Minnesota
Study Predicts Cost of NCLB Minnesota's Office
of the Legislative Auditor ("OLA") has released a report on the current and
potential future impact of the No Child Left
Behind Act on the state of Minnesota. The report
estimated that the cost of implementing NCLB will grow and may outpace the federal
funding provided for implementation of the law. The
report stated further that Minnesota will have difficulty achieving NCLB's
goal of 100% proficiency in reading and math by the 2013-14 school year. Interviews
with local educators and superintendents around the state revealed that while
most view the law as unduly punitive and are unsure of its effects on student
achievement, most of these education professionals agree with the goals of NCLB
and do not favor "opting out" of the law. Fiscal Impacts OLA
calculated that it is likely to cost the state $19 million to develop and administer
new tests required under NCLB. This result is consistent with the findings of
a cost analysis performed for the state of Ohio, which concluded that the cost
of developing and administering tests would be about $25 million dollars. According
to the Ohio cost analysis, the cost
of developing and administering tests is a very small fraction of the total cost
to that state of implementing the mandates of NCLB. The bulk of the cost according
to the Ohio study is attributable to student intervention costs in order to bring
students to 100% proficiency. The Minnesota Study also estimated the future
cost of school transfers and supplemental services at $20 million dollars. The
authors of the report acknowledged that they were unable to estimate the cost
of other aspects of the NCLB, such as: restructuring schools which fail to make
adequate yearly progress, realigning curriculum, meeting the highly qualified
teacher and paraprofessional requirements, and construction costs associated with
school transfers. The report points out that the cost of corrective actions may
increase as more schools fail to make adequate yearly progress in future years,
and that the federal NCLB allocation to Minnesota will decrease in the next two
years. If these trends continue, the authors warn that the cost of implementing
NCLB will exceed the federal NCLB allocation. Adequate Yearly Progress
OLA and the University of Minnesota conducted a simulation of rates
of adequate yearly progress in future years. The researchers limited their predictions
to elementary schools, because the most Title
I programs are found in elementary schools. The simulation used three different
assumptions: (1) that student proficiency rates would remain the same in future
years; (2) that there would be moderate annual improvement in each subgroup (0.57
points); and (3) that there would be significant annual improvement in each subgroup
(2.45 points). According to the simulation, between 80%-100% of Minnesota's
elementary schools would fail to make adequate yearly progress by 2014. Among
these schools, the "outstate" schools from smaller districts, which typically
have fewer disaggregated subgroups than other types of schools, would have the
lowest failure rate. The report noted that achieving 100% proficiency, the stated
goal of NCLB, is an unprecedented educational accomplishment, and that experts
are skeptical of the ability of schools to attain this goal. The authors
of the report observed that Minnesota had a low percentage of schools failing
to make adequate yearly progress in the 2002-03 school year. The report attributed
the low failure rate partly to the fact that middle schools and high schools were
not subject to proficiency measurement in that year. This observation is supported
by the recent study conducted
by the Center on Educational Policy ("CEP"), which found that failure rates
increased for states in the 2003-2004 school year. Another factor contributing
to the low failure rate was the small amount of disaggregated subgroups. The Minnesota
study further observed that white subgroups were more likely to make adequate
yearly progress by meeting the proficiency requirement, whereas more minority
subgroups passed because of the NCLB's "safe harbor" provision, which allows schools
that do not meet the proficiency requirement to make adequate yearly progress
if the percentage of students failing to achieve proficiency is reduced by 10%
as compared to the previous year. Earlier this year, studies conducted by CEP
and the Harvard Civil Rights
project have also concluded that a higher number of disaggregated subgroups
presents a school or school district with more benchmarks to attain and therefore,
leads to a higher rate of failure to make adequate yearly progress. The
report revealed that most school officials in the state believe that the accountability
system required by NCLB does not provide a useful basis for evaluating academic
performance of schools and districts nor for assessing academic needs of individual
students. The NCLB requires year-by-year analysis, which does not assess how a
school, or a student, performs over time. This observation, and the results of
the simulation, echo the Harvard Civil Rights Project's concern that the assessments
required by NCLB do not give a clear picture of how schools contribute to learning,
but rather say more about the demographics of the students assessed. Reaction
in Minnesota to the study has been mixed. According to a story published in the
Pioneer Press
on February 27, 2004, the Minnesota Commissioner of Education who, along with
the governor, strongly supports NCLB, criticized the report as "unfair and unfounded."
Some legislators are citing the study in their decision to push for "opting out"
of NCLB. Other legislators favor measures short of withdrawing support for the
law. Prepared by Wendy C. Lecker, March 9, 2004
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