No Educational Bureaucrat Left Behind

Like many Americans, I have previously waffled on whether the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act was good policy. I was drawn to the idea of performance standards and the suggestion that there would eventually be zero tolerance for mediocrity. But I was put off by another attempt by Washington to manage education from afar as well as the idea that the federal government could excel at driving state and local educational practices even if they wanted to. The most common reaction from people I talked to was the equivalent of a blank stare. Few of us really knew what the bill said or how it might work or fail.

Into that void of public knowledge, Lawrence Uzzell offers an outstanding synopsis of NCLB in an article entitled No Bureaucrat Left Behind. Here are some excerpts:

In domestic policy, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education act is the Bush administration's top claim to visionary leadership…NCLB's success will depend on whether it is possible to produce excellent educational performance through centralization. Its advocates are in a self-contradictory position. They recognize that the educational policies of the last four decades—a period of almost uninterrupted centralization—have failed, but their remedy for that failure is yet more centralization. While invoking the principles of an "ownership society" on issues such as Social Security reform, they are pursuing almost the exact opposite model in schools. In a period of growing social mobility and individual autonomy, they are promoting a top-down, Great Society model of reform—transferring power from individual parents, teachers, and principals to distant bureaucracies such as state education agencies. Ironically, education is precisely that area of social policy that by its nature is least susceptible to centralization. Education is inherently personal and inherently value laden. The key relationships in schools are those between individual teachers and individual students: If the teachers are not willingly committed and highly motivated, no centralized rule books or formulas are going to inspire peak performance…

Moreover, schooling inescapably involves judgments about truth and virtue, about what kind of person a youngster should aspire to be. Americans inevitably disagree with each other about those judgments…Today's Americans have no more chance of reaching consensus on [these] questions than of agreeing on what church (if any) we should all attend; that is why we keep the state out of controlling churches, just as we keep it out of other value-forming institutions such as publishing and journalism. The more we entrust such decisions to centralized state agencies, the more conflicts we foment. Zero-sum "culture wars" for control of coercive state monopolies make enemies of people who could otherwise be friends.

NCLB does not explicitly call for national curricula. It mandates standards for testing, not for curricula, and leaves the content and design of the tests up to the states. But in the long run tests, at least to some degree, shape curricula. NCLB is already promoting centralization within each state; it could become a force for national centralization as well if future administrations exercise to its full potential their power to deny federal funding to states whose testing programs are deemed inadequate…

…NCLB virtually guarantees massive evasion of its own intent: It orders the state education agencies to do things that many of them don't want to do—such as instituting detailed, rigorous testing programs that enable the public to distinguish successful from unsuccessful schools—while giving those agencies broad discretion about just how to do those things. As the states devise various tactics for evading the letter and spirit of the law, Washington policymakers will be forced either to let them get away with those tactics or to keep amending NCLB's statutory text (already about 1,100 pages long) and associated regulations in order to keep up with ever more inventive evasions.
If policymakers choose the former course, NCLB might as well not exist; like other federal education programs, it will be just one more drain on taxpayers and provide subsidies to special interests, in this case to the testing companies. But if policymakers instead choose to amend the statute, they will end up making it steadily more prescriptive and top-heavy. Washington's education officials will more and more resemble Soviet central planners trying to improve economic performance by micromanaging decisions from Moscow. Unlike Soviet bureaucrats, however, the federal government lacks a captive labor force; the more centralized the system becomes, the more likely the educators with the greatest creativity and leadership will be to seek careers elsewhere rather than accept being pawns of the central government. As a strategy for promoting "excellence," centralization is inherently self-defeating.

Thus NCLB is a reform strategy at war with itself: It can work on its own terms only if federal officials ride tight herd on their state counterparts, overriding them whenever they sacrifice reform to special-interest pressures. Its authors have already said that they will do no such thing, rightly invoking principles such as states' rights and the absence of a constitutional warrant for federal control of local schools. But if they were truly serious about those principles, they would never have enacted NCLB to begin with…

Thus NCLB may end up giving us the worst possible scenario: unconstitutional consolidation in Washington of power over the schools, with that power being used to promote mediocrity rather than excellence. It is too early to know which scenario will prevail, but it is already clear that state and local education officials are skillfully protecting their interests in ways that undermine the intent of NCLB. Especially telling has been their widespread dishonest reporting in at least four areas: graduation rates, school violence, qualified teachers, and proficiency tests…

The most important part of NCLB, its goal of 100 percent academic "proficiency" among America's schoolchildren by the year 2014, is also the easiest to manipulate. The statute does not even define the word "proficiency," though it appears hundreds of times. Under NCLB the states have manifold opportunities to "game the system."…Unfortunately, the first three years of NCLB have seen states using all of those tactics. As it becomes increasingly clear that the states can dumb down their standards without adverse consequences, there will likely be a "race to the bottom."

The incentives for evading the truth will grow as NCLB's annual targets get more ambitious…Moreover, the idea of an enlightened federal government forcing the states to do the right thing depends on the assumption that Washington is somehow immune to the interest-group pressures that warp decision making within the state education agencies. That assumption is utterly unrealistic…

State-level testing and accountability systems enacted before NCLB have tended over time, as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, to drift from "tough" to "soft." Standards are gradually relaxed as interest groups mobilize against them…

NCLB reflects an ideological strain that is novel for Republican presidents, utopianism. Like older forms of utopianism, the Bush administration emphasizes collective action rather than individual responsibility: NCLB implicitly treats students as passive commodities, mass-produced by state programs. It also treats parents as unable to select good schools…

Utopianism usually ends up transforming rhetoric more than reality…By 2014 NCLB will be seen to have failed, just as the other centralized education programs enacted since the 1960s have failed…Rather than continuing to use centralized government decrees to turn mediocre institutions into excellent ones, as they have been trying but failing to do for decades, the state and federal governments should be empowering individual families to transfer to schools of their own choice.

That strategy would bring three advantages that are absent from the command-and-control model embodied in NCLB. First, it would allow parents to rescue their children from dysfunctional schools immediately…Second, it would allow families to pick schools that are compatible with their own philosophical and religious beliefs instead of locking them into zero-sum conflicts to decide which groups win power to impose their beliefs on others. Third, it would unleash the dynamic force of competition. Real accountability to customers free to go elsewhere is qualitatively different from fake accountability to government agencies that can almost always be pressured into keeping the money flowing to schools that are manifestly failing.

The key locus for genuine reform is the states. Under the Constitution it is the states that have legal responsibility for education…The best contribution the national government can make is to get out of the way.

In a February 27 Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee), Chester Finn, Jr. and Diane Ravitch, offer further perspective:

U.S. students lag behind their peers in other modern nations -- and the gap widens dramatically as their grade levels rise. Our high school pupils (and graduates) are miles from where they need to be to assure them and our country a secure future in the highly competitive global economy. Hence, any serious effort at education reform hinges on our setting world-class standards, then candidly tracking performance in relation to those standards. Even when gains are slender and results disappointing, we need the plain truth. Which is why recent attempts by federal and state governments to sugarcoat the performance of students is so alarming.

Our most rigorous standards are those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federally funded testing program that began in 1969. At a time when many states, responding to the accountability prods of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, are embracing low performance norms for their students -- and pumping out misleading information about how many youngsters are "proficient" and how many schools are making "adequate yearly progress" -- NAEP functions as an indispensable external benchmark. It unblinkingly reported that only 29% of eighth grade public school pupils were "proficient" in math and reading in 2005. It also showed starkly that the results reported by many states are far too rosy...

Not surprisingly, NAEP's role as honest auditor makes state officials squirm. Since NCLB expects each state to set its own academic norms and choose its own tests, the temptation to dumb them down is irresistible; NAEP is the main antidote. Congress knew that in 2001 when, as part of No Child Left Behind, it required all states to take part in NAEP reading and math tests in grades four and eight. (Previously, state participation was voluntary.) Since 1988, NAEP's standards and policies have been set by the independent, bipartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). In 1990, that body promulgated three achievement levels for reporting NAEP results. These it labeled "basic," "proficient" and "advanced."

"Basic" denoted "partial mastery of knowledge and skills." "Advanced" signified "superior performance beyond grade-level mastery." "Proficient," though, was the key. NAGB termed it "the central level," representing "solid academic performance for each grade tested" and "a consensus that students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter and are well prepared for the next level of schooling." NAGB intended that "proficient" would represent the skills that every student ought to possess -- even if many were not there yet. On NAEP tests since 1990, this level of performance has usually been reached by about three kids in 10. Everyone knows that's unsatisfactory. But it's also reality, an accurate gauge of the gap between U.S. pupils' prowess and what they need to match world standards.

From the outset, some educators protested that NAGB's "proficient" was too ambitious, but the board stuck to its guns. For the past 15 years, both NAGB and the Department of Education, which manages NAEP, have resisted pressure from politicians and educators to back away from, or dumb down, the "proficient" standard. With NCLB, however, that's begun to change. More voices are demanding that NAEP focus attention on the much-lower "basic" standard...But the White House and Education Department now crave proof that NCLB is succeeding and seek to accommodate state pleas for "flexibility" and pacify governors threatening to withdraw from NCLB.

Hence they, too, are subtly substituting "basic" for "proficient" when they report NAEP results -- and downplaying standards altogether in favor of simple up-and-down trend lines. In releasing the 2005 scores, the Education Department for the first time published comparison tables showing state-specific progress only in relation to "basic." And even NAGB members now highlight "basic" rather than "proficient."...

Is No Child Left Behind corrupting NAEP? It's too soon to be sure. But it's clear that, for those in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill whose own reputations hinge on the perceived success of NCLB, NAEP results now carry consequences, just as they do for states...

America's great education problem is that for years we settled for "basic skills" rather than true proficiency. The Bush administration does a disservice to the nation if it tells educators and state officials that "basic" is acceptable. You can be sure that our competitors aren't doing any such thing.

Another relevant article can be found here. A previous posting is also relevant.