Features > February 2, 2007
Education Reform: Pass or Fail?
As No Child Left Behind comes due for reauthorization, questions remain about whether it really helps children learn
By Adam Doster
Can bureaucrats craft education policy that benefits students?
The Cerveny Middle School in Northwest Detroit looks like any other aging public school in a depressed urban area. The ominous brick structure is checkered with Cold War-era bomb shelter signs, the linoleum tile floors are scuffed from years of foot traffic and a busted clock rests on a hallway wall in dire need of a paint job.
But one classroom on the second floor is markedly different. A Malcolm X quotation—”I never felt free until I began to read”—lines the outer wall, and Gary Paulsen’s teenage classic Hatchet leans against the chalkboard alongside a biography of Che Guevara. When the bell rings, a seventh grade language arts class enters the room and begins an orderly, active and sophisticated discussion about the effects of depopulation on their once-enormous city. Welcome to English class with Nate Walker.
Walker, 26, in his fourth year as English teacher, basketball coach and drama director at Cerveny, is tired of the status quo in education. Instead of using customary textbooks or worksheets, he applies state and federal standards to materials and activities that he crafts with his students’ interests in mind. During a recent lesson on expository essays, Walker challenged his students to develop a research question, thesis statement and supporting arguments about truancy in the Detroit Public Schools. He then let them debate. “I give [the students] a lot of freedom to explore their own ideas,” he says. “Everyone has a voice. It’s interactive.”
By learning reading through dialogue and communication, Walker’s students develop analytic abilities while simultaneously cultivating the skills to pass any test thrown their way. They also behave and enjoy themselves; something that Walker insists wasn’t always the case. “I work really hard to try and build a positive learning environment,” says Walker, “a classroom that people want to come to.” After witnessing Walker in action for two hours, it is clear that he understands and embraces the complexities of educating children. The same cannot be said about leaders in Washington.
Reauthorization on the horizon
On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), his most significant domestic policy initiative. Over the last five years, this sweeping legislation transformed K-12 education, generating supporters and detractors in the process. This year, NCLB is up for reauhtorization, amid growing concerns that the bill is not achieving its goals. The resulting debate will galvanize citizens and policymakers concerned with the state of American education.
Introduced in early 2001, NCLB benefited from a groundswell of national unity following 9/11. Congress passed it in an overwhelming bipartisan vote. Many of NCLB’s major tenets were derived from school reform efforts instituted in Texas when Bush was governor, but prominent Democrats Rep. George Miller (Calif.) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (Mass.) were instrumental in revising the original draft.
All three of these players have made it clear that they will work toward reauthorization. With Democrats now in control of Congress, Miller has assumed chairmanship of the newly renamed House Committee on Education and Labor, and Kennedy heads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, meaning both will set the agenda in their respective chambers. Both also claim that reauthorization of NCLB is a high priority. Likewise, in his recent State of the Union address, Bush said that NCLB “has worked for America’s children—and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law.” To improve NCLB’s public image, the administration recently unveiled a snazzy American flag-themed logo for the legislation.
Yet with renewal right around the corner, many Americans remain unclear about what NCLB does. According to a poll conducted in the fall of 2005 by Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup, 54 percent of parents with children in public schools said they knew little or nothing about the law. That’s not surprising—teasing out the key points of the 670-page bill can be overwhelming. Essentially, NCLB reauthorizes previous federal education mandates in hopes of improving the performance of all K-12 students, thereby eradicating what Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” To do this, the law relies on a strict accountability system, called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
AYP divides students into subgroups—all ethnic/racial groups present in the school, low-income students, students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency—and requires that each subgroup in a school reach state-determined levels of proficiency on standardized tests in math and reading. If one subgroup fails, the entire school fails. By the 2013-2014 school year, the law will require all states to set their levels of proficiency at 100 percent.
For schools that fail, NCLB institutes a series of sanctions and remedies that force schools to improve and at the same time gives students attending low-performing institutions a series of options. After two years of failure, schools are deemed “in need of improvement,” meaning that school administrators must devise a two-year improvement plan following strict peer-reviewed guidelines and that students must be allowed to transfer to another school in the district or a nearby charter school. A third year requires the offering of supplemental services like tutoring, a fourth year triggers “corrective action”—such as changes in staff and curriculum and the extension of the school day or year—and a fifth year requires the complete restructuring of the school, which in many cases means the opening of a charter school in its place.
In the case of Cerveny, the school was reconstituted after failing to meet AYP for five straight years. However, its performance plan left some hiring responsibilities to the principal, a unique stipulation that Walker says was critical to the school’s recent improvement. Cerveny maintained some local autonomy and teacher stability, and students passed their reading proficiency levels for the first time last year.
NCLB flaws and motives
Although some argue that it’s too early to pass judgment, recent evidence suggests that the bill has fallen short of its lofty goals, leaving parents, educators and legislators discontented. Three major studies released in November reported persistent achievement gaps between students of different racial, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. According to the Northwest Evaluation Association, an Oregon nonprofit testing organization that studied the results of 500,000 reading and math tests administered in 24 states between 2004 and 2005, pupils attending poor schools achieved less growth than those attending rich schools for each subgroup at every grade level. It found the same variance between students of color and white students. The Educational Testing Service, a nonprofit assessment development and research organization, reported similar findings; in 2005 black students scored considerably lower than white students in math, science and reading. And a study by the Policy Analysis for California Education found that achievement gaps in California actually widened over the past five years, which runs counter to Bush’s insistence that the law is successfully addressing educational discrepancies.
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