But NCLB was doomed to failure from the beginning by Congress and the Bush administration, who chose to critically underfund the program, and by its poor implementation—not the viability of public education or national standards. And NCLB has been hamstrung all along by its failure to require that urban students be allowed to transfer to suburban schools, which has created a shortage of options outside of conservative's prefered solution of private-school vouchers.
A large study of six school districts in three states found tutoring had no significant effect on students' math and reading test scores. Studies found the same in Milwaukee and Minneapolis. The next steps — the various "corrective actions" ranging from firing staff to hiring consultants — were equally ineffective, Ahn and Vigdor found.
It wasn't until schools had to hire new leadership that schools made meaningful change. But, as the authors pointed out, even if it's effective, it doesn't mean it's efficient. Schools didn't undergo restructuring until after students had been failing to make progress for six years. The challenge for states now is to try to figure out a way to replicate that result more quickly without the federal government telling them what to do.
Besides the dramatic step of school restructuring, there are a handful of methods that have helped some schools improve. The Education Department's What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews education research to make sure studies are well-designed, has picked out four strategies for "whole school reform" that it says are proven to be effective:. These interventions are all over the map; they work in some situations, but not in all.
Two only focus on high schools. The elementary school Success for All intervention is only about reading, where scores are typically harder to improve, but doesn't do anything for math. Positive Action, meanwhile, focuses mostly on behavior, not on academics. Schools fall behind for lots of reasons — far more reasons than one set of strategies can fix. Even supporters of a bigger federal role in education now think it's the right call to let states or school districts decide what to do about schools that are falling behind.
No Child Left Behind showed that making every school try the same remedies doesn't necessarily get results. The report focuses, at one point, on the American system of educational funding: in many states, driven by property taxes in individual districts, the system of school funding all but ensures that the children of the wealthy have more resources devoted to their educational achievements, while lower-income students who could significantly benefit from more spending end up in schools asked to do more — subsidized school lunches, remedial education, counselling — with less.
And yet, in other countries where students outpace Americans, the opposite is true. They came in at or near the bottom in every category. As one Florida principal asked, "Is anybody going to want to dedicate their life to a school that has already been labeled a failure? Unfortunately, many of the private supplemental service providers have proved ineffective and unaccountable, and transfers to better schools have been impossible in communities where such schools are unavailable or uninterested in serving students with low achievement, poor attendance and other problems that might bring their own average test scores down.
Thus, rather than expanding educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color, the law in many communities further reduces the quality of education available in the schools they must attend.
Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students' education. Studies have found that sanctioning schools based on average student scores leads schools to retain students in grade so that grade-level scores will look better although these students ultimately do less well and drop out at higher rates , exclude low-scoring students from admissions and encourage such students to transfer or drop out.
Recent studies in Massachusetts, New York and Texas show how schools have raised test scores while "losing" large numbers of low-scoring students. In a large Texas city, for example, scores soared while tens of thousands of students--mostly African-American and Latino--disappeared from school.
Educators reported that exclusionary policies were used to hold back, suspend, expel or counsel out students in order to boost test scores. Overall, fewer than 40 percent of African-American and Latino students graduated. Paradoxically, NCLB's requirement for disaggregating data by race creates incentives for eliminating those at the bottom of each subgroup, especially where schools have little capacity to improve the quality of services such students receive.
As a consequence of high-stakes testing, graduation rates for African-American and Latino students have declined in a number of states. In the NCLB paradigm, there is no solution to this problem, as two-way accountability does not exist: The child and the school are accountable to the state for test performance, but the state is not held accountable to the child or his school for providing adequate educational resources.
There are hundreds of proposals for tweaking NCLB, but a substantial paradigm shift is required if our education system is to support powerful learning for all students. The Forum on Educational Accountability, a group of more than education and civil rights organizations--including the National Urban League, the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens, as well as the associations representing teachers, administrators and school boards--has argued that "the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.
How might this be done? A new paradigm for national education policy should be guided by dual commitments to support meaningful learning on the part of students, teachers and schools; and to pay off the educational debt, making it possible for all students to benefit from more productive schools.
A new Elementary and Secondary Education Act ESEA should start by helping states develop world-class standards, curriculums and assessments and to use them for improving teaching. Returning to the more productive approach of President Clinton's Goals initiative, the federal government should assist states in developing systems for evaluating student progress that are performance based--including assessments like essays, research papers and science experiments that are embedded in the curriculum and scored by teachers using common criteria--leveraging intellectually ambitious learning and providing information that continuously improves teaching.
School progress should also be measured in a more comprehensive manner--including such factors as student progress and continuation, graduation and classroom performance on tasks beyond multiple-choice tests--and gains should be assessed by how individual students improve over time. To eliminate the statistical gantlet that penalizes schools serving the most diverse populations, the AYP system should be replaced with a continuous improvement model.
While continuing to report test scores by race and class, schools should be judged on whether students make progress on multiple measures of achievement, including those that assess higher-order thinking and understanding, and insure appropriate assessment for special-education students and English-language learners. And "opportunity to learn" standards specifying the provision of adequate materials, facilities and teachers should accompany assessments of student learning, creating benchmarks for the pursuit of equity.
The new ESEA must finally address the deep and tenacious educational debt that holds our nation's future in hock and insure that every child has access to adequate school resources, facilities and quality teachers.
Federal education funding to states should be tied to each state's movement toward equitable access to education resources. Furthermore, the obvious truth--that schools alone are not responsible for student achievement--should propel attention to programs that will provide adequate healthcare and nutrition, safe and secure housing, and healthy communities for children.
Major investments must be made in the ability of schools to hire and support well-prepared teachers and leaders. While NCLB sets an expectation for hiring qualified teachers, it does not include supports to make this possible. Federal leadership in developing an adequate supply of well-qualified teachers is needed. Just as it has helped provide an adequate supply of physicians for more than forty years, it can provide training for those who prepare in specialties for which there is a shortage and agree to locate in underserved areas.
A Marshall Plan for Teaching could insure that all students are taught by well-qualified teachers within the next five years through a federal policy that 1 recruits new teachers using service scholarships that underwrite their preparation for high-need fields and locations and adds incentives for expert veteran teachers to teach in high-need schools; 2 strengthens teachers' preparation through support for professional development schools, like teaching hospitals, which offer top-quality urban teacher residencies to candidates who will stay in high-need districts; and 3 improves teacher retention and effectiveness by insuring that novices have mentoring support during their early years, when 30 percent of them drop out.
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