Last summer, I found myself on Seattle's public television station, debating No Child Left Behind with Susan Sclafani, the former school administrator who serves as special assistant to U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige. As our discussion rolled through adequate yearly progress, approval of state plans, evaluation, assessment, and accountability, I was reminded of the recent blockbuster science fiction movie, The Matrix: Reloaded. Like the society portrayed in the film, No Child Left Behind creates an artificial environment that bears little resemblance to the real world of schools, much less to responsible policymaking.
At first blush, it's hard to find fault with No Child Left Behind. Because of its attention to the appalling failure rates among minority and low-income students, people are inclined to take it at face value. Who doesn't want to make sure that no child is left behind? Who could take issue with closing the achievement gap? Yet, like citizens caught in the Matrix, educators and parents find it difficult to distinguish between reality and illusion. Although the legislation addresses real problems, it offers only ersatz solutions.
No Child Left Behind will join a long history of failed federal promises to transform public schools. From the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 through the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (later the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), the National Education Goals, and Goals 2000—the list of fabulous federal promises is lengthy and inspiring. None has been kept
It Will Collapse on Itself
No Child Left Behind ignores earlier strategies that came up short—initiatives directed largely at equality of opportunity and guarantees of due process and standards of professional practice—and instead sets out to provide equality of results. It is an audacious promise, simultaneously breathtaking and cynical in its scale and scope. This latest expression of federal ambition, however, will collapse of its own internal contradictions. Why?
It Makes a Promise It Cannot Keep
The pledge to raise 100 percent of students over the bar in reading and math by 2014 sets a standard that no school, district, or state has ever achieved. Although everyone applauds this goal, it has never been pulled off in the United States, or anywhere else in the world.
The Bush administration's pledge runs up against the universal challenges of race, class, and poverty. Last year in England, for example, the long-term Youth Cohort Study, launched in 1973, reported that a bright child born into a poor family does not do as well in school as a child with low intelligence and wealthy parents. Empty slogans cannot wash away the education fault line between the haves and the have-nots.
We do not need a study from England to tell us about race, class, and poverty. We have had our own evidence for a long time. The Coleman Report of 1966, for example, was the first of a number of convincing research efforts pointing to the powerful relationship between family income and background and student achievement. As poverty goes up, test scores go down.
In many studies, poverty and its accomplices—unstable neighborhoods, single-parent homes, violence, and high rates of unemployment and substance abuse—explain as much as 60–70 percent of achievement differences. Statisticians speak of poverty as “predicting” low achievement. The odds are stacked against poor kids.
Until these issues are part of the policy equation, No Child Left Behind will remain a hollow promise.
It Is Woefully Underfunded
Equal opportunity is difficult enough to provide; it's even harder to take seriously a pledge of equal results in the absence of any real effort to level the playing field. Federal and state officials are not putting the money into the system that the legislation's new demands require.
No Child Left Behind is an unfunded mandate. The testing provisions alone cost a fortune. After looking into the projected testing costs in seven states this summer, the General Accounting Office, which is Congress's nonpartisan audit arm, issued an alarm about the costs, estimating that the annual national costs of the legislation's testing requirements would run from $1.9–$5.3 billion, depending on whether testing were done on the cheap or the way it should be done. U.S. Department of Education officials, who like to claim that they rely on objective evidence, dismissed the nonpartisan study on the grounds that it involved a sample of just seven states. To a dis-interested outsider, 14 percent of states would seem to be a sample of sufficient size.
Moreover, the study does not include the additional state and local funds required to comply with the many mandates in this legislation, such as developing personalized plans, providing counseling and tutoring, guaranteeing teacher and paraprofessional qualifications, and offering students the opportunity to take public funds to private schools. To meet these mandates, state estimates range from an increase in total funding of 16 percent in New York to more than 80 percent in some southern states.
Bush administration officials prefer not to look at overall funding requirements but rather at increases in the small proportion of funds that the federal government provides. Their arguments stop just short of dishonest.
Funds for Title I have increased 40 percent, federal officials like to say. What they fail to mention is that although the authorization —which is only a promise of funds—increased 40 percent, actual funding has not kept pace. The U.S. Congress and the White House provided only two-thirds of the authorized Title I funding for fiscal year 2003. The White House actually proposed reductions totaling 5.5 percent for overall funding of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2003 and 2004. (Congress refused to go along with the 2003 request and, as this was written, had yet to act on the request for 2004.) When it comes to financing this new legislation, the White House plays funding shell games.
It Makes a Mockery of Local Control
Defenders of this latest federal intrusion into local affairs cite the legislation's testing requirements as the anchor of a new, better, and more accountable school system. But “accountability” is a smokescreen. Behind it, the legislation has moved education decisions as far as possible from the classroom. Federal officials can now make decisions that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. They have established the criteria for disciplining schools; removing principals and teachers; and even defining appropriate curriculum, reading materials, and instructional practice.
The U.S. Department of Education defends itself against the charge that the act violates local control by pointing to the poor history of voluntary compliance with evaluation requirements in the Clinton administration's Goals 2000 program. Only about 10 states were in compliance after six years, Sclafani told me. We are justified in compelling compliance, she said.
On the contrary, allowing the federal government to compel states to do anything in education has no rationale. In fact, the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits it, reserving to states all powers “not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.” Because the U.S. Constitution does not assign responsibility for education to the national government, federal officials have no legitimate control over education policy.
The Tenth Amendment's Reservation Clause is crystal clear. It makes no exception, not even when the U.S. president or secretary of education is dissatisfied with the states' education decisions. For more than 200 years, education has been a state responsibility. Yet with scarcely a peep of protest from state leaders, this administration has trampled roughshod over important constitutional guarantees of state and local autonomy.
It Ignores Best Practice
Because it has raised evaluation and accountability to new levels with powerful consequences, No Child Left Behind has a special obligation to follow principles of best professional practice with respect to evaluation. It does not.
Testing experts have long agreed that interpreting standardized tests in isolation is not a credible summary of what individual students know or are able to do. One reason is that samples involving thousands of students might cancel out small test faults, but these same faults assume life-shaping importance when they involve a single student. Experts also argue that using single scores for important education decisions—such as whether to promote a student, grant a diploma, or fund a school—is akin to education malpractice.
Yet this new legislation endorses these approaches, probably because it's easier to talk about test scores than to talk about learning—or about what we need to do to really leave no child behind. Anything with a quantitative ring to it, after all, carries an air of objectivity, science, and truth, whether the number means anything or not.
Another troubling characteristic of this law is its “gotcha” quality—a sense that the accountability provisions are so many hoops through which to run schools before declaring them to be failures and turning to the private sector.
No responsible teacher would administer a 120-item test on a pass-fail basis, with a pass depending on answering all 120 items correctly and failure determined by a single wrong answer. But local educators who have examined the legislation closely note that all of the possible combinations of test subjects and grades tested—cross-indexed against the ethnic, income, and disability status of students—amount to 120 or more individual testing categories. Failure to meet expectations for adequate yearly progress in only one of these disaggregated categories threatens entire schools with the public ignominy of being labeled failures. It's educationally debilitating, and it's bad public policy.
It Offers Public Relations Instead of Education Policy
Writing teachers famously press their students for the “telling detail”—the seemingly obscure incident that reveals motivation and character. The telling detail about No Child Left Behind is that the U.S. Department of Education has set up a public relations offensive to rebut the legislation's critics.
The department offers no apologies. Even as the administration cut education budgets in the spring, it allocated half a million dollars to finance a team to tout its agenda. As citizens in Oregon, California, and elsewhere struggled to keep schools open, the department hired eight new public affairs specialists. Already, educators who provide local newspapers with opinion pieces questioning the legislation have been surprised to find rebuttals appearing within days, ostensibly written by Secretary Paige. Like the sentinels monitoring conversation in The Matrix, public affairs specialists have taken on the role of monitoring national discourse about education policy. And their prose has that mechanical and hollow ring to it that George Orwell described as a sure sign that the writers themselves don't believe what they are saying.
The flackery extends beyond press releases and into policy. After more than a year of blustering about performance standards, the White House held a ceremony in early June to announce that every state had a federally approved plan for ensuring that all students will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2013–2014. What proficiency means is unclear because the plans themselves—and the basis for their approval—are unavailable. “The era of low expectations and low standards is ending,” President Bush announced. Yet in order to claim that all 50 states were in compliance, the department had to approve 17 state plans on that same morning.
Even without access to the plans or information on how they were approved, it is obvious that savvy state officials already understood that if they set standards too high, they stood a chance of failing to meet the requirements for adequate yearly progress. The result has been a predictable move to lower standards. In fact, Texas—thought to be the seedbed of much of No Child Left Behind—recently lowered its performance standards on a new test, in part to avoid having hundreds of its schools labeled as failures.
What we have in Texas and elsewhere is a public relations coup, a veneer of compliance composed equally of state pretense and federal acquiescence.
What Educators Must Demand
First, educators should insist on modifications of this new policy. Its goals are noble. Its vision is inspiring. But implementation promises to turn this dream into a nightmare.
Second, educators should demand that accountability be real, not illusory. A year's worth of learning for a year in school is a reasonable standard for school accountability. More than a year for students who start the education race far behind the starting line is also reasonable. But insisting that our schools fix the problems of U.S. society is unreasonable. Schools are not the source of society's inequities and are unlikely to be the entire solution. Educators would be foolish to assume the burden of fixing all of society's problems. They will have only themselves to blame if they accept it.
Third, if the government provides public money to private schools, it should require them to conform to the same standards and processes that public schools face.
Finally, educators should insist that the government put money behind its education promises. We cannot become the America that we want to become when policy encourages private consumption at the expense of public investment. As the wealthiest nation in history, the United States can afford to finance the pledges it offers its children.
The United States is a nation, but America is an idea. This is the land of the second chance. That's the reality that made America so attractive for so long and to so many. It's a reality that is put at risk by an education Matrix that creates a punitive, test-driven society, one that will inevitably encourage young people to drop out while federal and state bureaucrats congratulate themselves that no child has been left behind.
