NCLB–Not on the horizon?

In catching up with the last couple of weeks of email, one theme emerged rather starkly: you know NCLB? Um, it doesn’t appear to be working.

A new piece of research, in the peer-reviewed Educational Researcher of the American Educational Research Association, finds that “earlier test score growth [in the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP] has largely faded since enactment of NCLB in 2002.” Bruce Fuller, a longtime education scholar, and several co-authors looked at 4th grade NAEP reading scores from 1992-2006. They found that from 1999 to 2002 4th graders grew some one-quarter of a grade level in reading. After 2002 those scale scores were flat. “Some policy mix, rooted in state-led accountability efforts, appears to have worked by the late 1990s. But growth flattened out in fourth grade over the 3 years after enactment of NCLB.” they write.

Next email included a survey from the Center on Education Policy, the independent Washington, DC group that advocates for public schools. They said the highly-qualified-teacher provision of NCLB isn’t doing much to improve achievement or teachers. The center surveyed officials in charge of implementing the law in all 50 states and 349 sample districts. Administrators are complying with the highly-qualified-teacher provision, they found, but 74% of the districts and 19 of the states said the law was minimally effective or not effective at all in producing better teachers.

Next in the inbox was “The Gifted Children Left Behind,” a story from the Washington Post that was very disturbing. It says NCLB is causing parents to abandon even public schools that are not failing because, as documented in a recent Univ. of Chicago study, the act pushes teachers to ignore high-ability students and “forces a fundamental education approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys they interest in learning.”

It would be a mistake to dismiss this story as pertaining only to the tiny fraction of gifted children and their sometimes obnoxious parents. No, NCLB, or rather, the reaction that NCLB often provokes amongst school administrators, has badly narrowed the curriculums of many districts and forced a joyless drill-and-kill teaching style on children that is no more appropriate for under-performing students than it is for high achievers. With such a learning environment and such curricula we can get students up to a minimum standard but we can’t get them past it. Note the decline in SAT scores reported today. Teaching to the lowest common denominator is not raising anyone’s scores beyond the minimal threshhold.

What to make of all this? The act has great value in shining a light on the performance gap and on really bad schools. But it is losing support because of its shortcomings, and it doesn’t seem that will get put to rights anytime soon.

Chester Finn wrote in the Education Gadfly June 28 that NCLB is not going to get reauthorized: “You can forget NCLB reauthorization until after the 2008 election. No, nobody important is confiding secrets and we don’t have an astrologer. But our reading of the political entrails says this is nowhere near ready to happen. Which may not be a bad thing, considering how little consensus there is regarding the changes that need to be made in this humongous set of federal programs–and how much is still being learned about them.”

And may we add, how completely dysfunctional the lame-duck Bush administration has become.

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