Experiencing a federal case of anxiety

Mr. Dineen had an unusual way of making sure no one felt picked on in his seventh-grade science class: blanket humiliation, enacted through a gaggle of rules that guaranteed everyone would eventually screw up. My own turn came when I didn’t turn in my homework (folded lengthwise, the student’s name showing) attached to a relevant laboratory assignment. “Benoit,” he barked from the front of the class to the back where I cowered, “there’s no homework with your lab. You fail.”

Mr. Dineen was known more for his skills as the school’s baseball coach than as an inspirer of student aspirations. I was reminded of him last week when Sue Gendron, Maine’s education commissioner, held a press conference to pass along the unhappy news that 143 Maine schools had one problem or another that placed them on the federal No Child Left Behind list of troubled schools, with 10 other schools on the outright-failure list. There’s no reason to name the 10 here; they know who they are. They failed.

This is outcomes-based education – a 19th-century-sounding idea in which experts will precisely measure whether a school is successful based, in the case of the federal NCLB, on 441 categories and subcategories of achievement standards. The federal government sets the standards for annual progress, test participation, attendance, etc.; states craft the tests to measure them; superintendents of the failing schools explain why the standards, and probably the tests, are asinine. This last event has already begun to happen in Maine, though the worst penalty for failing schools – federal takeover – is still many years away.

Standards are a wonderful device for students, teachers, administrators, and society in general, to establish and enforce acceptable behavior. Schools immerse themselves in standards all the time, from deciding what level of difficulty makes for an honors course to what level of exposure makes a belly shirt an object of concern, delicate measurements in both cases.

But just as any legislator can tell you that turning a good idea into a good law is complicated business, educators know that turning an admirable standard into an exacting measurement for grading is hard. Maine educators and lawmakers, in fact, learned all about this together starting more than 10 years ago when they began working on what became Maine’s Learning Results, the state’s own education standards that include an overhauled Maine Educational Assessment, through which the state is meeting NCLB rules. One of the things they found was that many strict standards mean many ways to fail, which makes many schools more interested in avoiding mistakes than encouraging learning.

The evolution of the Learning Results was a lesson in listening. Towns worried about unfunded mandates and teachers worried that they would surrender their classrooms to bureaucrats. Superintendents wondered how local standards could be compared across the state – a problem still not resolved. Everyone worried about the amount of paperwork that would be produced. Learning Results is no longer an anxiety-producing document, in part because teachers improved it but also because education officials were willing to find (some) more money, give teachers a greater say, broaden definitions of ways for students to demonstrate they understand their coursework and generally try to calm fears.

It is early in NCLB’s life, but it has often taken the opposite approach. Just the other day, teachers, principals and administrators from around the country wrote to the U.S. Department of Education, asking for more guidance and fewer penalties for schools that are struggling. The response from the department, according to news reports, was automatic: there were “no plans to amend the law.” Maine officials have gotten so used to hearing this line that when Commissioner Gendron was asked the other day whether the federal government had been helpful in responding to problems raised by rural schools, she repeated the federal mantra: “There are no plans to amend the law.”

It’s not only Maine that is concerned, of course. Vermont considered giving up federal education money to avoid the federal rules. Maryland teachers argue the rules are impossible to follow because they conflict with special-ed law. A Utah legislator proposed having her state ignore NCLB. This doesn’t mean NCLB is a failed policy; but the Bush administration and Congress should be eager to amend the document when they find shortcomings in it that discourage learning. So far, there’s been too few signs of that.

The anxiety this produces rattles right through the education hierarchy and into the classroom. Commissioner Gendron estimates that she has 25 or more people in her department now working fulltime on NCLB – a large percentage of whom are assigned to collecting test numbers – but that doesn’t count her time or the time of others not specifically hired to work on federal issues, and it doesn’t count the time of school boards, superintendents, principals and other administrators or teachers. Teachers who would be spending their time preparing lessons are now figuring out whether their years of successful teaching still qualifies them under federal rules.

This is in a state that receives among the highest scores on national tests and that already has a comprehensive system for ensuring that students are learning what they need to learn. Now it has a federal layer of oversight pasted on top of that demanding more tests but not more teaching, more records but not more resources. Could Maine have done as well or better by its students without NCLB?

“We could have done as well, especially because we would not be diverting resources to the federal program,” said Commissioner Gendron.

Better?

Small smile from the commissioner. “Better,” she said.

Late this week, Commissioner Gendron announced a dozen schools would come off the NCLB trouble list, where they had been placed after failing to turn in attendance reports. Once the reports came in, they came off the list and were no longer failing. To NCLB’s credit, that’s easier than Mr. Dineen would have been.

Todd Benoit is the BDN editorial page editor.