The risk with asking experts what’s wrong with a government program is that they are likely to tell you – and expect that something will be done about it. The Maine experts who recently critiqued the No Child Left Behind education program for Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, fortunately, had both good suggestions and the good fortune of a new secretary of education who seems more willing to give states the opportunity to amend the federal mandates.

“I am willing to consider more flexible approaches on things that are not in the bright lines of the statute,” Secretary Margaret Spellings told the Christian Science Monitor last week. “Exhibit A in that regard is some flexibility with respect to assessment of special-ed students, which is based in our newest and best research.” Flexibility is what the Maine task force was looking for in pointing out that only a limited number of special-education students are assessed on a scale different from children in regular classrooms, leaving the remaining special-education students, who may have had different course content and different goals, to meet the regular-class standards. Secretary Spellings is willing to double that number.

Special education is one of just five areas for which the task force had recommendations. The other areas were the adequate yearly progress that subgroups of students must make, the testing of students with limited English proficiency, how teachers providing instruction in multiple subjects meet the standards for “highly qualified teacher,” and, not surprisingly, funding.

The apparent lack of funding for No Child Left Behind requirements has caused states to threaten to drop out of the program or sue – the federal government, in theory, is not allowed to send unfunded mandates to the states. The Maine group concluded that it needs the Government Accountability Office to do a cost analysis, which it has done before but now would have more information.

That adequate measure of progress comes in for some of the most useful criticism in the report. It points out, for instance, that when special-needs students as a subgroup fail to make adequate progress “this has unintended but negative consequences for attitudes toward” them. This issue is far from solved.

Another key point: Currently, testing measures one class of students against another class the following year; the task force recommends tracking the same students over time to measure growth. Rather than a simple pass or fail standard for progress, the task force says correctly that the Department of Education should have gradations of failure, from those just missing the mark to the absolute flops. And, intelligently, the task force notes that demanding in a decade or so that all students will be proficient in all areas of testing, a more realistic but still very high target should be adopted.

The task force offered 26 practical recommendations – the role of the Senate offices should be to condense these into policy changes, match them with recommendations from other states and push for a package of reforms that would have broad support.

Another good recommendation from the task force, this time to the state and not the federal government, is worth repeating: “Teachers and administrators need to be more accurately informed about NCLB and the options available to them.” This could have included the public too – a common pair of complaints from the federal government is that it is often blamed for rules established by the states – here, for instance, under Maine Learning Results – and the states haven’t taken the time to understand how many options they already have under the federal act.

.

Incidentally but tragically, the task force in its brief report used the following abbreviations 291 times: NCLB, REA, NAEP, LEA, RIM, MEA, GAO, SEA, AYP, ESEA, FIE, IDEA, MLR, HQT, LEP, LAS, ELL, RF, ED, CIPS, IEP, PET, IASA, HOUSSE. There may have been others; after a while, the distinctions blurred.