“We are at a crossroads because of No Child Left Behind. We will either go back to the Lake Wobegon way of thinking or we will increase the sense of urgency about change.”
That's what Kati Haycock of the Education Trust said recently at a meeting with ASCD staff where she dramatically illustrated the achievement gap with statistics from NAEP. Her data drilled in the message: six in 10 African American 4th graders score below the basic level in reading; the average Latino 17-year-old performs in math on the same level as the average white 13-year-old; only 7 percent of children from families in poverty at present attain bachelor's degrees.
Children are being left behind, and that's why the Education Trust espouses the high expectations and the accountability measures of the No Child Left Behind Act. Haycock argued, as does her colleague Craig Jerald in “Beyond the Rock and the Hard Place”(p. 12), that educators must stop complaining about the intricacies of NCLB and accept the challenge of being accountable.
“The Challenges of Accountability” has been a tough issue to put together. No Child Left Behind takes center stage in a number of passionate arguments. Whereas some authors call it our last best hope to close the achievement gap, others see it as exacerbating that gap and leading to higher student retention and dropout rates. All agree that accountability is necessary, but few are ready to concede that test-based accountability will lead to true reform. Although standards are essential to progress, the difficulty of meaningfully measuring achievement–let alone learning–is the sticking point.
Anne Wheelock (p. 50), for example, does not see test-based accountability as the best hope for educating the most vulnerable students. Her data, based on what has happened in Massachusetts in the aftermath of the MCAST test, show increasing rates of grade failure, declining graduation rates, and miscalculated pass rates. Moreover, she argues, in small schools, where the presence or absence of a few students has a great effect on scores, success or failure is often a matter of luck rather than of school quality.
Richard F. Elmore (p. 6) notes that chief among the flaws of NCLB is a tendency to overinvest in testing and underinvest in capacity building. Whether or not a school is classified as “failing” or “succeeding” in a given year sheds little light on whether that school is improving practice. The law ironically introduces incentives for states that previously had relatively high standards to lower their standards and adopt lower-level assessments, he notes. He argues that “Internal accountability precedes external accountability.”
Frederick M Hess (p. 22), however, argues that the important split is not between proponents and opponents of accountability but between those who support tough-minded, mandated accountability and those who do not. He characterizes “nice accountability” as an approach that rests on “fond wishes and good intentions” and yields “only modest and uneven benefits.”
He urges that we must makea lack of improvement so unpleasant for local officials and educators that they are willing to reconsider work rules, require teachers to change routines, assign teachers to classes and schools in more effective ways, increase required homework, fire ineffective teachers, and otherwise take those painful steps that are regarded as “unrealistic” most of the time.
James Harvey (p. 18), who has called NCLB “our weapon of mass instruction,” doesn't buy the current brand of mandated accountability. He counts off the reasons: NCLB makes a promise it cannot keep, it is woefully underfunded, it makes a mockery of local control, and it ignores best practice.
Harvey likens the situation in education today to what military strategists call “incestuous amplification”: a condition “where one only listens to those who are already in lock step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.”
Indeed, the military term could apply to the predispositions of both critics and defenders of NCLB. It is definitely time to do as Elmore prescribes: stop the “hand-wringing sessions in which superintendents gather with superintendents, principals with principals, and teachers with teachers.” It is time, he writes, “to sit in the same room at the same time and develop a common theory of improvement.”
