Let's pass a law saying that police must end all crime by 2014.

Seems like kind of a silly idea, doesn't it? Well, it would make about as much sense as Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind law, which requires 100% of students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

To believe that schools can accomplish such an outcome simply because the federal government has instructed them to do so, we'd have to believe that schools are the single, decisive factor determining student achievement. In other words, according to NCLB, all socio-economic factors, parental education level, parental involvement, individual motivation (or lack thereof), and variations in native intellect can all be overcome, in every case and in every circumstance, by public educators -- just as long as you tell them they have to do it.

Later this year, NCLB will be up for renewal. Undoubtedly the Democratically controlled Congress will make some revisions to the law. What is not yet clear is how extensive those revisions will be, and what changes will be made. What does seem apparent is that NCLB and the fundamental notions underlying it, aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Which is too bad, because it's a junk law. Here's why.

Standards

"Standards" simply refers to the list of stuff that we expect students to know and be able to do. Without clear standards, you can't have accountability... right? I mean, you'd have nothing to hold people accountable for. And if you want a genuinely educated populace, those standards need to be high. So that's one major pillar of the NCLB law: high standards.

Except that, NCLB does absolutely nothing to improve standards, and one could easily argue that the law has lowered educational standards far more frequently than it has strengthened them. NCLB does not set any specific standards for student performance. Instead, it mandates that each state must write its own standards. Now, undoubtedly this is a step in the right direction. Every state should have clear, concrete standards for every subject area. Unfortunately, even while complying with NCLB, many states have standards which are weak, vaguely worded, short on specifics, short on content, and often just plain low. Bush's law doesn't contain any mechanism for evaluating the quality of state educational standards, or for ensuring uniformity across the states. There is no standard for the standards.

Given that it is up to each state to set its own standards, and then test whether its students have met those standards... it's not too surprising that test scores are on the rise. One simple explanation is that standards are being lowered so that more students appear to be proficient.

Testing

Under NCLB, standardized tests are the mechanism used to determine whether students are learning, and therefore whether schools are doing their job. Standards + Testing = Accountability. That's the essential formula of NCLB.

Contrary to what many people seem to think, there is no federal "NCLB test." Rather, the law mandates that each state is to administer its own tests in reading and math, and then submit the results to the federal government. While this is a tremendous windfall for private testing companies who write the tests, it's not the most reliable measure of student achievement.

In reality, the tests vary in difficulty level from state to state. Even if we set aside all the other questions and concerns surrounding the use of standardized tests to gauge student achievement and educator effectiveness (maybe we'll save all that for a later post), we still must face the fact that reading and math proficiency in Missouri are not the same as reading and math proficiency in Massachusetts, and No Child Left Behind provides no means to distinguish between the two.

(In New York City, teachers administer the tests within their own classrooms to their own students, with minimal [if any] supervision. Relying upon the results of tests administered under such conditions involves a pretty big leap of faith in teachers' integrity. Funny that legislators and the general public don't tend to trust teachers' competence, motivation nor professionalism. Yet they predicate billions of dollars of spending on this blind trust in teachers' honesty regarding test results.)

Accountability

This word gets thrown around a lot in contemporary education policy discourse, but it doesn't often get examined. Underlying all the discussion is an implicit assumption: schools haven't been properly educating children, because nobody has been holding them accountable for doing so. Increased accountability - holding teachers and administrators (and maybe even state governors, if Obama has anything to say about it) responsible for their own student outcomes -- is supposed to have a direct, positive effect on student achievement. In fact, that's the whole essence of the law. Logically, it presupposes that schools or individual teachers could be doing much more to educate children, but they simply haven't done so, only because they haven't been motivated to do so. They've been lazy, because nobody has been holding them accountable.

Yet NCLB doesn't hold educators accountable for their administrative or pedagogical practices, or even their students' actual achievements; it only holds them accountable for test results, which we've seen are essentially meaningless.

NCLB provides minimal guidance and weak support for struggling schools, totally failing to address the underlying issues and entrenched problems which cause students to fail in the first place. For example, the law offers a supposedly research-based reading curriculum whose development and implementation have been rife with corruption and mismanagement.

The law also mandates that schools which fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress for two years in a row must offer free after-school tutoring to students. This tutoring is provided by private companies, who have earned literally billions of dollars for providing their services. But the private tutoring companies are chosen by the individual states at their own discretion. NCLB includes no standards, no oversight and no accountability for these companies. It simply requires states to shell out piles of cash to them, with absolutely no way of measuring their effectiveness, and no apparent desire to do so.

Without a universal standard and without a reliable means to test progress toward that standard, accountability becomes a farce and NCLB becomes a very expensive exercise in futility. It allocates billions of dollars to private companies with no oversight or accountability. It does very, very little to provide real support for struggling schools or to address underlying problems which cause schools and therefore students to fail.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan appear to favor a stronger role for the federal government in public education, and they appear inclined toward strong accountability measures. It remains unclear how much of Bush's educational policy Obama will retain, but using NCLB as a template is probably a shaky foundation for real reform. It's a junk law that accomplishes nothing other than piling even more money onto the heap of wasted educational spending in America.