No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization this year, and so it is an apt time to be asking how it has worked out. In 2001, the U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and President Bush signed it into law Jan. 8, 2002.
How has it performed across the nation in closing the achievement gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged students, which was a primary goal? All students were to reach reading and math proficiency by the school year 2013-14. There is evidence that student achievement in reading and math has gone up since 2002, and that the achievement gaps of groups of students is narrowing.
But many critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are skeptical that the tests used truly measure proficiency or progress, and, moreover, the costs in teacher morale and a narrowing of the curriculum are too high.
Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)
Key to NCLB Act is the idea that schools need to be held accountable for their progress or lack of progress. Each state had to develop its own achievement standards, and then measure student achievement and progress through tests. When a school or districts fails to make its adequate yearly progress (AYP), the state then intervenes in a more drastic way to bring the lagging school/district up to standard. States have little choice but to cooperate with the federal government as their Title 1 money for low income, impoverished schools is linked to NCLB.
The accountability provisions of the NCLB have affected every public school, district and state in the nation. Schools that do not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two consecutive years are "identified for improvement." When this happens a number of "interventions" can occur, such as revising the school plan, offering parents the choice to transfer to another public school, and providing supplemental educational aid (tutoring, for example). If a school continues to miss its AYP, it then is subjected to "restructuring," which could mean reopening the school as a charter school, replacing all or most of the staff responsible for missing AYPs, or the state taking over the delinquent school or undergo other major governance restructuring.
To assess accountability under NCLB during this year of reauthorization of the NCLB, a forum was held at George Washington University. Three organizations involved in multi-year studies presented major findings on the implementation of NCLB. The RAND Corporation, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) and the American Institutes for Research (AIR), hosted this conference on June 12th.
Key Findings
With the passage of NCLB, the duties of the 50 states have significantly expanded, according to a CEP report discussed at the forum. State education agencies most often say they lack sufficient numbers of qualified staff to implement NCLB. They are called upon to provide technical assistance to districts with schools in improvement or restructured schools and lack the resources to monitor the assistance rendered, such as tutoring services.
"Only 11 states reported they were able to provide technical assistance to districts with schools in improvement, corrective action, or restructuring 'to a great extent'," says the CEP report. The RAND report found that half of California teachers expressed a need for technical assistance in the instruction of English language learners and students with special needs.
In 2002, the RAND Corporation began a project to assess how the NCLB accountability requirements were viewed in three very different states: California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. School and district administrators, principals, and teachers generally supported the 'theory' of standards and accountability, but this study found that there were huge differences between them in how these were put into practice.
"Most administrators thought that state test scores accurately reflect student achievement, but only a small minority of teachers thought so," says the RAND report.
In general, teachers have never cared much for NCLB and fought it when it was introduced, although most teachers do agree with the increased focus on student achievement and curriculum coordination. Most teachers interviewed in the RAND report felt that NCLB's requirements for student improvement unrealistic. A large majority of teachers, particularly the middle school teachers, feel thwarted by the "wide range of student abilities in their classrooms, and the students' lack of basic skills, inadequate parental support, and absenteeism and tardiness…," says the report.
The majority of teachers say that the standards and accountability system has "led to reduced morale and negatively affected teaching," found the RAND report. Teachers point out the "lack of consistency between state standards and local curriculum materials." Teachers worry about the narrowing of the curriculum and adverse affects NCLB is having on the high-achieving students.
Jamie McKenzie, a former superintendent, writing on his blog, NoChildLeft.com, asserts that there is a paucity of studies on teacher morale and retention. It is plausible that such studies would find lower teacher morale because the architects of NCLB cared little for its impact on teacher morale, says McKenzie. Laura Hamilton of the RAND Corporation mentioned at the forum that NCLB has had an adverse effect on teacher moral with its "incessant pressures to perform."
Critics of NCLB say that the punishment of schools which may have their principal and teachers fired, has become such a condition of life for schools that many states beat the system by lowering their standards and using easier tests. Remember the states develop and implement their own academic achievement standards and benchmarks of proficiency, which the federal government holds them to. Lowering of standards by the states is evidenced by the proficiency levels in the NAEP tests (National Assessment of Educational Progress), a national test, which does not always corroborate some state test proficiency levels.
Also, this "gaming of the system" is shown in the practice of teachers working hard with the students who are on the border of proficiency in order for the school to meet its AYP. The critics say that the students who are too far below standard then are abandoned. Also, students at the top are left on their own as teachers focus on students closest to the passing line. The RAND study found that a large proportion of teachers admitted focusing more on students near the proficiency cutoff score. It's all about the school passing and not about helping the kids that need it the most—the very opposite of what NCLB is supposed to fix, say the critics of NCLB.
All states had enacted academic achievement standards in reading and mathematics, said Kerstin Le Floch, from AIR. She said that about one quarter of the nation's schools did not make AYP. She pointed out that half of these did not succeed because students as a whole did poorly or at least several student subgroups did poorly. Le Floch interpreted that to mean that something generally was wrong in these schools. Le Floch's findings are based on two federally funded studies.
When schools did not make AYP for a single subgroup, it was usually for students with disabilities. The next subgroups most likely not to make AYP are students with limited English proficiency and African-American students.
Thirteen percent of the nation's schools were identified for improvement in 2004-05. Those schools were most likely to be high-poverty, high minority, large, urban schools," according to Le Floch. The latter schools were typically Title 1 beneficiaries in the past.
Probably it's too soon at this early date to give definitive answers to how well No Child Left Behind is meeting its goals. You could say that the implementation of NCLB is at its initial phase and still evolving. For these reasons, the main focus of research on NCLB at this time is on its challenging implementation in the 50 states (plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) and their school districts and schools.
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