Room to Improve NCLB

State and local education officials in Maine and around the country have argued that the federal No Child Left Behind act is overly burdensome and underfunded. Now, after a yearlong study of the act and its impacts on schools, the National Council of State Legislatures has come to the same conclusion. While the council’s assertion that the act may be unconstitutional because it is a federal intrusion into education decisions granted to the states is a distraction, the group raises many valid points that should be considered by Congress.

Some of its most constructive criticism surrounds the act’s centerpiece – adequate yearly progress. Rather than following children from year to year to assess their learning progress, the federal program compares this year’s fourth-graders to last year’s and expects that this year’s will perform better. Following the same children throughout their elementary school careers and ensuring they are making adequate educational progress makes more sense, according to the report’s authors, 16 state legislators, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, and six legislative staff members.

The group also noted that rather than leading elementary school re-form NCLB merely piggybacked on statewide reform efforts already under way, yet sought to measure progress in a much more rigid way. In Maine, for example, the state’s Learning Results were crafted and the Maine Educational Assessment test revised long before the federal reform program was created. But, where states and local districts allowed students to demonstrate that they understand subject matter in a variety of ways, through reports, classroom tests and even drawings, the federal act relies solely on testing. Marrying these two approaches could save time, money and anxiety.

As has been noted many times before, NCLB is fraught with ways for schools to fail. If an inadequate number of students in countless subgroups are not tested, the school is not making adequate yearly progress. If a school fails to make progress for two years, students can be transferred to another school – before the “failing” school has been given a chance to correct any deficiencies. Plus, in rural areas, like Maine, going to another school often is not an option. Instead, the lawmakers suggest, the federal government should work more closely with schools to rectify shortcomings.

The council calls for major changes, but this does not mean that the federal program should be scrapped. However, the administration’s solution to NCLB problems – more flexibility – is not adequate. Rather Congress should do the hard work of determining what aspects of the federal program need to be revised. Some guidance for such amending comes from a Government Accountability Office review of the program requested by Maine’s senators. Such a review should not be a one-time affair. Because it is a huge overhaul of federal education policy, NCLB deserves regular, third-party assessments of its strengths and weaknesses and responses from Congress based on those findings.

Reviewing the adequate yearly progress system would be a good place to start a second round of analysis.