No Child no more? Are GOP proposals to dump AYP a step forward or back?
Will the GOP plan to gut the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind improve education? (Dean Rohrer/AJC file)
Depending on where you stand — outside a school or inside — No Child Left Behind either pushed public education to new heights or kicked it to the curb.
Used by President George W. Bush as a cattle prod for greater student achievement, the 2001 law ramped up the federal role in schools and spawned a new lexicon of education acronyms, from AYP (adequate yearly progress) to NI (needs improvement).
The landmark legislation had standardized testing as its engine, causing critics to charge that the law reduced U.S. classrooms into “drill-and-kill” labs where worksheets and practice exams edged out science fairs and hands-on learning. The unrelenting pressure to raise test scores caused educators in some schools, including many in Atlanta, to resort to cheating to mask disappointing AYP results.
Despite its Republican pedigree, a group of GOP senators, including Georgia’s Johnny Isakson, announced a quartet of bills last week that will essentially disassemble the most contentious and demanding provisions of No Child left Behind, including AYP. In a media conference-call, Isakson said the goal was to ease federal mandates over all but the lowest-achieving 5 percent of American schools. Isakson and fellow senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee characterized the bills as a restoration of state and local control of schools.
Rather than the federal government acting as a national school board and decreeing whether schools made adequate progress, the states would become the judge and jury.
“The principle effect of the bill for the nation’s 100,000 public schools is to get out from federal mandates on deciding which schools are succeeding or failing,” said Alexander. “A lot has happened in the last 10 years. It is time to transfer responsibility back to the states and cities.”
But are flexibility and freedom simply a return to the see-no-evil past?
At the time that Congress passed No Child Left Behind, many schools allowed limited-English- proficient children, poor kids and students with disabilities to languish in the back row. Systems concealed these historically low-achieving clusters by releasing only average performance scores for schools.
While some schools appeared high-achieving, often they were only succeeding with the children who arrived in classes well ahead of the curve. No Child Left Behind pulled off the cloak off mean average scores.
“When left to their own devices, states have a long, well-documented history of aiming far too low and shortchanging the schools that serve our most vulnerable children. It’s because of that history that Congress sought to hold states accountable for results in the first place,” said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs at the Education Trust, a Washington-based advocacy group for low-income students,
In a concession to local control, No Child permitted states to set their own improvement targets. “More than half of the states chose to set their annual target at any progress, meaning that even a bump from 50.0 percent to 50.1 percent was acceptable,” said Wilkins.
The bar was set so low that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan complained about a dumbing- down of standards, saying, “We’ve seen a race to the bottom. We have been lying to children and lying to families in telling them they are prepared for college and careers when, in fact, they are nowhere near ready.”
But Isakson and Alexander counter that 44 states, including Georgia and Tennessee, have demonstrated a commitment to enhanced student learning by adopting the Common Core State Standards, a state-led initiative to set a purportedly higher and more relevant bar for what students should know.
As to weakening accountability by ceding it to states, Isakson said the proposed GOP changes still require states to “keep in place all testing, disaggregation of data and reporting. The best enforcement mechanisms are transparency and reporting.”
Under the GOP scenario, the community will provide the accountability, demanding change if school data reveal under-served students.
But will the publication of data and transparency alone lead to improvement without any real sanctions?
Wilkins doesn’t think so, saying, “We’ve had nutritional labels on food for decades, yet obesity rates in America are going up, not down.”
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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64 comments Add your comment
@ - William Casey
September 22nd, 2011
6:44 pm
Solution: Get rid of NCLB! Go back to where we were before its inception, especially since there have been no true gains in student achievement. At least prior to NCLB our youth benefited from being exposed to an extensive curriculum and teachers were able to adjust instruction to suit the needs of their students.
Common Sense 101
Jack
September 22nd, 2011
7:45 pm
I think Pres. Bush would take that one back if he could.
Ed Johnson
September 22nd, 2011
8:50 pm
“As long as NCLB remains in place, or for that matter, any similar policy that steers in the direction of teaching to the test,… I and others will continue to cheat…”
@APS 4th grade teacher, thanks for trying to help us wake up and open our eyes.
Don't Feed the Good Mother Troll
September 22nd, 2011
8:53 pm
Thank you, Fred at 6:40. She/he is so ignorant with the infamous “I am a taxpayer” statement. Duh! Good Mother does not have a monopoly on paying taxes. TEACHERS ARE TAXPAYERS TOO!
William Casey
September 22nd, 2011
10:38 pm
I’m no fan of NCLB but our schools weren’t all that great before 2001.
dcb
September 23rd, 2011
7:38 am
Simple answer to a not-so-simple issue – let’s give the classroom back to the teachers. As in generations past, give them goals but then credit for knowing what their students need and how to get them there. As education is a liberal leaning field in the first place, new methods directed to the needs of the local community will happen. We don’t need the federal government telling us that “one size fits all…..” – even for the good of that so-called bottom 5% who liberals feel are being overlooked.
Old Physics Teacher
September 23rd, 2011
8:59 am
Let’s see… the US was lagging in manufacturing jobs because our corporations were (and still are) moving manufacturing overseas where it’s cheaper. This increased unemployment and cut down on our economy severely. The politicians’ response was that high-tech jobs were booming and paying much more than manufacturing jobs, so their idea was that you could move blue-collar workers to these high-tech jobs….and… well everything would be hunky-dory. Well, most politicians have trouble balancing their checkbooks, and the concept of higher math made them run screaming from those courses when they were in school, hence the trouble we’re in now. What led them to believe that Lake Woebegone really exists? Answer: their ignorance.
My school was a National School of Excellence in the 1980’s. Our SAT scores have not been equaled since. The drop-out rate was near 50%. Some of the teachers actually fell asleep during their classes. Now our graduation rate is significant;y higher; teachers come to work early AND stay late; we’ve bent over backwards trying to improve, but we’re now a failing school. Our low-level kids can now pass (for the most part). Our average level kids can pass their tests, but they have little understanding in depth. Our upper level kids have fallen to barely above average.
There was an old joke about a new police officer directing traffic and causing a traffic jam by his ignorance. He directed a driver to pull his car over to the side. The driver was livid and screamed at the cop asking the cop why did he pull him over to the side when the driver had done nothing wrong. The cop’s comment was, “Set right here for awhile. You didn’t do anything wrong, but if I get out of the intersection, the problems will go away!” The politicians – both national AND state, need to get out of the way and let the local communities solve their problems themselves. The schools aren’t the problem and “fixing” them won’t solve the unemployment problem. There is also a story (reportedly true) of a guy trying to teach a horse to do math. The guy worked hard and screamed at the horse day and night. All it did was make him frustrated AND the horse angry. The horse eventually killed the guy and ran off. Now kids aren’t horses, but the analogy holds true.
We need to pull the politicians over to the side of the road so the rest of us can get on with our work.
November 6, 2012
September 23rd, 2011
9:07 am
@catlady
September 22nd, 2011
2:46 pm
Dream on, Pluto!
To “catlady” – Pluto is “dreaming”, but you know what?……that’s one dream that’s gonna come true……
HS Math Teacher
September 23rd, 2011
8:59 pm
When you keep raising the bar, and lowering the floor, and put most of the focus (and pressure) on high schools, you are not going to succeed. When you make education policy that is not grounded in reality, it will fail. When you allow kids in grades 1 – 8 to be promoted with little earned merit, then expect all of them to pass rigorous courses in high school, it will not happen. When you have policymakers who have spent too much time at the top, and little at the bottom, they lose touch with reality. When policymakers listen too much to data-driven, insulated, intellectuals, and less to real teachers on the front lines, then they will lose touch with reality.
If you’ve ever worked on a car engines, you learn fast to diagnose the problem, and to do what actually works. Knowledge & data are great; however, wisdom, front-line experience, and common sense are what’s needed to get us to the hilltop.
MiltonMan Tall Tale
September 24th, 2011
10:48 am
What is freshman high school daughter is in AP Calculus? Good parenting here!
An economist does not have serious math background? You probably think your average speculators on wall street are economists?
Think man!
FYI
September 24th, 2011
12:09 pm
@ MiltonMan, 3:34, Sept. 22. From Wikipedia: “Calculus has widespread applications in science, economics, and engineering.” Plus the study of Economics involves a knowledge of Statistics.
No wonder your complaint to school administrators that your freshman daughter’s AP Calculus teacher, who was an economist, wasn’t trained in math “went over like a lead brick.”
9/26: No Child no more? | Atlanta Forward
September 26th, 2011
9:30 am
[...] federal reins on our schools. The efforts to undo the law have inspired debate, as can be seen in my column. And in a guest column, an economics professor contends that college remains a terrific investment [...]
Ward Silver
September 26th, 2011
10:36 am
Graphic accompanying this article in the paper: disturbing in so many ways…
jm
September 26th, 2011
10:48 am
Regulation run amok
A holy amen for Susan Collins
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904194604576583082888335542.html?grcc=grdt&mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion