BEFORE & AFTER SCHOOL

As Congress prepares to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – No Child Left Behind – it would do well to notice amid the complaints of endless paperwork and celebrations of some test scores rising that schools are not the only and may not be the primary source of an excellent education. A renewed NCLB should spend more time accounting for issues beyond the K-12 school walls.

The journal Education Week began doing this recently when it released its annual assessment of state policies. For the first year, it began to track conditions outside school that contribute to academic performance. The new assessment, Quality Counts 2007, includes a “Chance-for-Success Index” that measures family income, education level achieved by parents, parental employment, linguistic integration, preschool enrollment and eight related measures. These are well-known influences on education but they often are ignored when officials judge the effectiveness of education policy.

Maine, by the way, ranked a middling 23rd among states on the “Chance-for-Success Index.” Interestingly, it scored slightly better than average on its percentage of young adults enrolled in postsecondary education and slightly worse on percentage of children with at least one parent having a postsecondary degree, suggesting that it may not be worse in the second category for long.

The value of the Education Week assessment and of thinking of NCLB more broadly is that it broadens the responsibility for educating children from solely the schools to include families and surrounding groups or agencies that support families. It recognizes that economic and social forces influence outcomes in ways NCLB has not entirely accounted for, and it says that children do not arrive in kindergarten or even pre-K programs as equally blank slates, ready to accept any information imparted by teachers.

This is not to oversimplify NCLB, which does attempt to catalog the effects of poverty and stresses the importance of early education, but to expand the public understanding and acceptance of what is required for a student to be ready and able to learn. It is to ask whether a child is growing up in a culture of learning and encouragement, conditions that likely are more important than whether that child’s school has the proper alignment of standards and assessment.

This is not easily measured, if it ought to be measured at all, but it does matter. When members of Congress talk about leaving no child behind, they should answer who will not be leaving children behind and why those children are behind to begin with.