US: No Child Left Behind stalled, But Still Armed and Dangerous

Mon Nov 19 15:08:53 UTC 2007

NCLB Stalled, But Still Armed and Dangerous
by Stan Karp
 November 17, 2007

Rethinking Schools
George Miller is not making adequate yearly progress. Neither is Ted Kennedy.

As a result, reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law
has been left behind, at least for now. Last month, Rep. Miller
(D-Calif.) and Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the two main Democratic
co-sponsors of the original legislation and the key congressional
committee chairs pushing for its renewal, conceded that the prospects
of passing a reauthorization bill in 2007 had faded. Prospects for
2008 are not looking good either. But while the bipartisan consensus
that passed NCLB in 2001 has fragmented, the old, unimproved version
of the law is not going away anytime soon, and a better one is nowhere
on the horizon. This means NCLB's "test and punish" approach to
education reform will continue to abuse schools across the country and
its impact will worsen as increasingly unreachable test score targets
and more drastic penalties kick in.

The law technically expired on Sept. 30, but was automatically renewed
for one year. Congressional committee work on House and Senate bills
will continue and efforts may still be made to move a reauthorization
bill next year. But election year politics makes passage unlikely.
This means the existing law is likely to be in place for at least
several more years. Based on NCLB's track record so far, the
consequences will be uniformly negative:

Thousands more schools will be sanctioned for failing to make adequate
yearly progress. The number identified for the law's more drastic
sanctions, including "restructuring" and closure, will far exceed the
capacity to respond effectively.

A host of unproven "interventions" for schools deemed "in need of
improvement" will sow chaos, feed privatization schemes, and further
erode support for public education

The curriculum will continue to narrow to what is poorly tested by
multiple choice questions.

Special needs students and English language learners will be subjected
to more federally mandated educational malpractice, including
test-driven standardized instruction that ignores the very special
needs that gave rise to these categories.

Parents will continue to be pitted against teachers in a politicized
"blame game" for school and student "failure" that is wrongly defined
and inadequately addressed.

Tens of millions of dollars in public funds will be siphoned off by
publishers of standardized tests and curriculum materials, private
educational management firms, and barely regulated supplemental
educational service providers.

Academic achievement gaps, and the multiple inequities in opportunity
and resources that they reflect, will remain far beyond the reach of
NCLB's punitive, privatizing approach to school reform.

The law's many contradictions will sharpen as the deadline nears for
meeting NCLB's central mandate that 100 percent of all students
achieve proficiency on state tests by 2014. There are numerous reasons
that this dubious goal will not be met, some that expose the law's
fundamental lack of reality or fairness. For example, the subgroup of
English language learners (ELL) is made up of students who have not
yet learned the language the tests are given in. When they learn it,
they're no longer in the group. So the prospects that the ELL subgroup
will ever be 100 percent proficient on state tests is, by definition,
non-existent. There are many other examples of how NCLB sets up
schools to fail.

As the Boston-based advocacy group FairTest noted, "The real problem
is that the goal that all children will score proficient in 2014 is
totally arbitrary, lacks any evidence of feasibility, and therefore
produces educationally questionable and harmful responses by those who
bear the brunt of the sanctions."

During the first six years of NCLB implementation many schools, states
and districts avoided sanctions for missing their adequate yearly
progress (AYP) targets by employing a variety of maneuvers: lowering
the passing scores on state tests, changing the minimum size of
subgroups to exclude certain scores (such as special education
students) and projecting exaggerated test score progress as the 2014
deadline approaches (a "balloon mortgage" approach to AYP).

Over the next several years, most of these gimmicks will have run
their course. The remaining students not passing the tests will be
less susceptible to quick fix test prep "solutions," while the AYP
benchmarks will steadily rise to levels that no real schools have ever
met. The longer the NCLB testing regime remains in place as is, the
more schools it will trap. A review by FairTest of studies in 11
states projected that most will eventually see failure rates in the 80
percent to 100 percent range.

Providing "safety valves" for this increasing pressure was a major aim
of numerous reauthorization proposals. Reforming the AYP system with
"growth models" and more "flexible formulas" would not have
fundamentally changed it. But it would have partially addressed
concerns that the NCLB dragnet was over-identifying "schools in need
of improvement." With reauthorization bogged down, this won't happen
any time soon. (However, we can expect more regulatory sleight-of-hand
from the U.S. Department of Education which has shown a tendency to
issue regulations that allow more privileged and more racially
homogeneous suburban districts and schools to avoid sanctions, while
more diverse urban ones are flagged for penalties.)

Reforming the AYP system was just one of many thorny reauthorization
issues that complicated congressional deal making. Six years of
partisan battles over funding levels eroded the basic bargain
Democrats contended they had entered into with Bush, linking
significant increases in federal education spending to increased
testing and "accountability" mandates. (Kennedy claims Bush came up
$56 billion short of his promises.) Midterm elections also brought
some candidates who had campaigned against NCLB back to a
Democratically controlled Congress. Massive grassroots pushback from
their members and congressional flirtations with merit pay schemes
weakened support for the law within the National Education Association
and American Federation of Teachers. A FairTest-led coalition of
nearly 150 civil rights, religious and education groups pressing for
radical revision of the law undercut the illusion, nourished by the
Washington-based Education Trust that the civil rights community stood
solidly behind NCLB.

On the Republican side, a weakened President Bush couldn't keep his
own party members from breaking ranks. Last spring, 65 Republican
Congress members signed a petition supporting the right of states to
opt out of NCLB without losing federal funding. Scandals over the
Education Department's handling of "Reading First" contracts and
direct payments to selected media outlets to shill for the law added a
taint of corruption to what was regularly misrepresented as Bush's
"most successful" domestic accomplishment. With Bush setting his own
benchmarks for failure and declining popularity, conservative support
for the law eroded.

But as noted above, the stalled effort to reauthorize NCLB is a mixed
bag. While congressional prospects for turning NCLB from a test and
punish law into a credible school improvement measure were never very
good, leaving NCLB in place as it exists is no solution either. The
Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, which stood firm for
renewal of NCLB in its current form, don't yet have the
reauthorization they wanted, but the status quo remains intact and
that is not good for public education.

The impasse sheds light on a larger issue. In almost every area of
federal policy, successive Reagan/Bush Administrations, aided and
abetted by Clinton-style neo-liberal Democrats, have put in place
regressive legislative and regulatory policy frameworks. From the
imperial conduct of foreign policy to the erosion of basic civil
liberties and human rights to the systematic dismantling of the
regulatory agencies designed to protect everything from food safety to
forest lands, anti-social, pro-privatization frameworks are now deeply
embedded in federal policy and practice.

NCLB is one of these policy frameworks. It reflects a fundamental
shift in federal policy that has dramatically expanded the federal
role in education, but transformed it for the worse. Historically,
federal education policy -- in an area that has always been primarily
a state and local responsibility -- was designed to promote access and
equity, for example, through school integration, financial aid for
poor schools, and programs for special needs students. Under Bush and
No Child Left Behind, the goals of access and equity have been
superceded by federal mandates to promote test-driven, top-down
"standards and accountability" on every school and district in the
country.

For Bush and company, this is a thinly veiled plan to systematically
discredit and privatize public education. But despite the primary
inspired bashing of NCLB by Democratic presidential candidates, most
congressional Democrats, themselves nourished on years of business
roundtables and governors' education summits, have also drunk the
standards and testing "Kool-Aid." They have been full partners and
enablers of the mainstream marriage between test-based
"accountability" and punitive sanctions. The Democrats have also
largely abandoned the commitments to equal opportunity that once
framed federal education policy, at least rhetorically.

As bilingual education advocate James Crawford has written, "Despite
its stated goals, the No Child Left Behind law represents a diminished
vision of civil rights. Educational equity is reduced to equalizing
test scores. The effect has been to impoverish the educational
experience of minority students -- that is, to reinforce the two-tier
system of public schools that civil rights advocates once challenged."

Uprooting neo-liberal policy frameworks, like NCLB, will take much
more than replacing Bush with a Democratic president. Much as the
massive sentiment against the Iraq war was enough to give Democrats
control of Congress but so far not enough to force them to do anything
very useful with it, the train wreck that is NCLB can't be avoided if
the parties in power remain on the same track.

Stan Karp is a Rethinking Schools editor. This article will appear in
the winter issue of Rethinking Schools.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=101&ItemID=14314
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