Did Help Get Left Behind?
Congress reconsiders a landmark school reform
The throw-up reports started not long after the law was passed: children getting sick before the test, during the test, even right onto the test. It was just one exceptional response to the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Behind the scenes, teachers, administrators, and state officials often fared worse, working late nights and weekends to create and grade the multiple tests the landmark law required.
Five years later, educators and lawmakers are asking whether the stomachaches caused by the legislation have been worth it. Over the next several weeks, congressional committees will hold hearings on the law as they try to decide before it expires whether to reauthorize the act as is, change it, or throw it out.
In some ways, the decision looks easy. Both leading Democrats and President George Bush say they are committed to keeping the law-one of only a few big domestic initiatives produced in the past five years. Further, the two sides appear unanimous on what aspects of the law need to be changed-a consensus that will inform a blueprint for reform scheduled for release this week by the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Commission.
But talk to the nine school districts that have filed a lawsuit challenging the act as an unfunded mandate or to the many newly elected U.S. representatives who campaigned against the law, and you will hear a different story. Every child may have been tested, the critics say, but the real question is: Has every child been helped?
The law was based on the idea that one thing would lead to the other. That's why it requires two tests a year in grades three through eight and one test in high school. And because the results are disaggregated by groups, the government learns not only how well a whole third grade scores; it also learns how the black, white, low-income, and disabled third graders score. If enough students in each group reach a certain level, the school is labeled "adequate." If they don't, the school is required to take remedial measures-consequences that get more serious with every year it fails to meet its goal.
Success stories. The result of all this testing is supposed to be improved performance. Ivan Small, the superintendent of schools in Poplar, Mont., tells one success story for that model. The law's requirement to break down test scores by poverty level, Small says, caused him to figure out why his low-income students were underperforming the higher-income ones. His findings, in turn, led him to replace old readers with a whole new literacy curriculum. It also changed the way he thought about homework. "There are multiple families living in a household of two or three bedrooms . ... Is there time or a place for homework?" The answer was often "No," so Small and his staff created an after-school study program.
Centennial Place Elementary School in Atlanta has also benefited from NCLB.The school had been collecting data even before the law was passed, but it had never separated out special education students. When it did, it found dramatic results. "We had a big gap," says Cynthia Kuhlman, the school's former principal. "Seeing that right there ... was a critical picture for us." The staff started giving these students extra help, reviewing their progress, and holding more parent conferences. As a result, proficiency levels rose from 41 to more than 80 percent.
Yet the success stories may omit a crucial point: Although both of these schools owe their gains to NCLB, the law got them only so far. It requires a diagnosis, but it does not prescribe a cure. Or at least it doesn't pay much for one.
No Child does call for consistently failing schools to address their problems, by allowing students to transfer to another public school, for instance, or providing free help to low-income students. But these requirements have hardly guaranteed improvement. In Poplar, all tutoring services are offered online, but few families have Internet access. As for the transfer option, there is no other place to go. Nationwide, only 17 percent of students eligible for tutoring took advantage of it in the 2003-04 school year, and less than 1 percent chose to transfer. In some cases, as with Poplar, there were no alternatives; in others, the districts failed to adequately inform families about their options.
Required reforms become stronger and more specific when a school fails four years in a row. But as substantial as hiring new staff and changing curricula may seem, the White House would go even further. Its proposal for reauthorization calls for more sweeping changes, like overriding state bans to establish charter schools or enabling all-out takeovers by elected officials.
Many more obstacles block the path from testing students to helping them, and at the top of the list is money. Like other turnaround schools, Centennial Place owes much of its success to outside resources: Even before No Child, members of the local community volunteered as tutors and built a YMCA whose gym the school shares. Coca-Cola donated $50,000 in new books for the school's media center. Elsewhere in the country, failing schools often have to fend for themselves.
There is confusion, too, over what constitutes a failing school in the first place. A Maryland superintendent just informed the staff at Annapolis High School that they will all have to reapply for their jobs next year because they failed to meet No Child standards for four years in a row. Yet the same school exceeded the world average for scores on International Baccalaureate exams. Why the failing grade? It hinged on the poor performance of a single subgroup.
Dozens more issues will fuel the debate over No Child in the months ahead, including how to improve teaching, how to make state standards more uniform, and how to test children with limited English abilities or special needs. A bigger question is whether Congress can avoid partisan bickering and actually fix the flaws in the law before the act expires. If the law remains as it is, it could mean no relief for schools at a time they need it most.
As of last year, less than 1 percent of schools-about 600-had entered the "restructuring" phase that comes after five years of failure. "But that will increase every year," says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy. Not only are more schools testing; but as a 2014 deadline for 100 percent proficiency nears, they will face higher standards. "You can't just establish a goal and say, 'Y'all go at it,'" Jennings says. "We need to figure out ways to help schools and teachers do better, not just tell them that they've got problems."
This story appears in the February 19, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.