Stangler: Education policy needs revision

No Child Left Behind leaves some schools with less funding, less ability to raise scores

By McKay Stangler

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The Bush administration’s much-heralded education reform bill, the No Child Left Behind Act, is due for evaluation and potential renewal in the upcoming federal budget. The ensuing policy discussion, arriving with decidedly less fanfare than the law’s passage five years ago, will generate a chorus of cheers and jeers on both sides of the aisle as lawmakers seek an amenable bridge between opponents and proponents. Though areas of testing have improved in the past five years, the time to rethink our national education policy is long overdue.

It always seemed a bit peculiar that the party of limited government was so eager to impose federal testing standards on local districts, especially since that same party advocated the abolition of the Department of Education a mere decade ago. It is understandably difficult to force homogenized education policy on wildly different school districts around the country, and any revised policy should put control squarely back into state and regional hands.

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Any revised form of NCLB should focus on the importance of localities, and should refrain from identical national standards that force improvements but impede assistance.

To be sure, NCLB has noble goals and aims: to improve students’ learning by increasing standards and allowing them to exit schools that don’t meet improvement requirements. However, NCLB has three serious flaws. First, it punishes entire schools for the lagging performance of just one group within that school, then gives successful students little recourse for transfer. Second, it encourages teachers to focus on national tests at the expense of other material, creating a disturbingly intense spotlight on test performance. Third, it remains a grossly underfunded mandate; President Bush requested little more than half the required budget for 2006, an unfortunate trend that predates his administration.

The overarching problem of NCLB is that, like many federal programs, it imposes strict standards and harsh penalties, but provides scant resources for institutions that lag behind. This creates a paradox that would be comical if not for its adverse consequences on young students: a school has to meet standards to receive funding, but failure to meet standards costs the school the very funding it needs to improve.

Education policy remains an area that functions best when power is removed from high-handed national politicians and returned to local officials who know the districts and communities best. School districts vary by size, demographics, and tax base, among other factors, and uniform policy standards rarely take these differences into account. Any revised form of NCLB should focus on the importance of localities, and should refrain from identical national standards that force improvements but impede assistance.

— McKay Stangler for the editorial board.

Comments

benfrankln (anonymous) says...

McKay,

As an education policy thinker and a special education teacher in an inner city school in Kansas City, Kansas, this editorial was a really excellent review of many of the problems with the No Child Left Behind Act. Very impressive and a much stronger understanding of the issues with this act and with education policy, generally, by my lights than much of even the strongest national coverage I read on this issue.

The penalties associated with NCLB - namely the required removal of administrators and teachers after 4 years of not meeting Annual Yearly Progress standards - are the most counterproductive of the federal mandates that I have encountered or seen thusfar. You're argument that authority should be redevolved to local governance is dead on, I believe. And schools should operate with much more substantial autonomy, being more responsible for both successes and failures on their own rather than both strictly regulated by Federal, state, and local governments and school districts, and then held accountable for decisions many of which are not within their control because of regulation. The current system is a terrible catch-22 where schools and teachers are tightly controlled and simultaneously held strictly and harshly accountable for decisions many of which they are not given the freedom to make on their own.

I teach in a school that is going throught this nightmare, right now, and it is a sad, sad comment on how politics can very seriously overwhelm more noble efforts in education in the name of satisfying a never-satiated public appetite to crack down and tightly control any problem it bears witness too, even when such control may be the very thing that most undermines the ability of many schools (and people) to be more successful, and certainly more responsible for their failures and successes.

And it is very refreshing to read a journalist, nevertheless a younger journalist, who has such a strong grasp of some very complex and counterpoductive political realities.

Ben Sutherland
benfrankln@yahoo.com
http://benfrankln.blogspot.com/

March 1, 2007 at 7:20 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

KUBizGrad (anonymous) says...

While I may be a BizGrad, I come from a family of teachers. And I've been hearing about the problems of NCLB for years now from my brothers and sister and their spouses - teachers all, just like Mr. Sutherland above.

The most common lament is that they are forced to 'teach the test'. This should come as no surprise, as so much is riding on those all-important test scores. Aside from the obvious problem of spending so much valuable classroom time on material of dubious value, there is another ramification. This test-focused teaching has also regrettably sparked a spate of cheating on the part of many teachers around the country, a phenomena that has been documented numerous times in the press - also no surprise as desperate people resort to desperate measures. Legislators should have seen these problems coming, and done something about them in the original NCLB act. Now that the results are obvious, they really have no excuse.

Congrats on another fine article McKay. But I will leave you and the other commentors with one thought:

The Federal Government does provide signficant funding to local school districts - funding that in many places, such as the inner cities, represents a necessary lifeline. But with all funding must come accountability. Accountability is a very popular word right now; unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be that popular when the subject is student performance in public schools. So, while you may well criticize the Bush Administrations' accountability standards as I and my family have, what say you to improve them?

Accountability must be real. There MUST be real consequences for those schools and administrators who are given resources but cannot deliver the results expected by parents and their duly elected representatives. What should those consequences be, exactly? I challenge. Tell us what to do with public schools and teachers that consistently fail.

Or, given the tone struck so far, is your answer to follow the Republican advice of 13 years ago, and abolish the Dept of Education altogether? Which should it be? Funding with real accountability? or total local control - no inteference from Washington but no meaningful help either? Those are the only choices you're going to get.

I'm eager to see some posts on this subject.......

March 2, 2007 at 1 a.m. ( | suggest removal )

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