Washington Post Calls for NCLB Overhaul

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

 Though hardly perfect from an assessment reform perspective, this 
editorial could turn out to be very important  because the WashPost 
Editorial Page has been a major booster of NCLB (and WashPost-Newsweek 
owns the huge Stanley Kaplan coaching company, which will benefit from 
test prep and tutoring). Folks need to send letters to the WashPost 
expanding on the editorial's critique -- and we need to press to get 
similar columns in other papers around the country.


MAKING THE GRADE
Washington Post Editorial

Monday, September 15, 2003

The more we learn about how the No Child Left Behind Act is working in 
practice, the more we wonder whether it isn't time for Congress to look 
again at the legislation it passed, with the enthusiastic support of the 
president, nearly two years ago. According to the complex rules set out 
under this federal law, states are required not only to show overall 
progress on tests but progress within specific groups, such as the 
learning-disabled and those who do not speak English. These rules 
contain a number of anomalies (such as: when a non-English speaker 
becomes an English speaker, does that count as progress for the 
non-English-speaking subgroup, or not?) partly thanks to which few 
Virginia school districts -- and none in Northern Virginia -- managed to 
post enough progress to comply with federal law. Some of the "failed" 
schools are in the best districts in the state.

This result was widely predicted. Virginia Board of Education President 
Mark Christie argues that the state has actually been penalized by the 
law because it adopted the Standards of Learning, its own testing 
system, before it was required to do so by federal law. That means that 
while Virginia is ahead of the nation on some national tests, many of 
its school districts appear not to be progressing as fast as other 
states, which are starting from a lower base. While these results have 
shone some useful light on the need to educate Northern Virginia's 
non-English-speaking students, at a deeper level this state of affairs 
seems to defeat the purpose of the law: If too many good schools and 
school districts are deemed to be failing, then that label will lose its 
significance. Congress should consider allowing states to devise ways to 
set and meet their own standards and alter the rigid and sometimes 
illogical accountability rules so that they make sense.

There are other conclusions to draw as well. One is that the 
administration, which has focused on this "standards" issue above all 
else, now needs to look harder at some other sections of the original No 
Child Left Behind Act. Schools have paid so much attention to the 
complex accountability standards that many appear to have ignored other 
parts of the legislation, particularly those that call for improvement 
in teacher quality. The Education Trust, an advocacy group, has recently 
published a report showing that the teacher-quality standards have been 
ignored and diluted -- presumably because hiring good teachers costs a 
lot more than just administering tests. What is the value of tests 
without good teachers to help students succeed on them? The law needs 
revisiting.