The heart and guts of President Bush’s education reform plan for every public school in America is contained in this simple requirement: Improve every year.
This requirement does two things. It emphasizes steady progress over time. It also mandates that children in every racial and ethnic group learn more each year. No more hiding them behind schoolwide averages propped up by the highest-performing students. No more allowing lower-performing, often minority, students to falter woefully behind without anyone paying attention.
In the negotiation over the particulars of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration agreed to leave it to the individual states to determine what would constitute “adequate yearly progress,” what schools must achieve to avoid sanctions, including possible closure. That concession, however, opened the door to all manner of wriggling, evasion, avoidance and obfuscation to avoid the tough sanctions proposed in the law.
The intent was to demand that all children show progress, measured by standardized test scores. Not just the well-heeled ones, the motivated ones or the ones with well-educated parents–all the children. Some of the states, however, have not shown that they intend to live up to the spirit of the law.
States are starting to come up with their own goals for progress in order to comply with the law’s ultimate requirement that all students meet or exceed state reading and math standards by 2014.
The first stab at this in Illinois is a huge disappointment. It is not an effort to live up to the intent of the law. It is an attempt to subvert the law.
A task force of the Illinois State Board of Education has submitted a recommendation for Illinois’ annual achievement goals. Under the proposal, schools wouldn’t have to show any progress for the next three years, as long as at least 40 percent of the students meet state standards. After that, schools would have to show only minute gains through 2010, then they would have to show explosive progress in the final four years.
Why the stall? Some Illinois educators would rather wait out the Bush administration than try to live up to the demands of the education reform law. If the president is re-elected, he will leave office in January, 2009. Just enough time to scuttle federal education reform before 2010.
Some argue that schools need more time to gear up for the new law. But the real effect of this go-incredibly-slow approach is tantamount to keeping a child on training wheels well into her teens.
There are some aspects of the No Child Left Behind law that should be revisited. The provision that allows students in failing schools to transfer to better-performing campuses looks great on paper, but in practice there simply isn’t enough room for all of them in other schools. It would be more effective to mandate that special tutoring be provided to those students before a transfer is attempted.
But the demand for steady progress from students at every school and the threat of real consequences for failing to meet that demand were the boldest and most meaningful aspects of the Bush reform plan. The state board of education must come up with a more challenging timetable for school improvement.
State educators must believe they have an obligation to comply with the spirit of the law. They must believe they have an obligation to raise expectations for themselves and for their students. All of their students.
