NCLB - not

hmmm....

Mike Petrilli's off the boat for NCLB:

For almost five years now, I've considered myself a supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act. And not just the casual flag-waver variety. Much of that time I spent inside the Bush Administration, trying to make the law work, explaining its vision to hundreds of audiences, even wearing an NCLB pin on my lapel. I was a True Believer.

In a way, I still am. After all, in the 21^st Century, saying you "support" NCLB is shorthand for affirming a set of ideas, values, and hopes for the country as much as an expression about a particular statute....a set of powerful--and controversial--ideas that provide the subtext for all the big NCLB battles.

[snip]

Speaking personally, I've gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair.

Now he tells me.

(Just kidding.)

His description of NCLB failings he did and did not anticipate is interesting:

Of course, I harbored doubts about certain specifics from the beginning. You didn't have to be a genius to see the "highly qualified teachers" mandate as a huge overreach and a probable failure, as it took a reasonable notion (teachers should know their stuff) and tried to enforce it through a rigid rule-based mechanism (second guessing principals who, for instance, hired engineers as math teachers). Nor was it hard to determine that asking all states to reach universal "proficiency" by 2014 but allowing them to define "proficiency" as they saw fit would create a race to the bottom.

Other flaws took me longer to appreciate. For example:

Surely schools would respond thoughtfully to the law's incentives to boost achievement in reading and math, and would understand that providing a broad, content-rich education would give them the best shot at boosting test scores, right? [ed: wrong. even I saw that one coming] Yet the anecdotes (and increasingly, evidence) keep rolling in of schools turning into test-prep factories and narrowing the curriculum. (See here, for example.)

Surely if those of us at the Department of Education pushed hard enough we could get districts to inform parents of their school choice options under the law, and ensure that kids trapped in failing schools have better places to go, right? Yet (as I conclude in this paper presented in December at the American Enterprise Institute), hard experience has shown that "stronger implementation" would only make a difference at the margin. It cannot solve the fundamental problem: in most of our big cities, there are too few good schools to go around. Uncle Sam can't snap his fingers and make it otherwise. Furthermore, while it's hard enough to force recalcitrant states and districts to do things they don't want to do, it's impossible to force them to do those things well. And when it comes to informing parents, creating new schools, or implementing almost any of NCLB's many pieces, it's not enough for states or districts to go through the motions. They have to want to make it succeed. If they don't, Washington is out of luck. It has no tools or levers to alter the situation. That's why I've called much of the law "un-implementable."

still flogging that Washington consensus!

I can't pretend any longer that the law is "working," or that a tweak and a tuck would make it "work." Yet I still like its zeitgeist. As Kati Haycock argued at the AEI confab, NCLB has "changed the conversation" in education. Results are now the coin of the realm; the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is taboo; closing the achievement gap is at the top of everyone's to-do list. All for the good.

Wrong again.

The Washington consensus, I've come to feel, reinforces race- and ethnicity-based views of IQ and achievement while at the same time depressing school accountability for individual student learning in all schools, rich, poor, and in between.

Not that there was a lot of accountability there to depress, but still.

To define white schools as good -- or at least good enough -- while defining black & Hispanic schools as catastrophically bad leads directly to the result Ed and I routinely experience here in Irvingtonland.

We go to meeting after meeting in which administrators look us straight in the eye, flash us a friendly smile, and say things like, "Student achievement correlates directly with number of books in the parent's home," or, "You can judge how good your school is by four criteria: the school, the students, the parents, and the community."

translation: We're off the hook, so party on!

There is no sense of urgency in the administration here. None. No sense that any of our kids might be at risk in any way if they're in 8th grade and can't figure a 10% tip while the most challenging book they've read this year is The Chocolate War (reading level 5.4). *

No one's worried.

No one's worried because our kids can't be at risk. By definition. The Washington consensus says so.

Thanks in part to NCLB, everyone "knows" that rich white schools are good, poor black and Hispanic schools are bad.

Everyone "knows" that "it's the parents that make the school."

And: everyone "knows" that Westchester parents hire tutors because we're a bunch of grasping, status-seeking jerks, not because our kids aren't learning inside our rich white schools.

The Washington consensus got it wrong, and apparently the people who brought us the Washington consensus plan to carry on getting it wrong.

Public schools are the problem.

Not public schools with disadvantaged students.

I can't do policy, but I've lived the Washington consensus inside an affluent white school district where "everyone is above average" and the "gene pool is good." (direct quotes)

It's time to stop focusing on the Achievement Gap between blacks and whites.

If we're going to focus on achievement gaps, and I'm beginning to think that's a non-starter, it's time to focus on the achievement gap between each individual child and himself.

Or between each individual child and his same-SES peer in Europe and Asia.


real information about schools? provided to parents?

Surely not.

....an important bullet waits to be bitten: collect and publish swift, reliable, and comparable data on the performance of the nation's schools via clear national standards, a rigorous national test, and a common approach to school ratings (e.g., a single definition of "adequate yearly progress"). Then everyone would have a consistent and fair way to distinguish good schools from bad. We would have consistently high expectations for all students and all schools, and would end the federal/state cat-and-mouse games being played over accountability. The federal government should also make school-level financial information transparent (a necessity to achieve the funding reforms mentioned above) and continue to pay for high-quality research and make its results transparent and accessible to all.

Given the fact that I'm going to have to file a FOIL request just to pry 6th grade gender subscores out of my own district, good luck implementing that one.

____________

* A friend's child recently defended the book to his mom, telling her that yes, it was too easy for the kids in his 8th grade class, but that was OK because "it's a classic."