No Child Left Behind’s test-based policies failed. Will Congress keep them anyway?
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote on the department’s website herethat “for more than a decade, states and schools throughout this country have worked within the narrow confines of the No Child Left Behind law,” and that “it’s long past time to move past that law, and replace it with one that expands opportunity, increases flexibility and gives schools and educators more of the resources they need.” He’s right about that; the severely flawed NCLB was supposed to be rewritten in 2007 but Congress didn’t get around to doing it until now. But Duncan says he wants to retain the NCLB requirement of annual standardized testing that drove the law’s unworkable accountability system, and many Republicans in Congress agree. Indeed, the House education committee this week approved legislation to rewrite NCLB that includes an annual testing mandate.
The important policy memo below, written by Kevin Welner and William J. Mathis, explores how the debates in over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which in its current version is NCLB), ignore the harm caused by NCLB’s test-based reforms. They write:
As a result, the proposals now on the table simply gild a demonstrably ineffective strategy, while crowding out policies with proven effectiveness. Deep-rooted trends of ever-increasing social and educational needs, as well as fewer or stagnant resources, will inevitably lead to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it. Instead, the gaps will only close with sustained investment and improvement based on proven strategies that directly increase children’s opportunities to learn.
Welner is the director of the National Education Policy Center, an attorney and a professor education policy at the University of Colorado Boulder. Mathis is the managing director of the center and a former Vermont superintendent. You can find the fully annotated memo here, at the National Center of Education Policy website.
By Kevin Welner and William Mathis
Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.
Yet over the past 13 years, Presidents Bush and Obama remained steadfastly committed to test-based policies. These two administrations have offered federal grants through Race to the Top, so-called Flexibility Waivers under NCLB, School Improvement Grants, and various other No Child Left Behind’s test-based policies failed. Will Congress keep them anyway? - The Washington Post: