Secretary of Education Rod Paige recently called one of the nation’s largest teachers unions “a terrorist organization” because of its resistance to provisions in the federal school improvement law known as the No Child Left Behind act. Paige apologized quickly. But his remark, and the furious reaction from teachers, was a fair barometer of the increasingly acrid debate over that law.
The two-year-old law had noble intent, and widespread support in Congress. For the first time, schools–and teachers–were to be held accountable by federal law for their efforts to teach all students. The law emphasized steady progress each year. It also stressed that every child in every racial, ethnic and economic group must learn more each year, and that schools prove it with testing. No more hiding the lower-performing students behind schoolwide averages propped up by the brightest kids. There was federal money to help and penalties for failure.
What that means to many districts is now becoming clear. Achievement tests show that many schools in Illinois and elsewhere are failing to bring along at least some of their students–particularly minorities, the poor, the disabled and those who speak English as a second language.
Many schools, some of them in wealthy suburban districts long accustomed to accolades, are in danger of being labeled as failing because of that performance.
Instead of encouraging schools to redouble efforts to help those kids who lag behind, however, the law has prompted a backlash across the country. A smattering of schools have turned away federal funds tied to No Child Left Behind, complaining that the money is not worth the cost and trouble of complying with the new standards. Several states–including Virginia, Utah and Arizona–also have contemplated such a move, as have several school districts in Illinois.
Some of the law’s rules need to be tweaked, and in some cases they have been. But the main mission of the law should be unquestioned: Schools will be held accountable for their record in teaching all children, regardless of race, income or disability. If they fail, parents will have well-defined options to take action to help their kids.
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The crux of the law is testing to gauge progress. Students from grades three through eight and one high school grade must be tested annually in reading and math and those scores must be reported to the state. States are required to separate the data by race, income, ethnicity, English proficiency and disability–nine categories in all, including the overall group. If any of those groups in a school fails to meet standards in reading or math–and in Illinois a group may have as few as 40 students–the entire school fails. (In 2002-03, more than four in ten Illinois public schools failed to meet academic standards. That means in at least one of those groups, fewer than 40 percent of the students passed.)
The federal goal: all kids meeting state standards for reading and math by 2014.
Failure brings expensive penalties for schools taking federal money targeted to help poor children. As a preliminary solution, schools that fail to make state-set goals for two years in a row must offer parents the chance to send their kids to another school in the district that is meeting standards. If the school fails again in the third year, the school district must provide tutoring to the students. In the fourth year, schools must take “corrective action,” which can include replacing staff members or adopting a new curriculum. In the fifth year, schools are “reconstituted,” which can mean that they are turned over to state control or reopened as a charter school.
Critics of the law argue that the federal government demands that the schools meet tough new standards but has not provided enough money to do so. Those complaints are not convincing. Federal funding for education has jumped from $17.4 billion in fiscal 2001 to $24.3 billion in 2004–about a 40 percent increase in just three years. Illinois’ share this year is about $800 million. The schools complain about funding even though most have not yet even faced the expense of tutoring or transferring students. The testing requirements are far from onerous. The more significant costs come, rightfully, to schools that fail.
Moreover, the U.S. Department of Education reports that states are currently sitting on about $4 billion in unspent federal education funds, lending credence to claims that the government is increasing federal spending on education faster than the states can spend it. Indeed, this year Chicago is receiving more money than it is spending for No Child.
The suspicion here is that the outcry about the law is largely a smokescreen so that schools are not forced to deal with the unpleasant truth: they’ve fallen far behind in educating minority and poor children, special education students and others. At several suburban Chicago schools that had easily passed state standards before No Child, for instance, the tests have shown the achievement gap between white and minority students is startlingly wide. Before the new law, schools could camouflage and ignore that gap; as long as half of all students were passing standardized tests, the school passed. Not now.
The detailed information about which children are being left behind offers an immensely valuable lesson and should inspire schools to work harder and smarter to educate all students. But schools across the country seem to be spending precious time and money to find ways to evade the law. It has been reported that some Ohio schools are cutting back on transferring students to gifted programs because their high test scores are such a valuable commodity. Others schools across the country have been suspected of discouraging low-scoring students from showing up on test day. Some schools in Illinois are suspected of fudging data to disqualify the scores of lower-performing kids.
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Education analyst Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution compares the new law to “a new pair of shoes that is pinching in some places.” That’s an apt metaphor. Early experience suggests that some changes in the rules make sense. The Department of Education has already adjusted rules for counting the test scores of students who speak English as a second language and the severely disabled. On Monday, federal officials announced further changes, relaxing teacher proficiency rules and promising to loosen requirements that at least 95 percent of all students participate in testing. Paige is right to fight any move to scrap or significantly weaken the law, while promising that he will wring “every ounce of flexibility” from it.
There’s more to do, particularly when it comes to the tutoring or transfer of students. There’s a good argument, for instance, that the law’s requirements should be reversed. That is, students should first be offered tutoring to bring scores up before they’re allowed to transfer. There’s a realistic reason for this: a dearth of spaces in successful schools. In Chicago, for instance, some 270,000 students were eligible this year for a transfer to better schools. Of those, some 19,000 students applied to transfer, but there was room in the better schools for only 1,100 students. In the end, some 800 students showed up in a new school and about 500 of them are still there.
By contrast, about 14,000 Chicago students are now being tutored under the new law, out of 133,000 who are eligible. Individual and small group tutoring in math and reading has the greatest potential to boost student achievement among those who have fallen behind. It makes little sense to transfer a child before tutoring is offered. At the least, a school should be able to offer the choice of tutoring before a transfer.
Moreover, the law says that in a school labeled as failing, all low-income students must be offered tutoring, regardless of whether they are performing at standards. It would be wiser to make sure remedial programs are targeted at those who truly need the help.
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A common complaint of educators is that the law unfairly allows little leeway when it comes to triggering penalties. They note that the law says if any one of the nine categories of students tested in a school posts a failing score in math or reading, all students in the school must be offered a transfer, whether their group is failing or not. Sometimes, educators say, the difference between pass and fail is just a handful of scores. Witness Pulaski Academy on the Near Northwest Side, which missed meeting standards last year by the narrowest margin: one student. That forced the Chicago Public Schools to offer transfers to the roughly 1,000 students at the elementary school.
Educators argue that the rules should cut them more slack. Their pleas would be far more compelling if 70 percent or 80 percent of the students in a group were passing. Then it would seem unfair to sanction a school because of one or two failures. But in Illinois 6 in 10 students can fail and the school still passes. Arguing that schools should get a break if 61 percent fail–because it’s so close to the cutoff–is absurd.
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Many of the reforms in No Child Left Behind are doing just what they should be doing: forcing teachers and schools to examine every aspect of effort to find new ways to help kids learn.
A student’s performance is not only the responsibility of schools and teachers. Parents must play a vital role. Some shirk that duty and that’s a shame. Just look at the thousands of Chicago parents who were offered free tutoring for their children and failed to take advantage of it.
Some educators say No Child is doomed to fail, that some children will fail to learn no matter what the law says. That smacks of defeatism. President Bush decried the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for America’s disadvantaged school children. This law attempts to raise those expectations. But the status quo dies hard.
Improving the performance of kids who have so long been presumed unteachable is difficult work. It can be done, as the remarkable gains in Chicago schools have shown. But it can only be done by rejecting conventional wisdom and jolting the status quo. America’s teachers and administrators should use their energy and creativity to teach the kids who need it most, rather than concoct reasons for why the national effort to do so will fail.
