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Find more Kappan articles in the How Well Has NCLB Worked? How Do We Get the Revisions We Want? PDK's 2006 Summit on Public Education opened with a stimulating panel discussion on the hottest topic in education: NCLB. Ms. Lewis reports on the panel's views and how they were received by the conferees in the subsequent breakout sessions.
LOOK south from the corner of the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., and the front door of the White House is squarely in the center of your view. Look north, and you can see a corner of the National Education Association building on 16th Street. Around the corner is the entrance to the offices of the Washington Post. Glance from side to side, and you see a stretch of the infamous K Street, the land of the lobbyists. One block west and one south is a stop for the Blue Line Metro, which can take you directly to the middle of the House of Representatives buildings. This hotel has always been a strategic and sometimes history-making place. In one of its ballrooms, the late Terry Sanford, then governor of and later senator from North Carolina, announced an unusual compact for education: the agreement to form the Education Commission of the States. Before other venues closer to the Capitol were built, this was a favorite site for the conferences of education groups, the release of major reports, and no doubt some deal making in the lobby bar. It was a fitting place for Phi Delta Kappa International to hold its 2006 Summit on Public Education, the formal culmination of a year of events celebrating the centennial of PDK, the professional association in education. In this cradle of policy making, politics, and media, PDK appropriately turned its attention to one of the most extraordinary happenings in education policy of the last century -- the No Child Left Behind Act. The law was conceived by the White House and passed by Congress on a nonpartisan basis. Since it first took effect in 2002, it has been the focus of intense lobbying by many groups wanting to change it. Now, after more than four years, it stands accused of not doing very much, very fast, for the children attending schools just a few blocks from the hotel, the kind of struggling and often neglected students the law is intended to help the most. This juxtaposition of good intentions and stark realities characterized much of the discussion, both formal and informal, at the Summit. A panel of national policy experts, prodded and kept on track by questions from John Merrow, education correspondent for PBS' "NewsHour," opened the conversations with a mixture of praise, some misgivings, and a few suggestions for changes in a law that is not going to go away. The panelists were a lot nicer than many in the audience wanted them to be. In breakout sessions focused on what the panelists had said, PDK members and others voiced frustration at how the law is playing out in their classrooms, school districts, and higher education institutions. The panelists, for example, counted the greater attention paid to children in special education as a plus in the law. That's true, participants said in the small-group discussions, but the law's accountability provisions work against the best interests of these children. Panel member Sandy Kress, an architect of the legislation for President Bush and former school board president in Dallas, said passionately that the law allows no excuses for the achievement gap. "I think part of what gets No Child Left Behind into trouble is, it means [what it says]. There are teeth to it, more teeth to it than anywhere in any previous act of legislation." Those in the small-group discussions agreed but argued that the accountability provisions are in need of a good cleaning. The panelists welcomed the fact that ensuring good teachers for classrooms in high-poverty schools was on the table. But even the panelists did not equate the law's definition of "highly qualified" with real competence, and Summit participants, many of them teachers, decried the law's effect on excellent teachers who had been made to feel that they are failures because of NCLB's statistical definition of adequate yearly progress (AYP). The panelists and Summit participants certainly agreed that NCLB has provoked a national discussion about public education and has made public the significant achievement gap among the nation's students. Yet many worried that the conversation was too narrowly focused on test scores. Missing from all the attention to student outcomes are a number of equally important roles for schools, such as developing critical thinkers and future citizens. The Summit's emphasis on NCLB had a clear purpose -- to stimulate PDK members to become involved in the reauthorization process. Although final passage of a revised NCLB may be delayed because of politics, Congress will surely begin its discussions in 2007. The new committee leadership in the House and Senate anticipates little change in the core provisions of NCLB, but it should be pointed out that the law, itself a reauthorization of the 40-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, practically "sneaked" onto the books late in 2001. The public had scarcely any opportunity to help shape it. Even if the panel discussion of NCLB at the PDK Summit lacked controversy, it did cover issues that might never have surfaced in such a forum without the law's provoking attention to them. In that sense, the panel began an important process for PDK members and for all Americans.
What's Good, What Needs Changing There has been meaningful progress in improving the academic scores of children of color since NCLB was passed, Kress pointed out. It was the importance of understanding the educational plight of these children that convinced the Council of the Great City Schools to support NCLB when "a lot of people didn't expect that a group like ours . . . would actually stand up and be in favor of a piece of legislation like this," according to panelist Michael Casserly, the Council's president. Even though most of the schools designated as "needing improvement" under the law are in urban districts, the Council would support the legislation again if it came up for another vote tomorrow, he said, explaining:
Others on the panel pointed to different positive effects, depending on the vantage point from which they viewed the law. Maine's state commissioner of education, Susan Gendron, confirmed that the law had furthered the standards movement, as state chiefs have moved to align standards and accountability and to create longitudinal data systems. Wendy Puriefoy, head of the Public Education Network, saw significant, structured dialogues about public education occurring in communities because of the law and a stronger emphasis on making parents and communities partners in improving achievement. Virginia McLaughlin, dean of the School of Education at the College of William & Mary, welcomed the law's effort to open up the issue of teacher quality, although she preferred to use the term "competent" rather than "highly qualified." And the "numbers guy" on the panel, Bill Sanders, a statistician who has developed procedures for tracking individual student growth, confirmed that the scores of the lowest-achieving students are moving up, something that he can document because more and more states now have annual data on class cohorts. Once the niceties were over with, and everyone had said what was good about the law, the panel turned to a number of troubling unintended consequences that have arisen from NCLB. And therein lies the tale of why the law is controversial and unsettling to educators whose careers have been built on a different set of values from those that have taken precedence under the implementation of NCLB. First, educators in schools deemed "in need of improvement" see no alternatives for meeting the strict timetables and performance levels of NCLB other than to limit the curriculum to the subjects tested and to drill students on test-taking skills. The reason is simply that the law rests on a foundation of regulations and sanctions. Kress believes the issue of sanctions is less important than critics contend, but, as Casserly pointed out, a basic psychology course teaches that punishment does not motivate people to do better. He continued:
Later in the discussion, Casserly agreed with Kress that the sanctions in NCLB are not terribly onerous. His view was that "they are stupid." Most of them involve writing a plan, replacing some staff members, reorganizing the school, bringing in a team, hiring outside advisors, or transferring students. "None of this stuff has anything to do with actually raising student achievement," he argued. "I just defy anybody to actually find any research that would suggest that those are successful strategies."
Sanders said that his data reveal two troubling outcomes that are tied to NCLB's emphasis on penalties. One he called "teaching to the bubble kids." In schools with the greatest likelihood of failing to meet AYP targets, the understandable strategy is to identify the students closest to meeting higher proficiency levels and intensify their instruction, while neglecting the children who are truly far behind, "so that you're actually putting more children at risk of not being proficient in the future." A second problem Sanders has uncovered in his data is that higher-performing students, including minority and low-income students, are regressing toward the mean because all of the attention and resources have been directed toward getting low-performing students up to standard. While NCLB mentions parents hundreds of times and guarantees them greater involvement in decisions about their children, the law has not delivered on its promises, Wendy Puriefoy of the Public Education Network contended. This has led to frustration in many communities. "You can't tell people that you're going to change their lives and change the outcomes of their children's lives in school," she said, "without telling them what and how and consistently engaging them." Low-income parents like having higher goals for their children, according to Puriefoy, but the accountability provisions of the law have been poorly communicated, and families have no understanding of how to get better results or how to obtain the resources needed, mostly from the state level. Just as Puriefoy doubts that the school systems have the necessary infrastructure to deliver on the goals of NCLB, William & Mary's Virginia McLaughlin finds the law's promises of a "highly qualified teacher" in every core-subject classroom highly questionable. In the first place, she said, the law fails to address the issue of teacher competency, which is different from certification. Another issue is the unequal distribution of well-prepared teachers, a problem that undermines the capacity of schools serving minority and low-income children to meet the law's goals. This is not a problem that can be solved simply with more money -- although that might help to attract more good teachers, such as those certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, to these schools. Rather, McLaughlin said, teachers want to work with strong principals, high-quality professional colleagues, adequate resources, and support from parents and community members.
Interestingly, the panelists did not address inadequate funding for NCLB, although that was a major concern in the small-group discussions that followed and has been a frequent complaint of national education groups. The panelists did discuss the issue of supporting students with broader resources locally, such as health, housing, and employment services. Of course, these services need their own set of reforms, mainly better coordination among them. While Casserly noted that his urban districts willingly accepted responsibility for improving what schools can do to raise student achievement and Sanders downplayed socioeconomic factors in student progress, McLaughlin called for equal responsibility: "I'm not suggesting any dilution of that expectation [of raising student achievement]. I'm just saying that if education is being held to no excuses, then let's get the health care system in place. Let's get the other strategies in place to deal with the major underlying issue, which is poverty." How to Make Changes Kress, whose views of NCLB were the most positive among the panelists, mostly wanted to see its accountability provisions applied more forcefully to secondary schools. Maine Commissioner Gendron agreed that more effort should be expended on improving secondary schools but disagreed on adopting the NCLB model. The standard she proposed was adequate preparation for college or the workplace, and test-based accountability may not be sufficient for such purposes. What fire there was in the panel discussion flickered brightest on the issue of national standards. This issue was "the elephant in the room," as Merrow described it. Puriefoy said that the students headed for highly competitive colleges had already met high national standards:
Casserly argued that other students still needed national standards. But Kress said the notion of adopting a set of national standards was politically unfeasible, at least in the near future. However the NCLB reauthorization deals with the matter of national standards, no one wanted the federal government to impose them. On the other hand, there was general agreement that the current structure, which allows each state to set its own standards, is nonsensical for a country that wants to remain competitive in the global economy. That's not how we build our interstate highway system or run our banking system. One answer may be bubbling up from the America Diploma Project, in which 13 states are reaching agreement on common assessments of core subjects. "That's going to drive expectations," said Gendron. The sentiment among members of the audience was for standards to include those subjects now neglected because of NCLB's narrow focus, especially science, the social sciences, and the arts. The fact that schools that have shown great improvement have failed to meet AYP goals while other schools that have slipped in performance have stayed off the list of schools needing improvement is a vexing paradox. However, Kress believes it can be easily fixed in the reauthorization. The panelists generally agreed that it would be better to redesign the idea of adequate yearly progress so that it would consider growth in student achievement rather than expecting schools to meet fixed levels of proficiency. Sanders, who is regarded as the "father" of the growth model, noted that not all growth models are of equal quality. Some are just simplistic, he said. Preferring to call them "projection models," he suggested that a provision of the reauthorization might offer incentives for schools to encourage the academic growth of all students -- not just those in danger of being left behind, but also those who are already at the proficient level, "because you want to get them on trajectories that move them up the ramp as fast as possible." Moderators always get the last words. For Merrow, the opportunity came at a debriefing session for the Summit, which was held the following day. There, he summarized the panel discussion and wondered why the panelists had shown so little anger about the unintended consequences of NCLB. Based on what he has seen in schools serving poor children, he finds that NCLB "is training kids for jobs that won't exist and is drilling the joy out of learning. [Secretary of Education] Spellings likens it to Ivory Soap, but to me it's more like a candy bar -- M&M's -- as in more and more children left behind." ANNE C. LEWIS writes the Washington Commentary column for the Kappan every month and covers issues in national education policy (e-mail: anneclewis@earthlink.net).
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