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No Child Left Behind: Upon closer inspection

Posted on November 21, 2007November 21, 2007 by Staff

Steve Peha & Margot Carmichael Lester

No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization. Those in favor of NCLB say it’s improving public education; those against say it’s ruining public education. Upon closer inspection, neither position seems right. And the fact that we have but two extremes to choose from indicates that we have closed ourselves off to more promising solutions.

As NCLB heads into its seventh year, no one can say for sure whether schools are better or not. State test scores are up, but national test scores aren’t nearly so rosy. Instructional consistency has improved, but that improvement has come at the cost of an insidious teach-to-the-test mentality that could be making teaching worse. For each positive, there seems to be a corresponding negative. And the issue of NCLB’s effectiveness may be no less cloudy seven years from now than it is today.

Amid this confusion, it appears that Congress will take a mend-it-don’t-end-it approach and reauthorize NCLB with small changes. This choice represents a lost opportunity to address the program’s fundamental weaknesses and to explore better ways of improving our schools.

Testing can and should be a part of education reform. But it shouldn’t be the foundation of reform, because test data can’t tell us why some schools are successful and others are not. Instead, reform should be based on an inspection system that tells us more than test scores can about how schools are doing and what they need to do to improve.

In a school inspection system, people who understand the instructional and operational aspects of successful schools would visit buildings and prepare evaluations that include analyses of test data along with other important factors. Such a system would give us a more accurate view of our schools than we will ever achieve through test-based approaches like NCLB.

An inspection system would give us three things NCLB does not:

First, it would identify fundamental patterns of success and failure within schools and draw explicit causal relationships between those patterns and quantitative data like test scores and graduation rates. This would not only tell us what was happening in our schools, it would tell us why.

Second, it would document these causal relationships and disseminate findings so that unsuccessful approaches could be phased out while successful approaches are encouraged.

Finally, inspectors acting in consulting roles could assist struggling schools in replicating approaches used by effective schools.

With a system of reform based on inspection — and a process of improving our schools based on identification, documentation and replication of successful models — we wouldn’t need to wait seven years to discover that we still don’t know what works and what doesn’t. With each year that went by, new patterns of success would be validated through a process of reproducible field research. This would not only increase the efficiency of reform, it would gradually bring an end to the destructive partisan bickering that has characterized education in our country since the Reading Wars began more than a generation ago.

NCLB takes a needlessly narrow view of school quality. But we compound the problem by taking a needlessly narrow view of school reform. The question we should be asking isn’t, “Is NCLB working?” but, “What reform would work best?”

To date, no other approaches to reform have been tried. How likely is it that we got it right the first time? Or that tinkering at the margins with things like growth models and sub-group sizes will produce results that are significantly better?

It’s time to discard the either/or mindset around NCLB that currently dominates the dialog. We can’t end education reform. But making small changes to what we’re doing now isn’t going to help us either. We need to take what we’ve learned in these last seven years and apply it to the challenge of designing a better model of education reform. Such a model, based on school inspections, would be a practical, powerful and permanent solution to the problem of improving our schools.

Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester own Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., an education reform, advocacy and consulting company based in Carrboro.

2 thoughts on “No Child Left Behind: Upon closer inspection”

  1. Katrina Best says:
    November 22, 2007 at 9:39 pm

    Jonathan Kozol is looking for support in changing the mind of Senator Ted Kennedy. In a talk held at Illinois State University, he urged everyone in the audience to write letters to Senator Ted Kennedy addressing No Child Left Behind. Please write!!! Kozol needs your support, as he will be meeting with Kennedy very soon to discuss this topic and do all he can to change it!
    Thank you and God bless!
    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13759 (very helpful website)

  2. Scott Kennedy says:
    November 4, 2008 at 5:09 am

    While NCLB attempts to address the need for “better” education, it seems to me that it has created a standardization that is able to be represented in numbers and data that serve to formulate an equation for receiving funding from various agencies, mainly the Federal Government.
    As a Middle School Math teacher my recent credential, has more than prepared me to teach a rigorous approach to the academic. Our universities and colleges prepare us for the job of teaching. Requiring more on the part of teachers is somewhat redundant. Hire great teachers from the get go and the worries of “if the teacher is highly qualified” will end. The problem is that there are not that many teachers available and many are taking early retirement, without having adequate replacements available. Teaching is a “calling” not a job. It is a career, not trade. To be a teacher calls for the complete investment of your mind, heart and time. With NCLB my time is now diverted from the education of my students and placed on meeting the testing requirements set by NCLB. American teachers teach the World’s students, not just our own. We have over 96 languages and dialects as communication hurdles to get over before we can even begin to teach. Not to mention the various cultural differences to take into consideration. Oh and did I mention the ongoing disrespect from the students themselves that is fostered by the lack of support for the teacher by the parent/s. The ongoing theme seems to be that the working parent will rescue their child from the big, bad, strict teacher.
    The Congress might want to consider a NCLB with parents and guardians during its next session.
    Sincerely,
    Scott Kennedy

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