Reinventing No Child Left Behind

Reinventing No Child Left Behind

As President Barack Obama -- along with his advisors in the Department of Education and elsewhere in the national educational leadership -- reviews the plusses and minuses of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it is apparent that major changes in the legislation are in the offing. What will those changes be and how will the teaching community -- and learners -- be affected by revisions to NCLB? This paper reviews the ideas and issues that will be taken into account prior to the president -- and Congress -- making substantial revisions to NCLB. If experts and high-ranking officials all agree that NCLB must be revised, the only questions remaining are a) what will those revisions be; and b) how will the educational community respond to the revisions; and c) how will future teachers view the changes in terms of their eagerness to become a member of the teaching profession?

Indeed Obama's administration has already "pumped $100 billion into education" (through the "stimulus" legislation) and the president and his staff members are working with the educational community in the U.S. To revise NCLB and make it more responsive to the needs of teachers and students" (Henderson, 2010). In his budget for fiscal 2010-2011, Obama has targeted $49.7 billion for education and Nia-Malika Henderson writes that much of that money will be focused on NCLB. What the president plans is a "major redesign of NCLB's accountability measures, which have set the standard for school systems across the country" (Henderson).

When the Secretary of Education -- in this case, Arne Duncan -- states that NCLB is a program that demands accountability "but does little reward progress," one can certainly predict major changes are in the works. Duncan states that accountability reforms that go into the NCLB must factor in "student growth, progress in closing achievement gaps, proficiency towards college and career-ready standards, high school graduation and college enrollment rates" (Henderson). Duncan added that a truly workable, practical version of NCLB should be a "cradle-to-career agenda" (Henderson). Although the news media has focused on other contentious issues in Washington (healthcare reform; job legislation; rifts between Democrats and Republicans) Obama has clearly set education as a priority. His $100 billion in stimulus funds "supported nearly 300,000 education jobs," Henderson continues. These were jobs that were either going to be cut from school budgets or already had been cut from budgets.

In addition, Obama is "dangling an extra $1 billion" for education funding "if Congress acts this year to overhaul NCLB, now referred to as the elementary and Secondary Education Act" (Henderson). In addition to the billions already invested in education, the Obama Administration has set in motion a $4.35 billion grant program called "Race to the Top" that is an incentive to states to create better data systems. It is a competitive grant project that will "focus on teacher effectiveness" and improve schools that perform at lower-than-acceptable levels. The reason for the competition, according to Amy Wilkins (with the nonprofit advocacy group "Education Trust"), is in order to truly get a reformed educational system implemented "…you get more change if there is competition" (Henderson).

Wilkins added that NCLB has shown those in charge of education that "standards are too low"; and because Obama is committed to getting more and more "kids ready for college" the energy and funds being invested in education are hefty (Henderson). But not everyone is sold on the idea of competition for the funds; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers has serious concerns. "Students with the most needs should not have to rely on how well adults compete for dollars," she said (Henderson).

Henderson's article in Politico.com also looks into another problem that relates to the changes that many agree are needed in NCLB -- and that problem is time. Will there be time enough in Congress in 2010 to hash out all the issues -- many of which will not be easily resolved -- and come to agreement? The president of the Center for Education Policy, Jack Jennings, said "The issues are so controversial that I just don't see it happening" (Henderson). In order to get new legislation passed with bipartisan support there must be the obligatory Congressional "table setting" -- according to Margaret Spellings, an official with the Bush Administration who helped implement the first version of NCLB. Spellings agrees changes are needed but what kind of changes? This is always the question in Washington as a majority from both parties always seem to agree that changes in legislation are good but who is going to determine exactly what changes will be most useful? Spellings believes the Obama proposals for change "would weaken vigorous accountability" (Henderson).

Meanwhile, on the subject of accountability, the chair of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. George Miller has an important voice in this matter. On December 8, 2009, Miller opened a committee hearing by asserting that "Having 50 different standards in 50 different states undermines America's education system." Lacking a "unified set of strong expectations" across the nation "many states chose to lower the bar -- creating a race to the bottom," Miller went on. Earlier in the year, in June, Miller pointed to statistics that show American education to be sadly lacking when compared with education in other nations.

For example, Miller stated that the American educational system has "fallen to 21st in math achievement, 25th in science, and 24th in problem solving. We used to be number one in college completion. Now we are 18th," he continued (Miller, 2009). Recently the United States produced the most PhD candidates worldwide, Miller explained; "Now, not one, but two Chinese universities have overtaken us." Sounding the alarm that certainly the administration will echo as the debate in Congress heats up, Miller said American 15-year-olds "…rank a full year behind their peers in higher-performing countries in math. Even our best math students rank behind 22 other countries" (Miller, 2009).

Some states have stepped up their efforts vis-a-vis NCLB but other states "have set the bar far too low," Miller continued, adding that the quality of a child's education "…shouldn't be left to the luck of the draw." One reason the bar tends to be set too low is that typically U.S. state standards cover a "larger" number of subjects as students progress into higher-grade levels. But this results in schools wind up with a curriculum that is "a mile wide and an inch deep," according to Miller. Hence, teachers "can't teach it, students can't learn it, and parents can't reinforce it" (Miller, 2009).

Meanwhile James Caillier writes in the Clearing House that any proposal (to improve NCLB) that includes paying teachers according to student achievement must be met with great caution. He raises questions about the pilot project in New York City that will "connect personnel decisions (e.g., pay, tenure) to the value that teachers add to their students" (Caillier, 2010). These policies are launched "much to the dismay of teachers and their unions," Caillier insists, going on to point out that "success" is a purely subjective term and financially rewarding teachers to achieve "success" in a pay-for-performance system must meet three "independent and distinct conditions" (Caillier, p. 59).

The first of those three conditions relates to "output"; the output to determine success in a pay-for-performance model must be "quantifiable and linked to a single employer and a single task" (p. 59). Secondly, the employees who actually product the output that is to be rewarded must be "motivated by pay." And thirdly, the organizational setting in which the output is generated operates with an assumption that there is just one supervisor leading the workers who are producing the output, and that "they know exactly what they are supposed to produce" in order to achieve the output (p. 59). It is all well and good for the school district to launch a pay-for-performance system in order to get the most out of the teachers -- who in turn are motivated to get the most out of the students -- but how are the executives in a district going to determine the "amount of value that a teacher adds" to the school?

If the teacher simply "teaches to the test" -- an all-to-common approach in some schools -- it will be basically cheating a pay-for-performance system. A teacher "teaches to the test" by knowing ahead of time the specifics of the questions, issues and subjects to be covered in the end-of-school-year examination. With that information at hand, the teacher in this pounds the answers to those questions into the student's heads so they do well on the test. Doing this will do damage to the "linkage between these tests and effective teaching," Caillier continues on page 60.

Caillier explains how schools can avoid the pitfalls of false progress ("teaching to the test") on page 60. In order to measure teacher effectiveness the revised NCLB legislation should encourage using the benchmarks used by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), Caillier insists. Those benchmarks include making sure teachers are able to "employ multiple measures of measuring student growth and understanding" (NBPTS). Moreover, a teacher needs to be able to "clearly explain student performance to parents" (NBPTS). What this means is that teachers must be mandated to complete "rigorous self-reflection exercises" that are designed specifically to demonstrate the teacher's effectiveness (p. 60). Caillier points to a study which showed that teachers with NBPTS certifications were more effective in raising student outcomes -- and though he doesn't spell out what study that was, he believes schools should use models like the NBPTS model to identify effective teachers.

If Caillier is right, these models could work well. But he cautions that while private sector employees are more motivated by money and status, public school teachers "are more motivated by work-related conditions than money." Hence, if money is being offered as a motivating factor for teachers in a pay-for-performance strategy, will it indeed inspire teachers to improve their methods? The school systems in states should clarify expectations, Caillier concludes on page 61. And that clarification should be tinged with caution when powerful forces are urging the administration to adopt pay-for-performance in the newly revised NCLB.

Additional suggestions for improving NCLB were brought forth in a New York Times editorial (Feb. 2010); the editorial pointed out that yes, critics are saying it has failed, but "for all its flaws, the law has focused the country on student achievement as never before." When the law went into effect, many states kept "unqualified teachers" and some were known to "phony up graduation rates" in order to get funding from NCLB. That said, prior to NCLB being made into law, many states covered up their failures by basically failing to report or analyze test scores by gender, on socioeconomic grounds, or by ethnicity, the Times writes. With NCLB, that practice was ended, because states under NCLB must provide accurate "yearly breakdowns of student achievement data" along the lines of ethnic, racial and economic lines.