You know things are bad when the government is bad-mouthing its own laws and policies.
On Friday morning, the Obama administration released more details about how it plans to relax aspects of the federal law that governs elementary and secondary education, more familiar these past 10 years as the No Child Left Behind Act.
The law has been an object of unending criticism. Liberals don’t like it any more than conservatives do. To be brief about it, the rap against the law is that it has too many demands that haven’t added up to much in the way of academic progress: Too much testing, too much government intrusion, too punitive, too one-size-fits-all, too rigid.
Here’s the central demand of the law: By 2014, America’s schoolchildren, all of them, must be able to read and do mathematics at grade level — that is, 100 percent proficiency.
How states meet that goal is up to them. They write the tests, rate their students and determine the annual pace to arrive at the 100 percent proficiency by the deadline. But when school districts don’t hit their annual progress targets for two, three or more years, the law tightens the screws: It prescribes escalating “interventions, ” including mandatory tutoring, dismissal of teachers and principals and school closures.
The problem is, every year more districts fail to meet their targets and realize it will take a miracle to beat the 2014 deadline. The rising wail is that the law is causing too many school districts and schools to be labeled as failures. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, estimates that nearly 80 percent of the nation’s schools could be tagged as failures as the law stands now.
The Department of Education observes on its website (www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility): “In many states, parents are being told that their children are proficient based on a low bar. Many of them are being lied to because their children aren’t really being prepared for college and careers. …”
NCLB, the site continues, “fails to give parents an honest report on the success of their children’s schools. … Parents don’t like to see their schools labeled as failures.” (No, they don’t. Parents like it even less when the labels turn out to be accurate. And many times, the truth sinks in only when Missy or Junior is up against national competition — forget international competition for the moment — for a spot in college or a job.)
What the nation needs now, says the White House, is flexibility in the education law to lift the nation’s schools to the next level of innovation and reform. And because Congress is yet to reauthorize the law, the White House is taking the initiative. It is inviting states to apply for waivers to set aside the 100-percent-by-2014 bar. Educators no longer will have to sweat out targets they know they are not going to meet.
There will be a waiver, too, insulating districts and schools from the blanket label of failure and associated interventions. Also, the plan will ease restrictions on the use of federal education funds. Armed with a waiver, states, districts and schools will have greater freedom to use federal funds in ways that they deem to best meet their needs.
It is hard to fault the realism of the remedy the White House is proposing, the flexibility it hopes would fix No Child Left Behind until Congress delivers a comprehensive rewrite of the law. Wide gaps in achievement among student groups and the broad causes have been tolerated and excused for so long that a decade, indeed, may not be time enough to build up a respectable baseline in reading and math proficiency.
And what could be more respectable in an advanced nation such as the United States than to require that every child who attends school be able to read, write and compute at a level appropriate to his or her years in school? Look at state and national test scores, and you have to be delusional to believe 100 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren can achieve proficiency within the next three years.
Scrapping the deadline is simply being honest about it.
That’s not to say the remedy is not dispiriting. We have been this way before. In return for the new flexibility, states are expected to set “ambitious but achievable goals,” focus on raising achievement in the lowest-performing districts and schools, and provide parents honest reports on how their children and schools are doing.
The No Child Left Behind was offered 10 years ago as a response to perceived dishonesty in education, a situation where millions of children, mostly poor, simply passed through school, barely acquiring knowledge and skills to propel them into a higher orbit. The thought was that where states school systems were failing American — not Texan or Ohioan or Nebraskan but American — children, federal pressure, in the form of a proficiency deadline, mandatory testing and reporting about specific student subgroups, would be sufficient to sustain momentum for improvement in elementary and secondary education. It hasn’t worked out that way.
Quality for all has proved an elusive goal. We can only hope that waivers and the promised flexibility can make all the difference.
Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.
