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Expert Opinion

Moderated by Michelle R. Davis

On October 3, 2006, One Day convened a round table of education experts to discuss the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Participants were Jeanne Harmon, executive director of the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession; Bruce Hunter, associate executive director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators Michael J. Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation; Paul Reville, president of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy and director of the education policy and management program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education; and David Shreve, an education lobbyist for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

MRD: Next year, the No Child Left Behind Act is slated for reauthorization, but a lot of people think the timing isn't right and it's not going to actually happen... If it does come up, what would you like to see Congress tackle?

PR: If the federal government is going to weigh in on this issue of teacher quality, it really has to give some consideration to what it's doing to change the market factors.... If you can't intervene to make that market more appealing to draw in a higher level of applicants, then mandating where the bar is in terms of entry requirements, I think, is going to be a futile strategy.

JH: Special education is the place that is the hardest to staff across this country anyway. We have a job that is not particularly satisfying, because special education teachers are already rebelling against all the paperwork attached to special education, and now we've got staffing issues related to special education. And now we know, because of disaggregation, that we've got special education issues related to learning, and we're going to have to address the particular needs of special education and the way the special education system works in this country. I don't think the law as it works now recognizes that at all.

MRD: What is actually politically viable to see changed, in terms of reauthorization?

BH: That's hard for me to tell... The people who champion the law are dug in deeply... Based on what people are telling us, reauthorization is going to happen in 2009.

MRD: Is that a real problem - that it's not likely to happen until 2009?

BH: Not if they improve the statute. I think doing it fast would just cement into place what's there now, maybe with a growth model.

DS: You start by throwing out AYP. Every psychometrician rolls their eyes and shrugs their shoulders... [AYP] doesn't make any sense.

PR: But the principle makes sense - the principle that we ought to expect progress. Progress might be different depending on the kids and the schools and the goals and standards.

DS: The principle is perfectly legitimate. To measure where kids are when they start and where they end up... No one can convince me that AYP does that. The starting point for me is just that with AYP they [Congress] just need to admit what they're not going to do, that they screwed up, they took the easy route out, that they picked something that doesn't measure what it's supposed to measure... But to get the next Congress to focus on what they did wrong is going to be very difficult.

MP: I do agree that major change is not likely... I don't think the people who wrote the law that are up there now would be happy saying, 'Everything's fine as long as kids make a year of gain in a year.' In terms of big issues for reauthorization ... what we need now is a national test.

MRD: That idea has had a resurgence.

MP: It's still a long shot. We do agree with David that the federal government is much too involved in many of the daily affairs and that they've set up this classic cat-and-mouse game - classic compliance-behavior stuff - between the feds and the states, and it's not a constructive relationship... Could we at some point in this country strike a grand bargain where we set expectations at a common level, at the national level, so we get a national standard, a national test, but otherwise you get the feds out of the business of figuring out how individual states and schools should meet those standards?

DS: Can you tell me any bureaucracy that took power from another bureaucracy that is willing to give it back

MP: The bureaucracy is not going to do it, but we're going to have to take it from them. It's just an unhealthy relationship right now.

MRD: Why is this idea coming back now?

BH: People have said that state tests and standards vary some... When people look at the states and they see how they have lowered the [scores] to sort of game the system, people wonder what's going on.

PR: In Massachusetts, we already feel like we've got high standards... To a certain degree, we feel like we get penalized for having high standards as a result of the AYP expectations for No Child Left Behind. At one level you have some sympathy for forcing other states who low-ball it to apply the same standards to their children.