NCLB - an underfunded copy of Goals 2000

[NV1962]

From my own blog:


Two days ago, I vented my anger about Spanish language ads that, while claiming improvement of education under Bush, accuse Kerry of not being trustworthy on the issue. Both are patently false claims. Before I comment on that so-called improvement -- particularly in the case of the Latino / Hispanic community -- let's first take a look at the background of the Bush administration's education policy, and why that "improvement" is much more a result of Republican clout at work in Congress, railroading the previous administration's similarly targeted efforts when the Clinton administration was essentially rolling out a policy adopted by its predecessor, under President George HW Bush.

The nature of the claimed improvement of education under the current Bush administration amounts, according to their own electoral "accountability" ads, to allegedly increased accountability towards parents of publicly funded schools. On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable approach: make schools accountable to parents, while giving them means to assess their performance, and the "invisible hand" of the education market will lead to survival of better schools. In its essence, that's a classic example of the traditional conservative approach in politics: reliance on market economics, combined with a family-oriented approach.

In order to enable the parents to assess "their" school's performance, a unified method to set educational goals, measure their achievement and take corrective actions in the case of shortfalls were introduced via the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. In a nutshell, taken from the Department of Education website:

Under the act's accountability provisions, states must describe how they will close the achievement gap and make sure all students, including those who are disadvantaged, achieve academic proficiency. They must produce annual state and school district report cards that inform parents and communities about state and school progress. Schools that do not make progress must provide supplemental services, such as free tutoring or after-school assistance; take corrective actions; and, if still not making adequate yearly progress after five years, make dramatic changes to the way the school is run. (source)

But that's not a new idea. In fact, that idea goes back to the presidency of George HW Bush, the current President's father. In September of 1989, President Bush convened with the National Governor's Conference in Charlottesville, VA, at the Education Summit. Ensuing work resulted in the announcement in 1990 of (initially) six key goals for education, to be reached by the year 2000: the so-called National Education Goals.

It was the second time in history that National Education Goals were established but it was the first time that they received a both legal and financial basis, through the "America 2000 Excellence in Education Act" that was signed into law in May of 1991. During the Education Summit of 1989, then governor Bill Clinton led the taskforce elaborating those National Education Goals. So it is no surprise that President Clinton embraced his predecessor’s ambitious education reform plan, and incorporated its goals in his own landmark "Goals 2000: Educate America Act" that was signed into law in March of 1994.

The introduction of nationwide objectives for education, laid down in the NCLB act, is therefore not the first but the latest step in the evolution of standards-based education policy.

Another major component of NCLB, the objective of boosting parental involvement, also goes back to the Goals 2000 act of 1994, when it was added as one of two new goals to the pre-existing ones, as the eighth National Education Goal:

• By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.
  
  • Every State will develop policies to assist local schools and local educational agencies to establish programs for increasing partnerships that respond to the varying needs of parents and the home, including parents of children who are disadvantaged or bilingual, or parents of children with disabilities.
    
  • Every school will actively engage parents and families in a partnership which supports the academic work of children at home and shared educational decision making at school.
    
  • Parents and families will help to ensure that schools are adequately supported and will hold schools and teachers to high standards of accountability.

But the attempts of the Clinton administration to unify nationwide standards in education have met a lot of resistance, particularly in Congress. Much of that resistance is inherent to the issue of financing public education, permanently subjected to a tug-of-war. Religious interest groups in particular attempt to increase the flow of public funds towards "their" private schools; the voucher issue is just one example of that ongoing effort.

As relatively small as the federal contribution to funding of elementary and secondary education may be, another oft-heard argument against federally funded (and influenced) education policy is that it infringes on local and state rights. That argument is wielded all the more in the more philosophical and therefore ideologically colored issue of determining common standards in education, in pursuit of greater accountability of schools.

The issue of setting a common course in the delivery of academic content has been controversial since the 80s, when the idea gained weight that education had to shift from transferring "pure" knowledge to developing more "practical" skills. In essence, that is what so-called "Outcome Based Education" (OBE) pursued. Not surprisingly, this too was perceived by religious groups as an attempt by federal government to "meddle" with academic content and testing standards. Even today, a search via Google for "outcome based education" yields a dominance of results that are not only critical towards OBE but also (particularly) religiously inspired.

The Goals 2000 act of 1994 received huge amounts of criticism that wasn't always rational or informed, and many examples exist to illustrate how conservative groups strained to portray Goals 2000 as a "failure" from its inception. On a side note, it is interesting to see how the creation of the National Education Goals Panel, in July 1990 during the first Bush administration as a bipartisan entity to pursue and assess progress made on the national goals, is consistently but erroneously attributed by those groups to the Clinton administration.

Either way, the combined efforts that unfolded inside and outside Congress during the Clinton administration explain how, in the end, the ambitious national education goals for the year 2000 couldn't be met. The National Education Goals Panel was dissolved in early 2002, not long after the No Child Left Behind act was signed into law on January 8 that year.

Given the underfunding of the NCLB act (see my previous entry) and the still unresolved if not worsened problems it purportedly addresses, it represents neither a "succesful" nor a "new" initiative. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it pursues a purely cosmetic make-over, based on tweaked data. But that's for another time to explore.