A Better Deal
Education
Standardize the Goal, Customize the Strategy
Twelve Suggestions for the New U.S. President
Some time after the U.S. Congress reconvenes in February 2009, the debate will resume over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The law has had positive and negative effects that ought to be considered during the reauthorization debate.
The law created a testing and accountability system that mandates potentially severe interventions for schools and districts that receive federal Title I funding and that repeatedly fail to make “adequate yearly progress.” Title I funding is set aside for schools and districts with high percentages of students from low-income families.
We studied the effects of the law in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Among the positive results, school districts are aligning local curricula with state standards and assessments, using test data to make decisions about curriculum and instruction, and providing extra support to low-performing students. Educators across the three states say the test data facilitate their ability to meet individual students’ learning needs. Teachers report improvements in academic rigor, instruction, and the focus on student learning.
However, administrators are more positive about the effects than are teachers. Teachers are more likely to question the validity of state test results. Some teachers worry that the standards are too difficult for certain students and, at the same time, that the emphasis on having every student attain “proficiency” has led to a curriculum that is not challenging enough for high-achieving students. A majority of teachers do not believe that the state accountability systems are beneficial for students. Moreover, teachers report a variety of ways in which they have narrowed their instruction to focus on tested material, to the exclusion of topics and subject areas that are not included in state tests but that nonetheless would generally be viewed as critical to a well-rounded education.
AP IMAGES/DAMIAN DOVARGANESFirst-grade students perform an experiment at Las Palmitas Elementary School in the Coachella Valley Unified School District in Thermal, California. The district is considered one of the worst in the state and faces sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. |
No Child Left Behind has led to distinctive accountability systems in each state: different standards, different assessments, and different assistance strategies. In some cases, changes may be needed to reduce or to eliminate these differences — for example, to make the definition of “proficiency” in reading and mathematics similar across all states or to equalize the content standards across states.
In other cases, it may be wise to relax rules to give states greater flexibility. School improvement efforts might be more effective if they were responsive to local conditions. Rather than imposing a fixed set of choices that apply when schools fail to make progress for a given number of years, the improvement efforts could be customized to address the specific causes of failure and the local capacity to ameliorate them. Such efforts should include resources to help teachers offer high-quality instruction while avoiding the temptation to focus exclusively on tested content.
Additional changes to the law may be warranted to promote better measurement of outcomes. Moving away from a system that focuses on whether a student performs above or below the “proficient” level and toward a system that measures progress at all points along the achievement distribution would provide better information about how well schools are performing and could substantially increase teachers’ support for the system.
There is a further lesson for school-based accountability systems. Although educators have become comfortable with the underlying theory of accountability, they are not comfortable when implementation of the theory seems to clash with their local situations.
Such conflicts can occur when the local curriculum does not match the state content standards, when the proficient level seems unattainable for many students, or when an entire school is judged against targets that both seem unattainable and fail to reflect the breadth of learning the school is trying to promote. A good way to start bridging these gaps between theory and practice would be to engage educators themselves, to a greater extent than has been done in the past, in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. 
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