President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former superintendent of Chicago schools, are on a mission to reform public education. The president first proposed awarding nearly $4.5 billion in incentive grants to states with the best plans to reform their education laws and schools. Next, in a proposal made public last week, Obama outlined the changes he wants to make to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act.
Both proposals are largely positive, but neither is likely to do what state and local education reform efforts have failed to do for decades: permanently increase the performance of schools that chronically fail their students.
Obama's changes would end the misguided No Child Left Behind policy of penalizing a well-functioning school because one segment of its population, children with disabilities or non-native speakers of English, for example, failed to make adequate yearly progress toward a fixed target. Instead, the progress each student makes, no matter what their starting point, would be what counts. The crowning achievement of No Child Left Behind, its insistence that all children, no matter their ability or background, get the best education possible remains. But schools would be rated not just on test scores but on factors like graduation rates, attendance and teacher turnover.
The reforms made under what is now called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, are also designed to end the ability of states to dumb down assessment tests so, as in the fictional Lake Wobegon, all children could be if not above average, at least average. The willingness of states to cheat actually points to the need, in a mobile 21st-century world, for national rather than state education standards.
Similarly, Obama wants states to develop a rational, effective way, based only partially on student test performance, to assess the effectiveness of teachers and administrators. Ideally, the best state measurements systems should become the template for a national model for evaluating educator performance.
The new act would give better-run schools more flexibility in their approach to meeting education goals, but it leaves consistently failing schools with just four options: instituting a turnaround plan and firing the principal and half the staff;
