Still “Lying to Children”: How No Child Left Behind Corrupted Education
When George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind legislation into law 10 years ago this week, it seemed like the perfect expression of his brand of “compassionate conservatism,” while also redeeming his campaign pledge to use education reform to overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” NCLB passed Congress by overwhelming bipartisan majorities (87 to 10 in the Senate; 381 to 41 in the House) and a beaming Ted Kennedy stood alongside President Bush at the bill-signing ceremony.
Before NCLB, the federal government had attempted to achieve some degree of educational equity through the Title I compensatory funding program, which sent nearly $200 billion to the nation’s highest-poverty schools over four decades. This massive transfer of funds yielded meager results, however. With the new education law the Bush administration pushed for a results-oriented approach to education reform. The federal government now would require school districts to meet specific goals in return for their Title I funds. The states were required to conduct annual tests in reading and math for all children in grades three through eight, with the results—broken down by race, sex, and socioeconomic status—made public. Narrowing the racial achievement gap framed the measure as a “civil rights” reform that conservatives could easily embrace.
Though well intentioned, NCLB’s perverse incentives left the door wide open to the corruption of educational standards. The law stipulated that all American students must become “proficient” in reading and math by 2014 --- a hopelessly utopian goal – and then set sanctions for those states that didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” in meeting that goal. But the law also allowed each state to determine its own proficiency standard. Since men are not angels, it was inevitable that state and local education authorities would dumb down the tests to make themselves look good to the feds and to the voters.
The framers of NCLB might have avoided this outcome if they had familiarized themselves with the work of the great American social scientist Donald Campbell. According to Campbell, “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” That’s exactly what seems to have happened.
more . . . http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/09/still-lying-to-children-how-no-child-left-behind-corrupted-education.html
