• Our alumni
• Alumni support
• Graduate school partnerships
• Employer partnerships
• Power of the network
• Alumni Leadership Initiatives
• One Day - Alumni Magazine

• Corps and Alumni
• Donors
• Employers & Grad Schools
• Family and Friends
• Media
• Potential Staff

Does No Child Left Behind Measure Up?

As President Bush's controversial education act comes up for reauthorization, critics and supporters are taking a hard look at the law's provisions

By Michelle R. Davis | Illustrations by Leigh Wells

When Sharon Rubright was in college, she volunteered at two public schools: one inner city and low income, the other suburban and middle class. Outraged by the disparities she saw, Rubright joined Teach For America in 2000 as a third grade teacher in Washington, D.C. Six years later, she is still fighting for change, but now she's attacking with new artillery: hard numbers and data. As an instructional coach in a Fairfax, Va., elementary school, Rubright helps teachers plan curricula and set goals, but she also helps them crunch data so they can track student progress in a concrete way.

In many ways, Rubright owes her job to the No Child Left Behind Act, a landmark federal education law that at its core requires schools and districts to look closely at the achievement of not just the majority of students, but of all students-low income, minority, and special education included. The law sets annual achievement goals for students in reading and math and lays out consequences for failure.

When NCLB was signed into law in 2002, the high-achieving Fairfax County Public Schools District found it had an embarrassing problem: There were pockets of students, particularly those in low-income areas and those just learning English, who were slipping behind, even in "successful" schools. That's when the district created Rubright's position. Now she is part of an 11-person team at Glen Forest Elementary School, including a troop of reading and math specialists, that is helping teachers bring those struggling students up to speed.

"There always had been people doing this type of data analysis," Rubright says. "The difference is that now it gets into the hands of the teachers. We make that a priority."

Five years after its passage, the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act is arguably President Bush's signature domestic policy achievement. NCLB has been lauded for focusing on public school students whose lagging test scores had received little attention, and at the same time pilloried for containing what some see as arbitrary regulations cooked up in Washington that malfunction in real schools. Criticism about lack of funding for all the new mandates has dogged the law since its adoption.

This year, Congress will get a chance to revisit the law's provisions as it comes up for reauthorization. Teachers' unions and education interest groups are already pushing for changes. In the end, politics may play a significant part in slowing any alterations: Experts say it's unlikely that the law will be reworked with the 2008 presidential election looming.

"There's all kinds of pressure for nothing to happen and very little pressure for something to happen," says Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder and director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank. "No Child Left Behind, for both parties, creates intra-party tension which they'll be seeking to avoid."

While opinions of NCLB run the gamut, most would agree that the act has changed the way the nation talks about education. Phrases like "disaggregation of data" and "supplemental services" are on the lips of everyone from policy wonks to principals. Newspaper articles highlight local schools tagged "failing," and educators use a new metric to judge whether a school is successful.

"This law has really changed our fundamental idea of what it is to be a good school or a good enough school," says Craig Jerald (L.A. '91), president of Break the Curve, a Washington education consulting company. "No Child Left Behind says that to be a good school, you have to be a good school for all of your students, not just for the elite or even the average students, but for the low-income, the black, the Latino students too."

The law's central mission is to narrow the achievement gap between differing groups of students and get every student to grade-level proficiency by the year 2014. NCLB requires that all students meet grade-level targets in reading and math each year, otherwise known as AYP (adequate yearly progress). If schools and districts fail to meet the targets for any of their student subsets, consequences range from mandated tutoring to a total shutdown and overhaul of the school. A school can fail to make AYP and be labeled "in need of improvement" if it misses targets for even one group (special education students, for example), or if it fails to test 95 percent of students in most subgroups (see NCLB Primer on the opposite page).

Supporters say such penalties are necessary to get schools to focus on meeting the law's requirements, but critics say the measures only make it more difficult for floundering schools to turn around.

"The consequences for failure to meet AYP are all punishment-oriented," says David Shreve, an education lobbyist for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "You can't punish your way into a better system. It has to be a mix of punishments and incentives, with heavy emphasis on the incentives."

WE ASKED YOU

How would you rate the overall impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on the public schools in your community? 475 alumni responded:

46% It's hurting

21% It's helping

18% It's making no difference

15% I don't know

But Allison Jack (L.A. '91), director of special projects for the Chicago Public Schools' Office of New Schools, believes that the penalties, though harsh, have yielded good results. The Chicago schools that have closed and reopened are "much, much better schools," says Jack, whose job it is to help guide schools through the restructuring process. "The communities which were super-skeptical in the beginning are now saying this is the best thing that could have happened."

Opinions aside, there's no question that AYP has ratcheted up the pressure to deliver test scores (read alumna Laura Stramel's perspective on p. 20).

"People are much more focused on the use of data than before," says Alex Nock, director of the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind, formed last year to study the law. Teachers view data as "a positive thing," Nock says. "The frustrations we've heard are around the data collection and the length of time it takes to get back scores."

But that focus on testing and the peril of missing AYP targets has some schools paring back in areas like art, music, and even science, some teachers say, as they ramp up on reading and math. "It's that feeling that we're just teaching to the test," says Elizabeth Handy (Baltimore '03). "The law looks very good on paper, but I don't think it's as feasible in the school systems as they intended it to be."

While many find AYP requirements too rigid, Jason Kamras (D.C. '96), the 2005 National Teacher of the Year, believes such stringent, across-the-board standards are precisely the point. During his travels last year, Kamras says, he met a principal who "told me he used to put a warm body in the special education classes and the remedial math classes. He said,'Now I have to put my very best teacher in those classes or we won't meet AYP.'"

The AYP measure raises other issues as well (read alumna principal Tracy Wright's perspective on p. 20.) Under the current model, this year's third grade reading scores, for example, are compared with last year's third grade reading scores to determine if a school has made improvements. Even if a student has made several grade levels' worth of progress in reading or math during the year, the school doesn't get credit for that improvement unless the student reaches grade-level proficiency. Critics would prefer to use a "growth model," which would track individual student progress, taking into
consideration where the child started.

"We need something that takes into account where people are, that measures growth and provides the wherewithal for state systems to develop the ways and means of measuring growth if they don't have that capacity already," says Paul Reville, president of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy in Cambridge, Mass., and director of the education policy and management program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

However, Ross Wiener, policy director at The Education Trust, says the point of the AYP measurement is to get students up to grade level-regardless of where they start. "Accountability systems before NCLB never expected students to catch up or ever demonstrate proficiency," Wiener says. "The big advance of AYP is that it actually expects schools to get students to a common level."

Because each state sets its own proficiency levels and develops its own tests, critics have also suggested that states are gaming the system by establishing lower benchmarks in order to appear successful. A 2006 report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which supports national standards and testing, reviewed all states' standards and graded 26 of them as a D or an F based on their rigor. This disparity has borne out in test scores: In Tennessee, for example, 87 percent of fourth graders scored in the proficient category on the state reading test, but only 27 percent were found to be proficient by the National Assessment of Educational Progress-often referred to as the nation's report card-which provides an independent measure of achievement. By contrast, in Massachusetts, which began standards reform even before NCLB, state standards are proving more rigorous than the national ones. Forty percent of fourth graders in Massachusetts scored proficient on state math tests in the 2004-2005 school year, while 49 percent were proficient according to the NAEP.

To this end, one of NCLB's most controversial provisions calls for all teachers to be "highly qualified," though states have been slow to meet this requirement. To be considered highly qualified, a teacher must not only hold full state certification but also possess a bachelor's degree in the subject matter being taught or pass a rigorous test demonstrating competency. Teachers can be considered highly qualified as long as they are enrolled in an alternative program that results in certification within three years, but they still must meet the federal law's subject-matter requirements. For veteran teachers, states may also design alternative programs through which teachers can show competence in their content area.

Joel Packer, the National Education Association's manager for No Child Left Behind policy, says the federal law's definition of a highly qualified teacher just doesn't work in some cases. For example, a special education teacher who teaches multiple subjects in a self-contained classroom might need to be certified in math, English, science, and social studies-which, he says, is highly improbable.

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, favors the law's high bar for subject mastery. "I'm a little bit bemused by everybody thinking the law is fundamentally flawed," she says. "Change is just difficult. I really believe the teaching profession is going to become stronger for it."

In addition, there's the perennial issue of funding. Ever since NCLB was enacted, critics-particularly Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), two of the key Congressional leaders who developed the law-have bemoaned the lack of funding for the new educational mandates. States have complained about the cost of testing and other NCLB requirements that came with little federal money for implementation.

"There continues to be a sense of, 'We got shortchanged here,' " says Edward R. Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding. "The federal government is expecting way more than they're willing to pay for."

For example, President Bush's proposed 2007 budget essentially flat-lined spending on Title I, the federal government's largest education program, which goes toward improving education for low-income students, and called for a 3.8 percent drop in overall discretionary spending by the Department of Education.

That said, overall federal education funding has increased since President Bush took office, though much of that increase occurred in the early years of his first term. In his 2007 proposed budget, Bush also calls for $200 million to help schools that need improvement and $380 million for math and science education, though there's no guarantee that Congress will approve the new funding. It's likely that most of these issues will get attention next year when wrangling over reauthorization begins in earnest. The AYP testing system will get particular scrutiny, Packer says, with the NEA pushing for changes that would factor in additional methods of assessing schools, such as the number of students taking honors classes and attendance and graduation rates.

Some changes have already been made. In response to critics who felt that AYP did not accurately measure individual student progress, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who promised to take a common-sense approach to the law when she took office in January 2005, has approved a pilot program to allow two states-Tennessee and North Carolina-to test growth models to measure the progress of the same cohort of students from year to year.

Spellings has also tried to address other concerns. While NCLB requires that schools labeled "in need of improvement" for two years in a row must allow students to transfer to higher-performing public schools, that just doesn't work in rural areas where the closest school might be hours away, or in an inner-city district where the majority of schools are struggling. Last year, Spellings announced that such districts will be permitted to offer tutoring to students after the second year of not meeting AYP before being forced to allow transfers the following year.

As states struggle to meet the mandates of NCLB, some wonder whether a law that has to work so differently in so many states and local school districts can find success.

It can, says Christopher T. Cross, chairman of education consulting firm Cross & Joftis, LLC and an assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush. But the federal and the state system need to learn from each other.

"In reauthorization, one of the things that has to be done is to look at how better to articulate the state and federal accountability systems," he says. "Many states had accountability systems that predated NCLB-some were sophisticated, and some were not. A blending of both elements is not a bad solution."

Despite her deep belief in the law's tenets and the positive effects she has seen in her school, Sharon Rubright wonders if No Child Left Behind, in its current form, will ever live up to its name for under-resourced schools. "D.C. seemed crippled by NCLB because there are not enough schools achieving and not enough resources to pull a turnaround," she says. "In Fairfax, it's the opposite. We could focus on these small pockets of students and really make a difference."

About One Day | Contact Us | For Advertisers