Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is letting some states differentiate consequences of missing No Child Left Behind targets. That’s not what the law says, but nobody is objecting, writes Kevin Carey. He predicts NCLB won’t be reauthorized till 2010 and wonders what will happen if future education secretaries continue to revise problem areas in the law without waiting for reauthorization.
First, it will be become increasingly clear that NCLB is not identifying schools as low-performing because it’s horrendously inaccurate and arbitrary but because those schools are, in fact, low-performing. This is what happened with the growth model pilot project, where it turned out that most of the schools that look bad when judged by an absolute standard also look bad by a growth standard. Students just aren’t learning there. Similarly, despite what you may have read in the newspaper, NCLB has not resulted in states coming down on large numbers of schools like a ton of bricks. It is simply not happening. In fact, if states takes the terms of the pilot project seriously, a reasonably likely outcome is that more schools will be subject to legitimately serious consequences, not less.
This, in turn, should provide some clarity to the accountability debate. In the end, the NEA didn’t decide to wage war against NCLB because the law is underfunded, or lacks a growth model, or lacks differentiated consequences, or relies on standardized tests of inadequate quality, even though all those things are true. The NEA rejects the idea of assessment-driven governmental accountability for public education at its core.
NCLB can’t be “mended” to suit the NEA, Carey writes.
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