Friday, July 13, 2007

Brownstein: Don't leave this law behind

Progress is slow under Bush's 2001 education reform,
but No Child Left Behind is worth improving.

THE COMPLAINTS are reaching a crescendo as Congress moves closer to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the education reform law that President Bush passed with rare bipartisan support in 2001.

Conservatives are wailing about federal intrusion.

Teachers unions and some leading Democrats moan that the law relies too much on testing as the measure of student progress. And some parents echo each of those indictments.

There's no doubt the law has minted enemies.

But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for low-income children, has it right when she says the law wasn't designed "to make people happy." It was passed because too many students in too many places were not learning enough. It wouldn't be doing its job if it left in place the practices that produced those unacceptable results. Grumbling, in education as in everything else, is the inevitable price of change.

And the evidence is that change is generating some progress.

The Center for Education Policy, an independent research organization, recently found that the share of students demonstrating proficiency in reading and (especially) math is up in most states since the law's passage. In most places, achievement gaps between white and minority students are narrowing.

The problem, on both fronts, is that improvement is coming too slowly. The overall gains remain relatively modest. And the gaps between white and minority students, though narrowed, remain dauntingly wide in many places...

[The testing] system — the heart of the law — is mostly admirable. It ensures that schools focus on educating all their students.

The problem is that it has produced a reverse Lake Wobegon syndrome, one in which all (or at least too many) schools are below average.

Fully one in five schools that receive federal Title I education dollars are now identified as needing improvement. That trend is alienating parents and educators at basically solid schools tossed onto the "failing" pile because one or two groups underperformed.

It also means states must spread their resources over so many "failing" schools that they can't concentrate on the most troubled. "They are swamped," says Bruce Reed, President Clinton's former chief domestic policy advisor. "They have too many failures to fix."

The Bush administration and leading Democrats should be able to agree on a solution: establish tiers to distinguish between schools that fall just short of their annual improvement targets and those with deep, systemic problems, and then direct most attention to the latter. "We should focus our resources on the chronic underperformers," says Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) says much the same.

This from the L A Times.

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