Common Sense Revisions for NCLB :: Frederick M. Hess

Breathing life into any statute as complex as No Child Left Behind brings inevitable headaches. To date, the legislation's great boon is the sunshine it has beamed upon student, school, district, and state performance in reading and math. The testing mandate is yielding a wealth of valuable achievement data that is deepening popular awareness of school effectiveness and equipping principals and superintendents to lead more effectively.

However, the accountability apparatus mapped by Congress presents some common sense difficulties. For example, the multiple subgroups the law creates mean that even generally successful schools can be flagged based on a variety of measures, yet the federal law does not distinguish between a school that fails to make adequate yearly progress in dozens of subgroups and another that falls short in just one. The law also imposes a lock-step timeline in which all states are directed to reach 100% proficiency by 2014, prompting most states to wedge the bulk of the requisite gains into the final years and leaving the heaviest lifting to those in office six or eight years from now. The rules invite finagled timelines and gamesmanship over passing rates and "cut scores."

This state of affairs points to the need for some sensible revision. First, NCLB today is too laid back about the knowledge that young Americans need and too prescriptive about calendars and measurement processes. Rather, Washington should offer clearer guidance regarding the essentials that students must master, while being flexible with regard to how states, districts, and schools produce those results. Though NCLB pretends otherwise, there is a great deal of nationwide agreement as to what children should learn in reading and mathematics. Using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as a benchmark, Washington could readily set clear and uniform expectations regarding student mastery in these subjects in Grades 4, 8, and perhaps 12. Such a metric would allow the Department of Education to gauge student performance with existing NAEP tests, without requiring the extensive negotiations now taking place with states over the shape of their assessment systems.

Second, school performance should be judged not just in relation to absolute standards but also in terms of how much students are learning during the course of a school year. Adequate yearly progress should be gauged based primarily on the academic value schools add (i.e., the achievement gains their pupils make)--not, as is the case today, on the aggregate level at which students perform. Measuring a student's level of achievement entails three elements--learning in the current school year, learning in previous years, and everything else in a child's life--of which only the first gauges how schools and educators are performing. While, today, neither NAEP nor most state assessments are designed to measure value added, this capacity is rapidly developing. Today's NCLB is hostile to value-added analysis. That should change.

Third, NCLB should replace its all-or nothing AYP calculation with a more flexible approach. One might, for example, distinguish among schools that are making progress overall and in a given percentage of their demographic subcategories; those that are making progress overall but in less than the requisite number of categories; and those failing to make acceptable overall progress. Such a triage system would distinguish between those schools that are almost succeeding and those that are clearly inadequate, and enable states and districts to focus on repairing the latter.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to frederick m. hess's free mailing list