No Child Left Behind

On his first day in office, President Bush announced that education was his priority and set forth a plan that was based on four principles. The first, of course, is accountability. The president said that too many children across this nation are not educated to their potential and fall behind their peers in educational achievement. We have let this condition fester, because we have always assumed that there were some children who couldn’t learn well. We offered remedial programs, but the bottom line is that we never expected them to reach the same standard as the rest of the children. As the U.S. economy has evolved over the past few decades, education has become a more important requirement for economic success, and our failure to provide an adequate education to many young people will limit their opportunities throughout their lives.

In 1950, roughly 20 percent of U.S. jobs were professional positions, 20 percent required skilled labor, and 60 percent required only unskilled labor. Formal education wasn’t a necessity. Children leaving high school with limited skills or even without a diploma could still find jobs. They could acquire the limited training that they needed and earn enough to enjoy a middle-class life. That’s no longer the case.

In 2000, the job market is still 20 percent professional, but now it’s 65 percent skilled, leaving only 15 percent unskilled. In a nation with a steady stream of immigrants who are willing to accept very low wages, there is intense competition for a small number of unskilled jobs that don’t even pay well. We know that if we want our young people to have the opportunity to earn a decent living, raise a family, and become active members of society, we must provide them with a good education. That is the underlying motivation for the president’s No Child Left Behind legislation. The president and Secretary of Education Rod Paige are both committed to improving the life chances of our children and recognizing that the first principle that should guide reform is that we as adults need to take responsibility for the quality of learning in our schools.

Studies that seek to identify the factors that improve school performance all agree that teacher quality is the critical element of success. Of course, in some situations, even a magnificent teacher is not enough. Consider a sixth grader who ranks in the 20th percentile of student performance. That child is entering middle school without adequate basic skills in reading and math. Middle-school teachers are not trained to teach students rudimentary reading and mathematics, so this student is likely to be shunted into classes where little if anything is taught. The student might even be allowed to pass on through middle and high school without ever developing these skills. If the student lives in a state that does not have a high-school exit exam, he or she could receive a diploma.

When Rod Paige became superintendent of the Houston public schools, he noticed that the system had an unusually large number of ninth graders. He wondered where they were coming from. He discovered that in ninth grade, students were required to meet specified academic standards in order to be promoted. This was the first time that these students took a test with real consequences, and many were failing. He found that many of these students stayed in school for a year or two while their former classmates became sophomores and juniors. But when these classmates began talking about picking up tickets to graduation and being measured for their robes, the nonachievers quietly drifted away from school. They didn’t want to be around when their failure would become obvious to everyone. Paige rightly recognized this as a failure of the school system, not the students.

During the past few decades, we’ve learned an enormous amount about how children learn. In particular, we know much more about the process by which children learn to read, and we know that the inability to read proficiently is a barrier to further progress in education. These kids who became stuck in ninth grade had probably fallen behind their peers by third grade. After that, teachers think that it is not their job to teach reading, and they typically will not teach reading unless a student asks for help. This is not the responsibility of a nine-year-old; it is the job of the adults, the schools, and the school districts. This is where accountability must begin.

The second principle is to put control where it belongs. We cannot simply mandate from Washington how every school ought to operate, what standards it ought to use, what structures it ought to put into place. That’s got to be done in the states. Indeed, the states are likely to find that it is even more effective to have the school districts and the schools determine how best to help their students achieve high standards. And so in the bill, the states are left to determine what their standards should be, to develop assessments that are aligned with these standards, and to create an accountability system that must–for the first time–include all children.

The third principle is parental choice, and I am disappointed that the legislation that Congress passed did not go as far as the administration hoped it would. We recommended that any child in a low-performing school be allowed to transfer to a better-performing school, whether it be private or public. Congress agreed that no student should be forced to attend a low-performing school, but the majority decided that students have a right to attend a better public school but not a private school.

The legislation also enables parents who decide, perhaps for social or practical reasons, to keep their child in the low-performing school to use public money to pay for additional help for the child. This help can be provided by the public school system, by private companies, or by community organizations. The legislation’s goal is to have all students meet high academic standards. It provides the states with the flexibility to develop their own ways to achieve that goal.

The fourth principle is to research what works. Although that sounds very simple and obvious, the reality is that we have not done it. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been too busy fighting the “reading wars” between the advocates of phonics and the advocates of whole language. The result of this obsessive struggle is that we sometimes find kids who have developed wonderful decoding skills through phonics but who aren’t reading because they are not given anything interesting to read. At the other extreme are some kids who are surrounded by good literature that they cannot decode. It should have become apparent by now that there is no conflict between the two approaches. Research has shown that kids need alphabetic awareness, phonetic decoding skills, and stimulating literature.

We also need to learn more about how children learn mathematics, science, and social studies. Our colleagues at the National Research Council have been working on this, but we need to do more. The Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement is putting more of its resources into research in these areas, so that we can provide teachers with better strategies and better tools.

The need for assessment

Of course, in order to figure out what works in the classroom, we need to assess student performance. Assessment is critical to making schools accountable and to identifying practices that make schools and teachers successful. Unfortunately, we are not doing enough to assess student progress.

Many states test students only once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school. That amount of testing does not provide us with enough data to understand what is happening in the schools, so the new legislation requires schools to test more frequently. We should be realistic about what it will take for each of the 50 states to develop reliable tests that are carefully aligned with their goals and curricula. The schools and the private-sector companies combined might not have the expertise necessary to develop 50 separate sets of tests, and the states will have to decide if they want to team up with other states to produce a joint test or to use an off-the-shelf test until they can develop their own.

The whole point of annual assessment is that it provides a very rich data source that can be used to help individual children and to identify where teachers’ strengths and weaknesses lie. We know that if we look longitudinally at the classroom performance of children in a particular teacher’s classroom and find that every year those children miss certain objectives, the problem is probably the teaching strategy or the teacher’s content knowledge, not the children. Assessment can be a wonderful tool for principals and teachers to use to determine what professional development they need. If there are teachers whose students always do well with those objectives, let’s observe those teachers more closely to uncover the keys to their success and then share those insights with other teachers.

We can also use the data to evaluate schools and school districts. Although many people are not happy to hear me say that, the truth of the matter is that we are not running our school systems as well as we should. I’m sorry if people are upset at that, but we have children for whom we are not providing even an adequate education, and those children deserve no less than a first-rate education.

No school system lacks the desire to do right by their students. They are underperforming because they don’t know how to do it differently. What happens over time is that underperformance erodes their morale; it erodes the teachers’ belief that school performance is in their control, and they start saying, well I was very successful with the students I used to have, so it must be the students. And what we have to say is, yes, students have changed. They learn differently than we do. They are much more accustomed to receiving information in short bursts from interactive multimedia sources, which means it’s a lot harder to get them to sit and listen to a lecture for 40 or 45 minutes than it was for some of us who grew up with books and other print media as our primary information source.

The fact that they learn differently doesn’t mean that they can’t learn. Some schools are doing an exemplary job, and the Department of Education has published a report on those schools. Knowing that it can be done makes it incumbent on us to have an assessment system that makes it possible to see that all schools succeed.

The goal is to have a test that measures how well the students are learning. A common concern is that if there is a test, teachers will teach to the test. But this is a circular argument. If the assessment is a good measure of what it is we want children to know and be able to do, then I certainly want the teachers teaching to the test. If it’s not, no matter what they do, they’re not going to be able to help children. Thus, the quality of the assessment is absolutely critical.

But more than that, the quality of the leadership in the schools and school districts is critical, because what we don’t want to see happen is that the assessments to be passed by all children become the ceiling rather than the floor. There are schools where they say if you’re going to measure me on mathematics and reading, we’re going to spend all of our time doing mathematics and reading. Art, science, and social studies can be covered by someone else in the future. But it is the school leader who has to support, monitor, and assist teachers in teaching a rich curriculum to every child. The complexity of the world in which these children are going to live requires that they be educated to high levels. We don’t want to cut back on or eliminate subjects that will enable them to lead rich and satisfying lives. Superintendents and principals must remind teachers that well-educated children pass tests. These are not the kind of tests that require that a child spend every moment focused on test practice.

Some children may need additional instruction to meet the standard, and that’s why we have before-school and after-school programs. That’s why we’re talking about giving a lot more flexibility to states in spending federal funds. They can spend their money on Title I activities aimed at low-income students, increased salaries for hard-to-find science and math teachers, or the 21st Century Schools program. The accountability system will provide the incentive to motivate school leaders to determine what works best in their context.

Other questions remain: Should states allow school districts to have local assessments; can there be a mix of criteria for assessment; can assessments differ from year to year? What do we do in the two states that have provisions in their state constitutions that forbid statewide testing? What about Iowa and Nebraska, which have local control systems in which each district creates or purchases its own assessment? There are other states that plan to do state assessment in some grades and local assessment in others. The overarching question is how do we ensure that all the assessments are comparable? The federal policy is that the burden of proof is on the states to demonstrate that their assessments are adequate.

Implementing accountability

The other big issue with assessment has to do with accountability. I know that there are some who believe that what we ought to be looking at is not where students stand at the end of the year but how much progress they have made since the preceding year. Because all students begin the school year at a different level of achievement, the critical question is how far forward the school is able to move the student in a year. This has been dubbed the “value-added” approach.

The intention of Congress is that we should pay special attention to the amount of progress that occurs over several years, because a single test is simply not sufficient to evaluate student achievement or a school’s quality. I agree that we can learn much from the value-added approach, but it is not sufficient to ensure that all students meet a high standard. We should not be satisfied that children who are trailing their peers by several years in achievement simply improve somewhat year to year without ever catching up. We want all students to reach a recognized standard.

States will have some flexibility in demonstrating that their students are meeting a high standard, but they have to demonstrate that all subpopulations are doing well. It will not be enough to raise the average score by raising the performance of the best students even higher. That is not the spirit of No Child Left Behind. The requirement that 100 percent of the children achieve proficiency has many educators swallowing hard. Indeed, our biggest challenge could be convincing school leaders that we can do this. That’s why we keep bringing people back to take a look at what Texas has accomplished in setting a firm standard and enabling the overwhelming majority of students to meet that standard. Texas deserves praise for what it has done, but now it’s time to raise the bar even higher. I am confident that Texas will succeed again and that it will inspire other states to do the same.

The states should not expect instant success. They understand that they will have to meet high standards, but until they see how their students do on the benchmark tests, they will not know how much improvement is needed. They should expect some rough sailing ahead. A large percentage of high-school juniors are likely to find that they are not at the level they should be. What do school officials say to parents who want to know why their children who have passed all their courses are not where they should be when it is too late to catch up? This should be a wake-up call to educators that they need to identify problems earlier and take action immediately to help these students catch up, so that when they finish high school they have the skills they need for work or higher education.

It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to admit that very often we have let empathy get in the way of doing what was best for the children. We have said that this child is poor, that this child has a dysfunctional family, and that this child has to work, so we can’t hold these children to the same standards. We let them move through school with C’s and D’s until at the end of high school they are woefully lacking in basic academic skills. Good assessments should enable us to identify these students so that we can intervene early and often to help them. A good assessment should let us know not only which students are falling behind but also what the major stumbling blocks to each student’s progress are. We should begin educating these children as individuals. When each individual receives an adequate education, the benefit to the nation will be immeasurable.