In marking the seventh anniversary of No Child Left Behind, President Bush last week encouraged Congress to not only reauthorize the landmark education law, but also to strengthen it.
It’s part of Bush’s legacy but, like many of the things he’s leaving behind, it needs work.
There is a lot to like about the law, including the requirement that states set educational standards and disaggregate their test scores by ethnicity and other factors.
But there’s plenty of room for improvement.
First, the federal rules ought to come with federal money to implement them. Furthermore, NCLB shouldn’t be so punitive to struggling schools that are making progress.
It should allow states to use a growth model to determine whether individual students are learning over time. And the wildly optimistic deadline of having every single student proficient in math and reading by 2014 must be addressed.
NCLB, enacted in 2001, required students in grades 3 through 8 be tested annually for proficiency. Schools that don’t show adequate yearly progress are socked with an escalating set of sanctions.
President-elect Barack Obama has put the modification of NCLB on his education agenda. He has said that teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.
Obama believes the measurements of student progress are inadequate and unfairly penalize schools that have high numbers of disadvantaged students who may be making good academic strides, but still don’t yet measure up.
We look forward to seeing Obama work in conjunction with Congress to come up with modifications that leave the core of the act intact, but soften some of its harsher, punitive elements.
Furthermore, we hope that Michael Bennet, who is set to take the Senate seat being vacated by Ken Salazar, will use his real-world experience as superintendent of Denver Public Schools to help shape these changes.
Bennet has been on the front lines of some of the more progressive developments in education, such as the district’s pay-for-performance plan and its dramatic moves to overhaul failing schools.
Bennet and former DPS chief academic officer Jaime Aquino developed a sophisticated set of data-driven measures to identify schools that are succeeding against conventional wisdom and to figure out how they’re doing it.
While the effort is still being perfected, surely that sort of model — and the expertise that went into developing it — will be useful in rethinking how NCLB measures achievement.
The incoming president and Congress have some serious economic and financial problems to deal with, but reworking No Child Left Behind must be high on the agenda.
