TOO SOON ON NCLB

With Congress trying to reauthorize the federal education act No Child Left Behind, it’s natural that a new set of scores on what’s called the nation’s report card would be used by both sides of the debate to support their claims. But the argument is not worth making for either – NCLB hasn’t been around long enough, the changes in national scores aren’t dramatic enough and too many other factors influence outcomes to draw any conclusions.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is given nationally every two years to fourth-, eighth- and 12th- graders in several academic areas. Recently the U.S. Department of Education released new data on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores. The results showed a small increase in math for both groups – 39 percent of fourth-graders were called proficient in 2007, up from 36 percent in 2005; 32 percent of eighth-graders rated proficient this year, up from 30 percent in 2005.

“The No Child Left Behind Act is working,” President George Bush said of his major domestic accomplishment after the test scores were released. “As yesterday’s positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.” If only NCLB had begun earlier.

Democratic Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said the slight gains showed the act needed to be reformed to make it “more fair and flexible,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

NCLB began early in the president’s first term, took a while for federal funding and state testing to be put in place, then a while longer for administrators to figure out all the ways their schools needed to pass – with standards for participation, attendance and graduation rates as well as annual progress in multiple assessments across multiple grades. Sure enough, with NCLB in place, scores on the national assessment are up, in math anyway.

But those scores were rising before NCLB existed. They have been rising for 15 years and rose slightly faster in the years immediately before NCLB went into effect. The average math scores for fourth-graders, for instance, rose from 238 to 240 between 2005 and 2007 but had gone from 226 to 235 between 2000 and 2003. The performance gap between white and minority students – the children who were not to be left behind – has not budged, according to the assessment.

That doesn’t mean NCLB is ineffective. The act was supposed to change the way schools measure performance and, therefore, how teachers prepare students to perform. That is obviously a huge job that will require many years of incremental change (and it’s why NCLB should become more flexible, to account for new information about student learning).

But it’s inaccurate to attribute academic progress to the act so early in its life. Almost all states have emphasized increased testing in the last decade; students may simply be better at taking tests now. It is accurate to conclude that there is scant evidence to conclude that NCLB is actually hurting student achievement, which is not much of a legacy. But who said education was easy?