage – that are most likely to be found lacking under the federal law.

Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a previously voluntary national exam that NCLB requires states to administer, demonstrate how widely expectations vary from state to state. Incredibly, the results show that there is almost no relationship between the percentage of students in a state deemed proficient according to state standards and the percentage reaching proficiency on the NAEP. Students in Texas and South Carolina, for example, performed similarly against national norms, with just over one quarter of students reaching proficiency in reading. However, fully 83 percent of students in Texas achieved proficiency in 2003 on the state's own exam, as compared with 29 percent of students in South Carolina.

As many observers have noted, the ability of states to alter their standards raises the specter of a nationwide race-to-the-bottom, with states progressively lowering their expectations for students so that fewer schools are identified as failing. Indeed, a handful of states including Louisiana, Colorado, Connecticut, and Arizona have altered their scoring systems since the law's passage in an apparent effort to increase the number of schools making adequate yearly progress.

Why did NCLB's Congressional authors settle for an accountability system with such seemingly predictable deficiencies? Unworkable compromises often emerge from legislative hoppers, and, in this case, any move toward establishing national standards had to travel a particularly rocky road. Prior efforts to create national standards had floundered on attempts to define them. As former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn quipped in the wake of a failed 1990s attempt to accomplish the task, "Republicans oppose any proposal with the word 'national' in it, Democrats oppose anything with the word 'standards.'" In the case of NCLB, establishing a full-fledged accountability system for schools at the same time only augmented the problem. Meanwhile, the idea that all schools, no matter what the composition of their student body, should be held to a common standard, rather than be evaluated against their own performance the year before, resonated with the law's rhetorical commitment to the notion that all students can learn.

What is less widely recognized is that by 2001 only a handful of states even had the capacity to measure the annual progress of individual students—the most basic requirement for a school accountability system based on the growth in their achievement. Although many states have since upgraded their data systems, a recent survey by the non-profit Data Quality Campaign revealed that most still lack the necessary resources to move immediately to a growth-based model.

Impending Collapse

The problems with the NCLB measurement system are rapidly coming to a head. Consider the following scenario: Higher statewide performance targets cause a sharp increase in the percentage of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress, just as state accountability systems register conflicting signals about school performance, some indicating considerable progress. An Education Week analysis of preliminary data from the 2004-05 academic year showed just such an outcome unfolding in several states. In California and Hawaii, for example, the percentage of schools making adequate yearly progress decreased by 10 and 21 percentage points, respectively, over the previous year, despite the fact that the percentage of proficient students in each state increased. In Hawaii, the percentage of schools making adequate yearly progress fell to 34 percent, the lowest of any state to have reported its data thus far. But the local reaction was not entirely negative. "We have two daily papers," Hawaii's communications director explained. "One played it up like the glass was half-empty; the other like the glass was half-full. So it's kind of confusing." Such schizophrenic outcomes could lead many people to question the legitimacy of the entire accountability enterprise. After all, if virtually all schools in a state are identified as failing—including many that appear to be succeeding in difficult circumstances—is the problem with the schools or with the accountability system? The threat of diminished credibility is especially acute in places like Florida where, as we have seen, dual schoolrating systems provide conflicting assessments of the effectiveness of specific schools.

The Department of Education is hardly unaware of these dangers. Its strategy to date, introduced by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in April of 2005 as a "new, common-sense approach to implementation," has consisted mainly of allowing states to make minor modifications to their accountability plans, apparently in the hopes of postponing the day of reckoning until school performance improves. Various states have been allowed, for example, to delay scheduled increases in their performance targets, to use a larger minimum number when determining whether the performance of a subgroup of students within a school will be assessed separately, or to make statistical allowances for the uncertainty inherent in any measure of school performance.

Individually, each of these changes has been reasonable and even prudent, given the circumstances. And they seem to have helped prevent a dramatic increase in the share of schools not making adequate yearly progress in the 2004-05 school year. But their collective effect has been the creation of a patchwork system in which the apparent success of a state's schools under NCLB depends as much on the savvy and sophistication of the statisticians in its education agency as it does on the performance of its schools. Differences in the federal treatment of states requesting flexibility even provided ammunition for Connecticut,whose allegations against Secretary Spellings in court include the claim that her department's enforcement of NCLB has been arbitrary. Meanwhile, the various modifications have done nothing to ensure that the schools identified as making adequate yearly progress are those in which students are actually learning.

The Growth-Model Pilot Program

Against this backdrop, the Department of Education's November 18, 2005 announcement of a new growth-model pilot program represents an important step forward; indeed, it is the most important regulatory change since the passage of NCLB. The program will allow up to 10 states to implement accountability systems based in part on annual "growth" in student achievement – that is, the amount individual students are learning from one year to the next, as measured by the state achievement test. The first growth models may be approved for use in the 2005-06 academic year, well in advance of the law's scheduled reauthorization in 2007.

Such growth-based accountability systems have the potential to offer a fairer and more accurate assessment of school performance. Their widespread adoption could also reduce pressures to lower state proficiency standards, preventing the potential dumbing-down of school curricula by rewarding schools for gains made by highachieving students. In states with the necessary database capacities to participate, the pilot program should help sustain support for the law among officials frustrated with the federal government's hitherto rigid approach to implementation. And, by encouraging other states to invest insuch data systems now, it may help ensure that Congress is less constrained than it was in 2001 by what states can do when the law comes up for reauthorization.

It remains unclear, however, whether the Department of Education will allow states enough flexibility to make the pilot as informative as it should be. While there is an emerging consensus among practitioners and scholars that measures of school performance based on growth are superior to level-based measures, there is little agreement over how best to implement them in the context of an accountability system. Growth models bring with them a host of technical and political problems that lack broadly accepted solutions. To address these issues, researchers will need a solid base of evidence on how various growth-based accountability systems work in practice.

That said, the Department of Education has been wise to exclude one popular category of growth models – those commonly referred to within education circles as "value-added" models – from the pilot program. Value-added models incorporate information on students' background characteristics when evaluating their progress and, as a consequence, have been appropriately criticized for reintroducing and disguising lower expectations for disadvantaged students. Secretary Spellings should also insist that states experimenting with growth-models continue to report test score levels to the public separately by subgroup as mandated under the current system.

Participating states should otherwise be given considerable flexibility, includingthe flexibility to use growth-models that are not premised on the notion that every student, regardless of his or her grade, will be fully proficient by 2014. The federal government should instead allow states to reward schools for putting virtually all students on a trajectory that, if sustained, will ensure that they are fully proficient by the time they are tested in high school. While this new interpretation of the law's language on deadlines would be characterized by some as a step back, it is increasingly clear that the requirement that all students in a school be proficient by 2014 will, sooner or later, undermine the credibility of the entire accountability system. Or it will lead to a state-by-state downward redefinition of the meaning of proficient.

Conclusion

When considering how much flexibility states should be allowed under NCLB, whether in its current form or after its reauthorization, it is useful to recall the role states played in the law's initial development. The accountability movement in education was a state-led effort, with the crucial steps taken by governors eager to establish a reputation for reform. Likewise, the law's core principles of annual assessment and disaggregation of achievement data by subgroup did not emerge in whole cloth from the federal legislative process leading up to NCLB. Rather, these principles were developed independently by a few innovative states, most notably Texas and North Carolina, and gained credibility when those same states' performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress improved dramatically. We should again let the states lead the way.

There was always a danger in the highly prescriptive nature of NCLB regulations that whatever good was accomplished by bringing some states into the accountability fold would be more than offset by the prevention of experimentation and innovation. By granting flexibility only to states that have proven themselves to be leaders in the effort to increase accountability in education, the growth-model pilot program provides a way to eliminate this tradeoff. The Department of Education should trust these states to serve as "laboratories of accountability" with the aim of devising new and better measurement systems.

Downloads

Download

Authors

Martin R. West

Every State Left Behind

Diane Ravitch — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

While in office, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton both called for national academic standards and national tests in the public schools. In both cases, the proposals were rejected by a Congress dominated by the opposing party. The current President Bush, with a friendly Congress in hand, did not pursue that goal because it is contrary to the Republican Party philosophy of localism. Instead he adopted a strategy of "50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests"—and the evidence is growing that this approach has not improved student achievement. Americans must recognize that we need national standards, national tests and a national curriculum.

The release last month of test results by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is part of the Department of Education, vividly demonstrated why varying state standards and tests are inadequate. Almost all states report that, based on their own tests, incredibly large proportions of their students meet high standards. Yet the scores on the federal test (which was given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders) were far lower. Basically, the states have embraced low standards and grade inflation.

Idaho claims that 90 percent of its fourth-grade students are proficient in mathematics, but on the federal test only 41 percent reached the Education Department's standard of proficiency. Similarly, New York reports that nearly 85 percent of its fourth graders meet state standards in mathematics, yet only 36 percent tested as proficient on the national assessment. North Carolina boasts an impressive 92 percent pass rate on the state test, but only 40 percent meet the federal standard.

In fourth-grade reading, the gaps between state and national reports are equally large. Georgia claims that 87 percent of its pupils are proficient in reading, but only 26 percent reached that level on the national exam. Alabama says that 83 percent of its students are proficient, but only 22 percent meet the federal standard.

The same discrepancies are found in the scores for eighth-grade reading, where Texas reports that 83 percent met the state standard, but the federal test finds that only 26 percent are proficient. Tennessee and North Carolina both claim that 88 percent are proficient readers, whereas 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively, met that mark on the federal test.

Why the discrepancies? The states function in a political environment. Educational leaders and elected officials want to assure the public that the schools are doing their jobs and making progress. The federal testing program, administered for the past 15 years by an independent, bipartisan governing board, has never been cowed by the demands of parents, school officials and taxpayers for good news.

In the No Child Left Behind law of 2001, Congress left it to each state to develop its own standards and tests, but added that the tests given by National Assessment of Educational Progress should serve as an external gauge of national and state-level achievement. The federal tests are considered the gold standard for good reason: they are the product of a long-term federal investment in research and development. Unlike the state tests, the federal program tries to align its performance standards with international education standards. Many states model their testing on the national program, but still cling to lower standards for fear of alienating the public and embarrassing public officials responsible for education.

The price of this local watering-down is clear. Our fourth-grade students generally do well when compared with their peers in other nations, but eighth-grade students are only average globally, and 12th graders score near the bottom in comparison with students in many European and Asian nations. Even our students who have taken advanced courses in mathematics and physics perform poorly relative to their peers on international tests.

Last month, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that our nation's ''strategic and economic security,'' as well as our leadership in the development of new technologies, is at risk unless we invest heavily in our human capital; that is, the education of our people. The academy report made clear that many young Americans do not know enough about science, technology or mathematics to understand or contribute to the evolving knowledge-based society. The best way to compete in the global economy, the report maintained, is to ensure that American workers are ''the best educated, the hardest-working, best trained, and most productive in the world."

It is fair to say that we will not reach that goal if we accept mediocre performance and label it ''proficient.'' Nor will we reach that goal if we pretend that mathematics taught in Alaska or Iowa is profoundly different from the mathematics taught in Maine or Florida, or for that matter, in Japan and Hungary.

Unfortunately, the political calculations that resulted in the No Child Left Behind law adopting a strategy of letting the states choose their own standards and tests remain the reality. In general, Republicans are wary of national standards and a national curriculum, while Democrats are wary of testing in general. Both parties must come to understand that the states are not competing with each other to ratchet up student achievement. Instead, they are maintaining standards that meet the public's comfort level.

America will not begin to meet the challenge of developing the potential of our students until we have accurate reporting about their educational progress. We will not have accurate reporting until that function is removed from the constraints of state and local politics. We will be stuck with piecemeal and ineffective reforms until we agree as a nation that education—not only in reading and mathematics, but also science, history, literature, foreign languages and the arts—must be our highest domestic priority.

Authors

Diane Ravitch

Publication: The New York Times

No Child Left Behind and the 2004 Campaign

Tom Loveless — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

On the second anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the law is coming under intense criticism. Education apparently will be just as important in the 2004 presidential campaign as it was in 2000. It will also be an issue debated by Democratic and Republican candidates for Congress. The three main criticisms of NCLB are that it is inadequately funded, unfairly holds schools accountable for student performance, and requires an onerous amount of student testing. How will each of these arguments play out with the electorate?

Funding
Democrats complain that the Bush administration's funding of NCLB falls short of the amount Congress authorized. The shortfall is $6 billion to $7 billion. No one believes that amount of money can make a decisive difference in improving America's schools. That said, there is no doubt states and local districts could use more funding—whatever its source—especially for bringing all teachers up to the standards of "high quality" mandated by NCLB. Strained state budgets have made voters wary that schools are being shortchanged. Even some Republican governors have complained that NCLB issues mandates without the funding required to fulfill them. Advantage: Democrats.

Accountability
Very few people think that traditional approaches to accountability mechanisms worked very well. Every year, hundreds if not thousands of schools managed to slip by without teaching kids how to read, let alone teaching them history, science, or mathematics. Should schools be held accountable based on what they have taught students or on other grounds, such as keeping parents happy, holding down student suspensions and expulsions (even if discipline suffers as a result), or school principals ingratiating themselves with district administrators? Taxpayers spend about $500 billion each year on K-12 education. They want to see results. Advantage: Republicans.

Testing
Should students be tested on assessments reflecting the skills and knowledge that the public considers important? Or should they be evaluated on criteria set by individual teachers and school principals, with each school going its own way in measuring what students learn? In the past, minority and poor kids paid a huge price for the lack of data on school achievement. No Child Left Behind requires an annual test in grades three through eight and public release of the results. Polls are clear that neither parents nor the general public considers annual testing onerous. Advantage: Republicans.

The NCLB is not without problems. It needs tinkering. The revisions that would do the most good are technical in nature. They do not lend themselves to political sound bites, and, therefore, we probably won't hear about them in the fall campaigns. Among the most pressing problems are figuring out how the performance of subgroups of students (especially minorities and poor students) can be fairly incorporated into accountability systems; making sure that provisions requiring schools to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) are reliable, especially with small schools; and coming up with ways to insure that all teachers are highly qualified.

The needs of gifted, high achieving youngsters are ignored by NCLB. The law lacks any form of student accountability, a serious omission if you believe students respond to incentives just as educators do. Rewards and sanctions are surely as helpful in encouraging students to learn a lot as they are in encouraging schools to teach well.

Authors

Tom Loveless