The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is less than two months old but it's already yowling and a lot of people are nervous about it, not unlike new parents unsure how best to soothe a crying infant.
This is an enormous piece of legislation that possibly nobody has read from cover to cover. Spanning dozens of programs and thousands of specific features, it ranges from Indian education to impact aid, from teacher quality to bilingual education, and on and on.
Its heart and muscle, however, are its provisions dealing with standards, testing, adequate yearly progress and accountability at the state and school levels. This is the part of the act that got the most attention, stirred the most controversy, is perhaps the most different from previous versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and is fraught with the greatest uncertainty as its implementation proceeds.
No matter what one thought of the President's initial proposal (which I liked a great deal) or of the compromises and alterations that Congress worked in it (many of which I didn't like nearly so much), NCLB is now the law. Surely everyone wants it to work effectively in carrying out its stated purposes: boosting student achievement, improving schools, giving people better information and closing long-lasting and troubling performance gaps, so that, indeed, no child will be left behind.
The standards, testing and accountability provisions are at the core of this hope. But they turn out to be quite complicated and somewhat mysterious. Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. The United States is a country in which people hold different ideas of what constitutes good education and what's reasonable to expect from schools. Congress left many key decisions to the executive branch and the states and we cannot yet know how they're going to handle these weighty responsibilities. There's also reason to be worried by reports of weak implementation of past rounds of E.S.E.A. Moreover, NCLB embodies an idiosyncratic set of compromises between what the fifty states have discretion to do differently and what they must all do uniformly. To recall just the most obvious example: under NCLB, states may set their academic proficiency bars wherever they like but, whether they set them high or low, and no matter where their students are today in relation to those bars, every state has the same twelve years to get all its children over those bars. (An article by Lynn Olson in the February 20 issue of Education Week looks at how the definition of proficiency varies across the states. See "A 'Proficient' Score Depends on Geography.")
Many groups have recently issued guides to NCLB and analyses that seek to tackle some of these implementation issues. The Education Commission of the States has come out with "No State Left Behind: The Challenges and Opportunities of ESEA 2001." The Education Leaders Council has published "The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Summary by Issue," (not yet on the web; call 202-261-2600 for ordering information). The Learning First Alliance produced "Major Changes to ESEA in the No Child Left Behind Act."
At the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, we, too, asked what we could usefully do to help the country prepare for the challenges ahead. We began with the premise that everyone wants NCLB to work but there's no unanimity on how that can or should happen and plenty of reason to worry about things that could go wrong, not be done at all, be done badly, not be foreseen, etc.
So we invited seven smart people (two of whom enlisted colleagues, making for eleven smart authors) to examine some of these issues. We asked them to write short, fast, accessible papers on specific topics pertaining to implementation of NCLB's standards, testing and accountability requirements. On the whole, we think they did a pretty terrific job. You can find their papers, together with perceptive commentaries by Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools and Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in No Child Left Behind: What Will It Take?, available on our website at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/NCLBreport.pdf.
These papers and comments were aired at a lively, well-attended conference held in Washington on February 13. (Also speaking there were three additional commenters and Gene Hickok, America's very able Undersecretary of Education, who bears much of the executive branch responsibility for NCLB's implementation. A short article in Education Week by Erik Robelen describes the highlights of the meeting. See "Intestinal Fortitude" in the February 20th issue.)
You may not be surprised to discover that the authors and commenters found some disagreements as well as a lot of shared perspectives. For example, Lisa Keegan and her colleagues at the Education Leaders Council are more bullish about what can be done with norm-referenced tests than is Achieve's Matt Gandal.
I would come down differently on some of these issues, myself. I also recognize that some are so intricate that another analyst, tackling the same topic, might reach a different view of what the law provides and what the available data show.
Still, this report warrants the attention of anyone interested in NCLB's implementation. But please bear in mind that this is a moving target. The Education Department is gearing up for "negotiated rulemaking." Much is in flux. That's why we concluded that getting this report into cyberspace as quickly as possible would be more helpful than slowly trundling forth with a fully edited volume of the traditional sort.
We invite your comments and feedback. We have no agenda other than to advance the debate in a constructive way. This is part of an earnest effort to read NCLB's entrails in the hope that, if we understand them better, and are smart about what can and should and shouldn't happen, maybe we can boost the odds that this will indeed work well for American children, especially the neediest among them.
