Report Shows States Circumventing NCLB Policies

The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will not happen this year. Senator Kennedy (D-MA), The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pension (HELP), removed the matter from the Senate’s overbooked 2007 end of the year agenda. This allows advocates and Congressional staff to take time to consider the law’s next reiteration, so the advocacy that happens from now until the beginning of next year will likely play an important role in informing that deliberation.

One of the first reports to fill that space comes from Kevin Carey of the Education Sector, the Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act. The report, named after the character in Voltaire’s Candide who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds, is a damming chronology of how, according to Carey, the Alabama Department of Education, with illustrative examples from Birmingham City Schools, was able to secure waivers from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) that eviscerated the law’s intent. The report takes the reader from 2001 to 2007 and details the waivers granted by ED.

These waivers, claims Carey, allowed Alabama to demonstrate academic progress under NCLB, but the reality was very different. Despite the well-publicized statements of progress made by the state superintendent and the Birmingham City School Board, their test scores were not praise worthy. The state was not truly improving in its academic achievement and Birmingham City Schools’ population continued to decline because parents sought better schools for their children. Alabama was merely successfully gaming the system, and ED was a conspirator because it granted the waivers.

In response, Carey recommends that Congress require ED to grant less waivers and make the process more manageable, that the reauthorized law be more specific about acceptable statistical behavior, and that the reauthorized law promote shared standards in order to reduce the profusion of state by state accountability gaming. The report argues that the law’s mechanisms and approach are correct -- but that it runs counter to the sentiment now emerging in Washington.

The more fashionable opinion, a judgment based on unscientific and personal discussions, is that the law has been trying to do too much all at once and that it is a Rube Goldberg structure that combined the political civil rights moralism of the 60s with unrealistic goals and ineffective behavior modification tools. As such, it is not working and, if it is to succeed, Congress will have to restructure the law completely. Small tweaks, the kind argued for by Carey, will not do. Yet, this debate, between tweaking and fundamental revision, rages on and it gives Members of Congress and their staff plenty to think about over Thanksgiving and well into the next year(s).

Resources:
Kevin Carey, The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left behind Act (Education Sector: November 2007), http://www.educationsector.org.
Author: DAD