November 21, 2006--Leaving Children Behind

Even before taking office six years ago, Compassionate Conservative President-Elect George Bush had staff working on the first piece of legislation that would be submitted to Congress. It was labeled HR-1, signally by that designation its priority in the House of Representatives. Within weeks of his administration taking office that bill passed both Houses in a fully bipartisan way, supported enthusiastically by Democrats Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative George Miller.

It was called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It was in many ways revolutionary and held considerable promise that maybe George Bush would turn out to be a surprisingly effective President. It was revolutionary in that it was the first piece of federal legislation that explicitly referred to the academic achievement gap between the performance of children by race, and it called for the elimination of that gap by the end of a decade. Bush summed up the situation quite well when he said, “Knowing how to read is a Civil Right.”

The new law not only put a spotlight on this persistent social problem but called for specific remedies—it required states that wished to get federal funds for public schooling to administer achievement tests to all children each year, abandoning the existing practice of not testing until the third or fourth grade, for many children, sadly, too late to help them succeed. It also, radically, required that test data be disaggregated by race—in the past all testing results were lumped together so that the gaps in achievement were strategically and shamefully hidden. And, over the objections of teachers unions and many education associations, the law required that individual schools be held accountable for their performance. If they did not produce satisfactory results, parents would be given the opportunity to move their children to higher-performing schools or be given support to have their kids tutored.

But when it came time to have money appropriated for NCLB Democrats who had supported its passage felt that Bush and the Republicans did not allocate enough money to give it a chance to really work. But many educators felt that there was still enough pressure on school systems to get them to do better and that there would likely be evidence after a number of years to suggest things were heading in the right direction; and when it came time to reauthorize NCLB adjustments in its structure and funding would be possible.

But just yesterday, as the new Congress begins to stir about its priorities for 2007, including NCLB's reauthorization, the NY Times reported that there is sad evidence that across all grade levels, after five years of implementation, the gaps between whites, blacks, and Hispanics have not been narrowed. (Article linked below.)

The education score card maintained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed some progress on gap narrowing in math for fourth graders, but “on fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade reading and math, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps were statistically unchanged from the early 1990s.” Previously reported were the dire results in science performance, especially if measured against achievement levels in many other countries.

Critics claim this is because not enough money was available to get the job done and pre-Kindergarten programs were insufficiently available. Others contend that the problem lies with the achievement tests themselves—they dumb-down teaching and force teachers to spend too much valuable class time teaching-to-the-test. Well, if they are doing that, that too isn’t working!

One could agree with this analysis if there were no good, cost-effective, large-scale examples of programs and methodologies that do have a documented track record of closing those gaps. In their absence it would be fair to assert that we need to spend more money or we need to give up on public schools altogether and privatize education—turn schooling over to for-profit and parochial schools and pay for this with public money. As it turns out, some of this has occurred, and it doesn’t work very well either.

But why don’t we look at those approaches that actually work and insist that they be replicated? Improving education is at least as important as improving health care—where will this country be in 20-50 years if we do not fix this problem, especially since school systems all over the world are doing a much better job of educating their children? If in medicine there is agreement that a particular treatment “works” better than others, medical ethics, if not malpractice insurance, insists that it be the treatment of choice. Why are we so unwilling to require the same approach in the equivalently vital field of education?

The good news is that there are a number of approaches that have data that show they work to narrow and close the achievement gaps so teachers and schools would not, if this more prescriptive system were implemented, find themselves required to do things in rote lock-step. There would still be room to individualize methods and for educators to feel that they are more than just technicians.

Having said this, it is still not about the teachers and allowing them to be “creative” and to “express” themselves—which is what so much of contemporary education in the U.S. is about. It’s about the children and doing what it takes to help them get the education they deserve.