Senior House Republicans and Democrats recently announced a new bi-partisan effort to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It’s a good sign for some real progress, both for education specifically and Washington in general, but there’s been no word on whether the Senate is so inclined. The “proposals” put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday’s announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.

No More Pass/ Fail

One of the more frequent criticisms of the law concerns its binary pass/ fail system. If a school fails to meet a single academic benchmarks in a single grade in a single subject by a single sub-group of students, it is said to not meet “adequate yearly progress,” or AYP. If it does not meet AYP for multiple years in a row, the school is subject to a series of consequences that become more punitive the more years it misses targets.

The strengths of this arrangement came from protecting under-served populations. Because a school would be held accountable for all groups of students, it focused much more attention on achievement gaps and did not let a school hide its problems educating important sub-groups behind school-wide averages.

The focus on sub-groups should not go away, but a better system would allow states to create a multi-tiered ranking of schools with different consequences for different types of schools. They could give each school an A-F grade, for example, or place them into quadrants, or give them a percentile ranking. No school could be classified as fully successful if they had a persistently failing sub-group, and these struggling students must be privately identified and given triage through school choice, tutoring services, or other intensive remediation. The multi-tiered approach would treat schools differently that failed for different reasons. The Department of Education has already allowed a pilot program on differentiated consequences; this would open the door further.

Unlike NCLB, where states were mandated to have an accountability plan and left alone to implement it, the new version would require states to regularly submit updates on their progress. States would have to re-submit their plans, with objective, external reviews of their efforts and choices, every five years. This would be on a rotating basis so that the federal Department of Education could focus on a group of 10 applications per year.

No More AYP

States were allowed to set their own standards for what AYP meant, but were required to increase them regularly until 2014, when all students were expected to be “proficient.” That never really made sense, because it allowed every single state to set their own standards for what proficiency meant and what test they used to measure it. This also became the target for unfair Lake Wobegon criticisms, because, while “proficiency” was supposed to mean above some very base level, many interpreted it to mean that all students should be “above average.” Proficiency now means very different things in every state and, while some states have held themselves to high standards, most have made only a middling effort.

There’s a voluntary push to create common standards across states that has 49 members and looks promising, but we’re still years away from some common definition of what algebra, let alone history or science, should look like in classrooms. The Secretary should continue his advocacy efforts and seed money for this to happen, but it should not imperil congressional action.

Meanwhile, Congress should require every state to vertically align their curriculum (many have already done so) to college- and career-ready standards by 2012 and agree to give pre- and post-tests to every student every year until the curriculum is aligned. This accomplishes several things. One, it keeps the curriculum- and standards-setting in the power of states. This would allow each state to determine what “college- and career-ready” means (Education Sector has ideas on how to do this) according to their own wishes. But, by ensuring vertical alignment, the feds guarantee a real measure of achievement that at least means something in context, as opposed to what we have in place now.

Two, vertical alignment (or pre- and post-tests in the interim) moves us towards a better understanding of student growth. This is key for accountability and value-added measures for teacher evaluation purposes. One major problem with AYP is that it did not feature any measure of student growth, and only set a proficiency “bar” over which all students had to be, regardless of where they started. At the same time, teachers should not be held responsible for where their students start the year. Vertical alignment (or pre- and post-tests) and the evaluation of growth help alleviate some of those concerns.

Three, unlike “proficiency,” “college- and career-ready” means something in the real world. There are actual outcomes that the latter can be pegged against. We can actually count the number of students who graduate high school unable to find promising career prospects or who require remediation or struggle to earn good grades in college. These are measurable outcomes in a way that “proficiency” never could be.

Four, college- and career-ready standards put more emphasis on high schools. While fourth- and eighth-graders have progressed in math and reading over the last twenty years, scores of our nation’s high schoolers have remained stagnant. NCLB never really addressed this, and the tools it took for school improvement (tutoring and school choice) don’t really work the same way for high schools. An emphasis on college- and career-ready students would send a clear message that to high schools that they should work to get as many students out their doors as graduates prepared to succeed in the next phase of life.

New Flexibility

Gone would be the prescriptive fixes outlined in the last iteration (No Child). There would be no requirements to provide school choice options, or tutoring, or personnel changes after a certain number of years. These provisions have not been effective. They’ve been plagued by low participation, impracticality in some places, unwillingness or inability in state departments of education, and the inclusion of an option essentially allowing schools to pick “any other” method. A new system would require states to outline the incentives and punishments doled out to schools in each of their categories, but the feds would not be tight about what these are to be. States could start tinkering with positive incentives, for example, or inspection models, or keep what exists already if they wanted.

The $4 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund has very prescriptive measures to be taken by applicants to address inequities in the distribution of teachers, evaluate personnel, fix failing schools, ease restrictions on charter schools, etc. The competitive nature and limited pool of money for RTTT allow for such prescriptions. They would be left in whatever competitive grant program comes after RTTT, but they would not be part of the larger law.

No Child Left Behind attempted to address inequities in the distribution of teachers by requiring all teachers to be “highly qualified” and to report what portion of each school’s staff met this criteria. The thinking behind this provision was that poor- and minority-serving teachers tended to be less qualified, have less experience, and earn lower salaries. Unfortunately, states implemented this provision in such a way as to label almost all teachers as “highly qualified” and thus render the distribution issue moot. The Department has attempted to rectify this compliance problem by shifting the label to highly effective, but it’s not going to produce the desired results without needed (and unlikely) buy-in by state, district, and union leaders.

The new law would cut this provision out entirely and replace it with stricter school-level reporting requirements about teachers and funding. There would be no mandate on fixing the inequities, but states and localities must report the actual dollar amount spent per student at each school, not the assumed amount that’s commonly calculated by using average district salaries. These mask real differences in spending, differences that really matter in the lives of poor and minority students. Honest actuarial tallies would have to be included in each school’s public report card.

New Innovation

The current accountability system relies on old, cheap methods for assessing masses of students. States have opted for inexpensive scantron examinations that are good at assessing thousands of students quickly and cheaply at relatively low-level skills. These tests are not good at measuring complex thinking skills or assessing students at either the top or bottom of the academic curve. The new law would create a competitive fund designed to help states create and adopt new assessments that were more flexible and that assessed higher-order thinking skills. Such assessments, combined with an accountability measure utilizing annual student growth, would better firt the needs of high- and low-achievers, two groups that were somewhat neglected under No Child. As a federal investment in research and development, any findings would be required to be made publicly available and for appropriate use by other states.

States would also be required to participate, as separate entities, in international assessments like PISA and TIMSS. The new law would create a specific funding stream for this, and it would serve the purpose of creating another set of external benchmarks for states to compare themselves to, like NAEP.

Moving Forward

Eduflack has a good post up emphasizing the timing of this is all very difficult and there’s a very good chance nothing happens. There have been few specific proposals yet from either the Department or Congress, probably because details are easy to attack while platitudes are not. The outline above is merely the modest proposal of one outside observer.