Real Solutions Left Behind

Ever since President Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed Congress, debates have raged over its focus on standardized testing to make schools more accountable for the education they offer. Now that the federal government has released its “watch list” of failing schools—that is, schools that don’t show sufficient progress on improving annual test scores—it is even clearer that Bush’s one-size-fits-all solution to America’s educational crisis isn’t measuring up.

The federal watch list, released last week, lists more than a third of Massachusetts school districts as “in need of improvement,” which is not a great showing for the birthplace of American public education. If these districts don’t shape up, their schools could face anything from state interference in their administrative policies to a state takeover. Massachusetts’s performance was fairly standard. Iowa, California and Alabama—states rarely mentioned in the same breath when it comes to education policy—all fell in the same general territory as the Bay State.

But a closer look at the numbers paints a different picture. Of the 133 failing school districts in Massachusetts, 126 met the federal government’s standards overall. These districts were put on the federal watch list because one of 16 categories of students failed to make “adequate yearly progress.” Some of Massachusetts’s best schools—in terms of overall achievement—were placed on the watch list when a small group of students did poorly on a test. This strange outcome results from an understandable desire to help groups that are often underserved by the public schools.

Unfortunately, No Child Left Behind doesn’t help these students by chastising their school districts. Here’s what happens under No Child Left Behind: Let’s say a school is put on a watch list because students who receive free lunch—the school’s most disadvantaged students—have not improved quickly enough. In two years, all students at that school can enroll elsewhere. Of course, the school’s most disadvantaged students are least likely to deal with the logistical and administrative hassle of moving to another school. They are also least likely to have parents who are engaged enough in their education to pull them out of a familiar environment in search of a better education. So some affluent students leave for the big wealthy school one town over. Because school funding is usually paid out based on enrollment, the failing school loses the resources it would need to clean up its act but keeps the students who most need additional resources.

Over the next three years, the school loses autonomy to the state and to private contractors. At every stage, the stigma associated with the loss of status and autonomy encourages those who can to leave the failing school, while those who don’t have the resources or the parental support to switch schools are left in a privatized trap that likely does even worse on Bush’s tests than it did in the first place. And to make matters worse, the president has underfunded his own initiative, assuring that the students who are left behind in the failing school don’t even receive the programs that the law calls for.

No Child Left Behind is riddled with problems, but its biggest flaw is that it distracts policymakers from solutions that work. Educators know which programs work, and they know that declaring a school “failing” and then pulling the rug out from under it isn’t going to improve public education. Federal education policy must focus less on finding out which schools failed to educate some small subgroup of students and more on giving teachers the resources they need to succeed.