Can Schools Alone Lift 100 Percent of Children to Proficiency by 2014?

On November 13 and 14, 2006, scholars, educators, civil rights leaders, and policy-makers gathered at Teachers College, Columbia University, for the Campaign for Educational Equity’s second annual symposium, “Examining America's Commitment to Closing Achievement Gaps: NCLB and Its Alternatives.” NCLB, the federal education law, which states as its goals the elimination of achievement gaps and the attainment of proficiency on state exams by 100 percent of students by 2014, also calls for “highly qualified” teachers in all classrooms and a fair, equal, and significant opportunity for all students.

As the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, NCLB is up for reauthorization in 2007. Speakers and panelists at the symposium discussed what changes Congress should make to the law, and in the coming months, the Equity Campaign will be publishing a summary of the conference and a book outlining policy recommendations for NCLB’s reauthorization.

Laying a Burden at the Schoolhouse Door

In the Symposium’s opening presentation, Teachers College Professor Amy Stuart Wells provided both the historical context for NCLB and the difficulties inherent in achieving the law’s goals. Wells noted that unlike many other developed nations, the United States has traditionally focused on educational achievement as the primary means of helping the economically disadvantaged. Where other nations have established broad social welfare systems, Wells said, the U.S. has historically "laid the task of rectifying societal inequalities at the schoolhouse door." In a time when the out-of-school experiences of low- and high-income students are vastly disparate and becoming more so, this raises the question of whether achieving social justice is too great a burden to rest entirely on schools.

Wells, along with Teachers College Emeritus Professor Edmund W. Gordon, and Michael Rebell – Executive Director of the Campaign for Educational Equity – all discussed the importance of what Rebell calls “comprehensive educational equity” – a focus on education that involves not just education per se, but all of the social policies that affect a child’s ability to learn.

A “Bright Light” on the Achievement Gap

The first panel of the symposium discussed narrowing the achievement gap – whether NCLB has helped narrow achievement gaps, and what changes might make the law more effective in doing so. While the panelists had varying opinions, there was near unanimous agreement that NCLB’s targets should be retained. The panelists agreed that the law's focus on expecting all students to reach high standards makes NCLB invaluable.

"NCLB is a progressive policy. After two decades of education reform, this is the first explicit statement of closing the achievement gap," said Michael Nettles, the Edmund W. Gordon Chair for Policy Evaluation and Research at the Educational Testing Service. Nettles was speaking of the performance gap between black and white students, but other speakers said NCLB's goals are providing similar benefits – albeit with some limitations – to special education students and English Language Learners (ELLs).

"NCLB sheds a bright light on the problem of the achievement gap," said Eugene Garcia, Vice President for Education Partnerships at Arizona State University. Garcia criticzed NCLB, however, for focusing too much on making sure students are proficient in basic English, without measuring whether students are learning more complex thinking skills. The law has created what Garcia calls a “complex learning gap”; a strong focus on basics has narrowed the achievement gap at the third-grade level, but the gap at the eighth-grade level has widened, because students are not getting beyond those basics. Garcia proposed bilingual education for ELL students, as well as a growth model that measures the progress of students over a three-to-four-year period.

Margaret McLaughlin, Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Exceptional Children and Youth at the University of Maryland, agreed with Garcia’s analysis, applying it to special education students. "With NCLB there now is pressure that special education students be taught grade level subject matter. In 42 of 44 states for which we have data, there is an upward trend in the percent of students with disabilities achieving proficiency. This improved performance, however, is seen in the lower grades but flattens out at upper grade levels,” she said. Echoing Garcia’s comments about a “bright light” on disadvantaged children, McLaughlin vocally supported the 100 percent proficiency requirement for special education students while admitting that it was unlikely that the target could ever be reached.

100 Percent Proficiency: An Impossible Goal?

Other speakers, however, decried the 100 percent proficiency goal as NCLB's weakest link – either because they saw it as a meaningless goal or an unattainable one.

Speaking about the wide variation in state definitions of “proficiency,” Robert Schwartz, Academic Dean and Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, spoke of “the need to revive the discussion of national education standards.” “The need for this is even stronger now than it was before NCLB. One way to address the problem of national standards is to encourage national organizations, not the federal government, to come forward with proposed sets of voluntary model national standards.” Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University, emphatically stated, "I believe we should have national standards and tests.”

Other speakers were concerned less with the need for national standards than whether NCLB’s method of using standards is even valid. "One hundred percent proficient becomes increasingly unrealistic as we get closer to 2014," said Robert Linn, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Colorado at Boulder. "NCLB's accountability system undermines its strengths. We are likely to see all public schools failing to meet AYP by 2014."

Richard Rothstein, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute, said, "Nothing can save NCLB unless we jettison the incoherent demand that all students be proficient by 2014." Rothstein focused on what he sees as a fundamental contradiction in the law: "Standards cannot be simultaneously challenging and achievable for all students. Proficiency for all is an oxymoron." Rothstein added that NCLB’s focus on either unachievable or meaningless goals undermines public education: "[the law is] not simply trying to do something good and failing; it is doing enormous damage."

Rothstein and Linn both advocated alternatives to the 100 percent proficiency requirement. Rothstein proposed measuring progress towards elimination of statistical gaps between the scores of various populations of students. Linn proposed measuring progress by looking at “effect sizes” – increases in the mean score of groups of students.

Manny Rivera, Superintendent for the Rochester, New York School District, concurred, telling the audience of schools in his district that have made great progress and have even won awards for their performance, yet under NCLB's accountability system the schools are considered "in need of improvement." "NCLB's accountability system undermines true educational reform and is a very demoralizing system for those of us working in the schools," said Rivera, who called for locally-based accountability systems and a withdrawal of NCLB’s sanctions on low-performing schools, which he said have no basis in research or evidence.

Highly Qualified Teachers

Other presenters at the Symposium suggested that the most important aspects of NCLB to address were the resources and inputs lacking in public schools. For example, because low-income and minority students are far less likely to have quality teaching in their classrooms, NCLB requires that all students be taught by “highly qualified” teachers by 2006. To date, no state has met this target, and, furthermore, NCLB gives so much latitude to the states in defining what constitutes a highly qualified teacher that there is wide variation from state to state. “The highly qualified teacher provision in NCLB is a weak provision for controlling quality," said Susanna Loeb, Associate Professor at Stanford University’s School of Education.

Loeb cautioned the audience that there is little evidence that the specific components of the “highly qualified” requirements are important for student learning. The effect of teacher certification – one of NCLB's primary measures of quality – on teacher effectiveness is inconclusive. Similarly, there is little evidence that coursework requirements for teachers affect student learning. "Improving teaching quality will require more than NCLB's highly qualified teacher provision. Give local actors more flexibility in deciding who the good, effective teachers are," Loeb said.

In order to achieve the equity goal of quality teaching for all students, "we must make sure that hard-to-staff schools are more desirable places to work,” said Karen Zumwalt, Evenden Professor at Teachers College. Barnett Barry, Founder and President of the Center for Teaching Quality, called for a government funded "Marshall Plan" for training and producing teachers: "more than anything else, our nation needs an aggressive national teacher quality and supply policy."

Pretending to Pay, Pretending to Work

Getting quality teaching into every classroom is only one important piece of the puzzle, however. A leading national expert on accountability argued that NCLB’s accountability mechanisms are actively sowing trouble. The problem, according to Richard Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, is that some schools don’t have the capacity – the knowledge, ability, and resources – to perform well.

Elmore described NCLB as “a power grab by the federal government from state and local governments.” Through regulation, NCLB imposes a one-size-fits-all accountability system that impedes student performance and school improvement by tying up resources. "Rather than treating all schools the same and imposing sanctions,” Elmore said, “school improvement requires a lot of support and differential treatment.” Without active support from the federal level, Elmore explained, federal regulation merely “drifts” down through layers of bureaucracy until nothing is accomplished. Elmore likened the bureaucracy of NCLB to an old joke among Soviet workers: “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Tom Loveless, Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, was not so pessimistic about NCLB. He defended the law’s accountability system, and he argued that studies have linked improved student performance to strong state accountability systems.

Needs Beyond the Reach of Schools

After all of the panel discussions, Michael Rebell provided some closing remarks. "NCLB must be fairly funded," he said. "The federal government is not looking at the cost of the increased demands on schools that are the result of NCLB." He called for a national "costing-out" study, much like those that have been conducted by states in school finance lawsuits, to determine precisely what resources would be required to achieve NCLB's goals.

Coming back to the earlier arguments made by Wells and Gordon, Rebell also argued that schools cannot, by themselves, enable the most disadvantaged students to achieve at the same pace as their wealthier peers. "If NCLB's 100 percent proficiency is a mandate, then schools will have to work in concert with other institutional actors," he said. "There are basic services that all children need to excel in school – for example, quality health care, decent housing, good nutrition – that are beyond the reach of schools."

Prepared November 29, 2006. Much of the content of this article comes from “Only the Bathwater – Or the Baby Too?” by Laurie Beck, published November 21, 2006 at http://www.tc.edu/news/article.htm?id=5952.