The No Child Left Behind hard-liners are striking back at President Obama's call to move beyond the goal of getting 100 percent of American students to "proficiency" by 2014, and working instead to get most students "college and career-ready" by the time they graduate. Sandy Kress complains that "scrapping that goal and replacing it with a much tougher and higher goal with no challenging annual markers and deadlines for its achievement is real fraud." Margaret Spellings told the Washington Post last month that "It's one of the holy grails, as far as I'm concerned. If you don't have a real deadline, you've essentially gutted accountability." And Eduwonk Andy poked fun at the supposed reasoning behind this change: "The standards in this law were unrealistically high.?? So we're going to replace it with??more ambitious ones."
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="College- and career-ready by 2014?"]
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Now, there's no need to re-litigate the original NCLB. Setting a goal of getting 100 percent of students to "proficiency" by 2014 had its merits at the time--ten years ago. It created a sense of urgency and captured the nation's attention. But this policy has clearly outlived its usefulness.
2014 is arbitrary; getting all students to a standard by the time they graduate high school isn't. "Proficiency" is meaningless, thanks to wildly varying state cut scores; "college and career ready" isn't. And getting 100 percent of students to do anything is either a recipe for setting the bar low, or Utopian. Getting most students to reach a real standard is challenging, but doable.
Come on, folks. It's time to turn the page.
(Photograph by Adam Procter from Flickr)
-Mike Petrilli
