Closing Gaps In Obama’s Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization

Mike Petrilli and Janie Scull have a pretty good piece in this week’s Gadfly analyzing how one aspect of the Obama Administration’s Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization would have played out in California elementary schools. Obama’s Blueprint would abandon the No Child Left Behind attempt to hold all schools accountable in favor of focusing on the lowest-performing ten percent of schools based on student growth and proficiency. In addition, the Blueprint identified a separate category of schools that had sizable achievement gaps but was silent on how big this portion would be and for which groups the gaps would be measured. These schools would be required to implement “data-driven” supports through interventions like expanded learning time, supplemental educational services, public school choice, or other strategies.

Mike and Janie, while applauding the limited focus on persistently low-performing schools, are not so fond of the gap-closing idea. They ask, “But what if some of those schools have large gaps not because their minority students are performing poorly, but because their white students are doing really well?” It turns out that in California elementary schools about a third of the schools with above average white-black and white-Hispanic achievement gaps also had above average black and Hispanic achievement. Those schools just had even higher white scores.

Luckily, they found there are ways around this. When they limited the search to the five percent of schools with the biggest gaps, they reduced the false positives to 2/36 for black students and 8/137 for Hispanic students. Alternatively, they suggest the problem could be fixed entirely by identifying only schools with low black or Hispanic performance and large achievement gaps between groups.

This proposal, like the Obama Administration’s Blueprint, would allow a huge group of schools to slide by with middling education performance and large-but-not-humongous achievement gaps. But ultimately, the Obama Administration is trying to take a step back and assume a more humble role for federal education policy by saying, “Look, we can’t fix every school from Washington, nor should we try. We want to focus on those schools that are at the bottom of the bottom, that are consistently providing sub-standard education to our children. States and districts will have to identify those schools and then take serious actions to fix them.” All other schools would have to publish their data, but they’d be left pretty much alone.

To accomplish its goals, the Obama Blueprint relies on precision in the identification of schools and strength in the turnaround mechanisms. Both of those have come under heavy political scrutiny. The Blueprint at this point is still just a blueprint. It doesn’t have all the answers, but identification will be the first step in any accountability process, and it will be important to get it right.

Tagged as: NCLB Reauthorization, No Child Left Behind, Obama ESEA Reauthorization Blueprint