Obama's No Child Left Behind Revisions

According to today’s New York Times, President Obama will propose a number of important changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which under the Bush Administration was known as No Child Left Behind.  The good news is that Obama plans to eliminate some of the most problematic features of NCLB.  The bad news is that he may introduce some new problems, drawing on the administration’s current “Race to the Top” education program.

The Bush Administration’s law contains a number of flaws, as outlined in The Century Foundation’s book, Improving on No Child Left Behind.  As noted in a chapter by Lauren Resnick and colleagues, the requirement that 100% of students be proficient in reading and math by 2014 is wishful thinking, akin to promises, as others have noted, to abolish pollution or eliminate urban crime.  According to the Times, the Administration will eliminate this “utopian” goal.   Likewise, the revised law is likely to recognize degrees of school failure, rather than lumping together truly horrendous schools and those that barely miss the mark with a small subset of students, another appropriate correction. 

The unfortunate news is that administration may seek to recast the law to condition federal education money on the types of criteria currently used to distribute a much smaller pot of funds, known as the Race to the Top grants.  Race to the Top sets up a competition and rewards funds to states based in part on their willingness to agree to highly controversial ideas, such as teacher pay for performance and charter schools.

In theory, it certainly makes sense to reward higher performing teachers in order to attract superstars into the profession and to keep them in the classroom.  But as my colleague Gordon MacInnes has pointed out, pay for performance based on test score gains is not ready for prime time.  And if not structured correctly (to also reward school wide test score gains), it will discourage teachers from collaborating and sharing good ideas on how to teach difficult concepts.

Race to the Top’s requirement that states lift caps on charter schools would also be problematic if included in a revamped No Child Left Behind law.  Charter schools are popular, particularly among those who oppose teacher unions, but their track record is generally weak.  In this week’s Time Magazine, writer Joe Klein lauds charter schools, claiming that a recent study found that New York City’s charter schools “have closed 86% of the gap in test score results between the poorest neighborhoods of the city and ritzy suburbs like Scarsdale.”  In fact, the study, which has been criticized for numerous methodological problems, doesn’t find that charters “have closed” 86% of the gap.  Rather, Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby studies students who have mostly been in charters for three or four years and claims that if their gains persisted over time and were cumulative –  then in theory 86% of the math gap and 66% of the English gap would be closed over nine years, a far more speculative finding.  Moreover, a much larger Stanford study, involving 70% of charter school students nationwide, and funded by charter school advocates at the Walton and Dell foundations, concluded that charters underperform rather than overperform traditional public schools by a 2:1 margin.

Klein contends that in opposing reforms like charter schools, the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, has gone off track since its early years, when it was led by Albert Shanker “the smartest and toughest union man I’ve ever met.”  Klein quotes from a 1993 speech in which Shanker compares public education to the auto industry, in need of serious reform.  But as I make clear in my 2007 biography, Tough Liberal, Shanker, who first proposed charter schools as innovative institutions that would allow teachers to experiment with new ideas, later became a strong opponent of the charter school reform that Klein now champions.

What’s missing from Race to the Top – and needs to be included in the new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – are reforms to address a very serious problem in education, the economic segregation of students.  As Amy Stuart Wells and Jennifer Jellison Holme note in their chapter in Improving on No Child Left Behind, low-income students in a number of metropolitan areas throughout the country, such as Boston, Hartford, and St. Louis, have greatly benefitted from the chance to attend middle-class suburban public schools.  The ESEA needs to provide financial incentives for affluent schools to take in a reasonable number of students now stuck in failing schools, and expand magnet programs to attract middle-class students into urban schools.

Segregation, not teacher unions, are at the heart of America’s education problem, and until the Obama Administration recognizes that, the new version of No Child Left Behind – whatever it is called – will continue to disappoint.