As members of the first Democratic-controlled Congress in 12 years were taking their oaths of office in January, a growing number of influential education experts were calling for a fundamental overhaul of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
Some of the loudest voices calling for change as NCLB comes up for reauthorization this year came from unexpected quarters—conservatives who have generally supported NCLB and the Bush administration's education policies.
"When it comes to public school choice and restructuring, I have come to believe that this law is basically unimplementable," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a generally conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. Petrilli served in the U.S. Department of Education under the Bush administration's first secretary of education, Rod Paige.
The law requires schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress for two years in a row, based on results of state tests, to plan for improvement, receive technical assistance, devote Title 1 funds for professional development, and offer all students the chance to attend another school that has not been designated for improvement.
Speaking at a November 30, 2006, conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, Petrilli was joined by others who said that the three main tools for leveraging school improvement and closing the achievement gap for poor and minority students had largely failed.
Not everyone who participated in the conference spoke for the right, but all agreed that reauthorization needed to do more than tinker around the margins of NCLB.
These Tools Don't Work
Conference speakers said school choice, providing supplementary educational services (SES) for students needing extra help, and restructuring or disbanding persistently failing schools—the heart of the "NCLB toolkit"—were not working and that significant reconsideration of the legislation was in order.
"We know that any large, complex, ambitious federal law requires fine-tuning and revision and isn't going to work perfectly out of the gate," said Chester E. "Checker" Finn, president of the Fordham Foundation. "I think the question to ask as we move into reauthorization season is: Can the problems be fixed through amendment, or are we dealing with something much more fundamental that goes to the very nature of American educational federalism?"
Finn noted that although poor students have shown some gains since NCLB became law in 2002, as measured by slightly rising scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), "it's really unclear whether it's attributable directly to No Child Left Behind." He said that the number of schools "in need of improvement" as defined by NCLB is climbing and that the school-choice provisions built into the law (in which students in low-performing schools can switch to higher-performing ones) have gone largely unused.
Scant Evidence of Success
Compounding those problems is the seemingly capricious nature of the law's punitive sanctions for schools that underperform. "There appears to be no particular relationship between the schools in sanction under NCLB and their performance in NAEP," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents the nation's largest urban school districts. "Boston and San Diego have similar reading and math scores on NAEP, but San Diego has 15 percent of its schools under sanction while Boston has 47 percent."
Casserly said, "We are getting better as cities at implementing the law, but implementation is quickly becoming an exercise in compliance with rules and sanctions that are poorly designed to raise student achievement."
"It's really too early to look at the effects of NCLB, but what you can say is that there's no evidence yet of any clear improvement in achievement scores," said Marshall Smith, director of education programs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a former Department of Education official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. "So one option is, stay the course with a few minor corrections—up the ante, tell schools to implement better, get tougher on sanctions. I guess it's the theory that we can get people to work harder. Well, we shouldn't stay the course," he said. "We need bold steps that build on strengths."
Choosing Not to Choose
Petrilli believes there are three reasons why the law's school choice provisions aren't working. "First, in order for the public school choice and free [SES] tutoring provisions to work, local school districts must take aggressive action to inform parents of their options. Yet, districts have little incentive to do so," he said. "Second, students in schools in need of improvement are to be provided with options within the same school system. But in many big-city school districts, there aren't enough good schools to go around. Third, school districts are supposed to restructure persistently failing schools, yet those districts rarely have the inclination or the political will to do so, and some loopholes in the law make this bold action even less likely.
"Nobody inside or outside the administration has figured out ways to fundamentally solve these problems," Petrilli said.
"Why isn't it working?" Finn asked. "Part of it is loopholes; part of it is ineffective implementation. But I really think the overriding problem is that the federal government lacks the leverage to effect the changes contemplated by NCLB, except in situations where states and districts actually want to make the changes. In other words, the law itself is a huge overreach."
Supplemental Educational Services a Mixed Bag
Columbia University Teachers College Professor Jeffrey Henig said NCLB's SES provisions have been largely underused, although more students participate in SES programs than have opted to change schools.
Casserly said Council of Great City Schools research shows that as few as 2 percent of students eligible to transfer to better-performing schools may actually do so.
The law's SES regulations mandate out-of-school tutoring in the afternoons, on weekends, and in the summer for students in underperforming schools. SES providers include both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations. Funding for the programs comes from school districts' Title 1 allocations, and they must set aside at least 20 percent of those monies to pay for SES (as well as transportation costs associated with the choice provisions of the law).
"By any measure, SES is a major policy initiative," Henig said. "Compared to choice, it involves more children—in 2004–05, nationally, more than 430,000 children. It's a big-bucks industry potentially, up to two-and-a-half billion dollars a year if you max out that 20 percent under Title 1.
"It represents a new kind of policy. In an era when privatization of social services is the scrimmage line for partisan battles between the right and the left, SES can be seen as somewhat of an endorsement of the principle that for-profit providers may be able to do a better job than government employees," he said. "It provides a ‘nose under the tent’ of education for for-profit providers, a growing industry and one that many conservatives wanted to encourage" when NCLB was being drafted.
But does SES work? The Council of Great City Schools recently surveyed 36 urban school districts.
"We are starting to review various local evaluations of SES and finding very mixed results—modest at best on average and harmful in some cases," Casserly said. "The effects of SES on state tests really depend on the quality of the provider." Many of those providers have thin track records, and evidence is scant that they improve student learning.
Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., agreed that SES has yet to demonstrate its effectiveness despite relatively lavish funding. "What reason do we have to believe that private-sector tutoring companies are more effective than the regular schools, when so many of those companies have no achievement data to show that they are more effective?" she asked.
Questioning the Federal Role in Reform
Beyond the particulars of NCLB implementation, conference speakers had grave doubts about the federal government's ability to play a meaningful role in an education system where policy and practice are largely state and local affairs.
"I think it's hard to argue that better implementation is going to change the story. That doesn't mean that changing the law is an answer either. The hard truth is that there may be no solutions to these problems because they are inherent in our federal system," Petrilli said.
Paul Manna, assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary and author of the 2006 bookSchool's In: Federalism and the National Education Agenda, believes the disconnect between Washington, the states, and school districts hamstrung NCLB from the outset, despite the law's strong incentives for schools to improve.
"[State] and local control of education means that NCLB's ambitions and federal officials' promises to strictly enforce the law continue to collide head on with the primary institutions that control American schools," he said. "NCLB has provided Washington with a stronger lever to press for change. But given the lengthy delegation chain that the law relies upon for its success, and the reluctance of federal officials to assert real control through establishing a national curriculum and high-stakes national exams, federal officials find their options limited, especially when they contribute only pennies on the dollar to fund the nation's schools."
Can Federalism Work?
Indeed many of the experts who spoke in November voiced discomfort with the effectiveness of the punitive sanctions on which NCLB relies and with the federal government's ability to drive reform down to the state and district level.
"The cascading nature of sanctions does not appear to be very effective," Casserly said. "It has school districts chasing annually changing sets of strategies without enough time to make any of them work. In the end, Congress is going to have to recalibrate NCLB in order to make it work."
Ravitch believes that many states and districts have effectively opted out of NCLB already. "Not many districts have opted for radical restructuring. Few, if any, have converted failing schools to charter schools. Few have dismissed the staff," she said.
"Most of them are doing what they would have done anyway: more professional development, more coaching, more mentors, better alignment of curriculum and assessment. They're doing what they know to do. In most cases, that's the best thing to hope for—that people will do what they know how to do and do it better."
She expressed doubts that the federal government is capable of effecting meaningful reform at the state and district level.
"What reason is there to believe that choice will raise achievement? It's hard to see this as a federal mandate when we have so little evidence that it's a reliable tool," Ravitch said. "I don't think the American people voted to have the Department of Education here in D.C. running the nation's schools or to have Congress making decisions that will be mandated and then imposed in the absence of any evidence that they work. So I'm thinking that we might be barking up the wrong tree."
Reauthorization Directions
So if the "NCLB toolkit" of school choice, supplemental educational services, and school restructuring isn't the answer, what is? What should Congress focus on to ensure that NCLB supports better learning and teaching?
"I don't look at the NCLB toolkit as tools of change," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, an influential nonprofit that supports NCLB's goals, if not all its methods. "They're tools for when change doesn't work. My sense is that we need to focus on the tools that teachers and principals need to create improvement so that we don't have to use sanctions. And we know what they are."
Conference participants said that NCLB's emphasis on assessment has value and should be retained. Some even called for the institution of national standards and national achievement tests.
"Accountability may be the part of the NCLB toolkit that is working best. That is, assessment, disaggregation [of assessment data] so schools can focus on the lowest-performing kids and help them," Ravitch said. "I believe the focus should be on results. I believe there should be national standards, certainly in subjects such as science and math where there are already international standards."
Casserly noted that the Council of Great City Schools in November called for "the institution of national standards."
Smith, of the Hewlett Foundation, said, "We need to shoot for big effects. Keep standards-based reform, but turn it around and use positive incentives. Support information-based continuous improvement at all levels." He said a reauthorized NCLB should continue to emphasize teacher quality, as the law currently does. It should address content areas beyond math and reading and the planned addition of science to include the language arts, health, music, and art. It would somehow address student motivation and provide incentives to use technology to enable accelerated learning.
Haycock said, "We need rich, coherent curricula. We need formative benchmark assessments attached to that. We need professional development that's ongoing and attached to that. And we need teachers who know their stuff and want to teach these kids."
"I think the action is in curriculum and instruction," Ravitch agreed. "And I don't think the federal government should do it. The worst thing would be for Congress to decide what the national curriculum should be or what the right instruction should be. That's the most important thing, and it doesn't belong at this level."
The new Democratic leadership in Congress has yet to signal how—or even when—it will approach NCLB reauthorization. In fact, it's entirely possible that the law won't be put to a reauthorization vote until after the 2008 presidential election. But hearings on NCLB will surely occur this year. With a growing chorus of conservative voices calling for sweeping change, the debate is likely to take a different tone, one that addresses fundamental questions about the federal role in education.