One inquiring mind asked me this week why this blog has been dark for three weeks. The simple answer is: NCLB hasn't been in the news. Everything has been about the stimulus. Until last Thursday.
At the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli held an event discussing a paper on NCLB. Their thesis is that George Bush compromised his conservative principles by including liberal ideas in NCLB. As Yogi Petrilli helped us envision in a guided meditation (you had to be there), the public response to the law would have been completely different if it hadn't set the 2014 deadline for universal proficiency; hadn't included subgroups for racial categories or special education students in the accountability system; and hadn't required all teachers to be highly qualified. NCLB included each element, Petrilli and Hess argue, because liberal groups (e.g., the Education Trust) and liberals in Congress (e.g., Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.) wanted them. To win bipartisan support, Hess and Petrilli say, Bush compromised his ideals and created a bill that looked more like the liberal Great Society than his "compassionate conservatism."
The paper is a decent primer explaining the unique coalition that formed to support the law. The NEA, many education groups, and small-government Republicans oppose it, while the Education Trust and big business leaders support it.
But at yesterday's event, commenters weren't buying Hess and Petrilli's thesis that Bush was hoodwinked. "He knew full well what he was buying in to," said Andy Rotherham, a moderate Democrat who worked in the Clinton White House and may work in the Obama administration (as Hess pointed out). Bush and other Republican supporters backed the 2014 goal because they understood that states wouldn't have set aggressive achievement goals without it, said Dianne Piche of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights. Even a Bush appointee criticized the paper. The goal of 100 percent proficiency may seem insurmountable, but some schools serving predominantly minority communities are showing they can do it, said Williamson Evers, who was the Education Department's policy and planning chief before returning his perch at the conservative Hoover Institution last month.
Here's what no one talked about: The politics of NCLB reauthorization will be different in the Obama administration. President Bush had narrow Republican majorities in Congress. President Obama has larger Democratic majorities. How will he assemble a coalition to support his vision of what NCLB should become?
P.S. I am not the "national education reporter" whom Rotherham overheard complaining about the lack of cookies. Who's going to 'fess up?
UPDATE: You can watch or listen to the event at this page on AEI's site. You'll find the video and audio feeds in the box headlined "Event Materials" in the upper right corner.
I have always thought so (that Bush was hoodwinked)--and tried to urge NCLB naysayers on the left to make hay while the sun was shining. Putting aside the characterization of (approaching) universal "proficiency" as "pie in the sky," the transparency of test scores and their disaggregation have had (what I have always assumed to be) unintended benefits in illuminating achievement gaps and moving away from anything that keeps them away from the rest of us curriculum for students with disabilities. The three schools in my district with greatest growth in test scores have been the three schools that formerly warehoused students with emotional disabilities. Surprisingly, kids with emotional difficulties can, in fact learn. Who knew?
There have also been great disappointments. The "highly qualified teacher" requirements have succeeded at the state level in creating a lower level qualification. Teachers who were never certified to teach subjects that they were teaching at the secondary level (particularly those teaching students with disabilities) have been grandfathered via HQT and some summer workshops. They are still not licensed to teach content--but they are highly qualified to to so.
It's hard to fault the process of NCLB (and I would take issue with the "micromanagement" charge). For the most part, the process (of standard setting and determining levels of proficiency) has been left up to states and they in turn have left improvement planning, professional development, curriculum and the like to the local level.
There have been surprises. This movement towards freedom with responsibility turned out to be a sea change for educators. State-level decision-makers feared that setting an achievable level of proficiency would lead schools to do no more than what was required (which may very well be the case). Administrators in schools who came in well below the mark responded with restrictive pacing guides and got tough with regard to anything except direct teaching of measured content (like recess, arts, music, health, etc). Teachers sent the message to their unions that they couldn't do any more than they were already doing and set about to ignore or subtly sabotage any possibilities for change that would demonstrate improvement (thereby helping to guarantee that this, like all other reform, would go away). The union talked it up about the poor stressed out children who couldn't understand the vocabulary of the tests, or who couldn't recognize content that they had learned when they saw it "in the test format." District administrators responded by ensuring multiple additional required tests to provide more data and to inure students to testing (since that had been defined as the problem--not the curriculum, or the teaching).
Also unforeseen was the lack of learning expertise prevalent among the teaching community. Rather than learned treatises on the things that might be needed in order to improve the education of those students found to be lagging, teachers presented long lists of reasons why these children would never be able to gain in knowledge unless they, their families and their communities became fundamentally different. Smaller classrooms and eliminating testing for students with disabilities and non-English speakers were advocated, if indeed the tests--and responsibility for outcomes--were to continue.
I came into the standardized testing realities as a liberal, singing in the liberal choir lamenting the effects of the tests on low-income students. This is because the first tests in my state were legislated by conservatives who sought to punish students for being the recipients of demonstrably sub-standard educations. They were implemented sans standards as guidance and the consequences fell exclusively on students--who were denied graduation if they could not pass a test of eight grade content prior to achieving a "12th grade" education.
I remained skeptical as NCLB introduced the availability of transfers or tutoring (having little faith in either). Frankly, I have been waiting for "sanctions" to arrive in any meaningful way at most of the low performing schools in the district. Not that I prefer sanctions. I much prefer a dedicated improvement process--but this is largely regarded as "more meaningless paperwork."
I don't doubt the sincerity of our district superintendent, or most teachers--just as I don't much doubt the sincerity of G. W. Bush wanting to bring about equality of educational opportunity. But we have lived with the dysfunctions a long time. Moving away from the dysfunctions means an ability to trust the there is something better possible--and to give up whatever perks we have each been receiving from the dysfunctional system. Those perks may include a better school for "our" kids in another district. They may be the freedom to choose our own lessons and tests without having any idea if they are effective. They may be the ability of teachers to set their in-school hours and days around their preferences, rather than those of parents. Knowing that no one is going to judge an excellent teacher's skill also means that the teacher down the hall who is in over his head won't get any help.
So--I have moved into the "reformy" crowd, at this point. Pie in the sky or not, I like setting a goal of moving towards 100% proficiency. To do otherwise begins to beg the question of what level of proficiency ought we expect--and for whom do we lower the bar.
Great summary, David. I can't even begin to buy into this conspiracy theory when it is based, in part, on calling groups like Ed Trust "liberal." Liberal? Ed Trust has pissed off lots and lots of liberals with its consistent focus on achievement gaps and putting students--not the adults working in the system--first. I admire its tenacity, but don't always agree with its sometimes questionable use of data to identify successful schools.
That said, I guess if Mike & Rick ran the world, NCLB would have been all accountability and nothing else. What a disaster that would have been. The thing that NCLB is currently missing that would make a huge difference is a serious focus on building district and school capacity to do things differently and do things better. That work is fundamentally about teacher development and school leadership preparation. It's hard work -- and requires going much further than the paltry highly qualified requirement -- but those are the things that drive student learning. Not punitive sanctions that label schools failures.
As Dick Elmore says, accountability by itself suggests that schools are currently withholding something that they know how to do. A colleague of mine likes to say, "You don't know what you don't know." That's true of schools--including most of those currently labeled failures by NCLB.