WASHINGTON — It is an idea that seems so right you wonder how any decent-minded legislator could oppose it. And so, at the end of 2001, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved the president’s education program with the fetching moniker of No Child Left Behind.
Schools would no longer be able to mask the miseducation of certain minorities by reporting averages and aggregates. They’d have to make sure every group — virtually every child — was making good academic progress, or there would be penalties to pay.
Perfect — unless you run an indifferent school district with incompetent administrators and unprepared teachers fearing to be found out.
And that may be the fatal flaw with NCLB: its underlying assumption that school failure is willful, and that if you put the fear of God in the people who run the schools, they’ll do their jobs a lot better.
A handful might. But for most educators, the penalties make about as much sense as yelling at me for using the wrong fork at high tea with the queen of England. I can’t do what I don’t know how to do — what I haven’t been taught to do — and punishment is of no help.
And though Secretary of Education Rod Paige has modified some of its provisions, NCLB still relies on punishment. Failure to meet the mandated goals for a second straight year gives all children in the failing school the right to transfer to another public school in the same district — with the district paying at least part of the transportation cost.
A third year’s failure entitles children to supplemental services such as tutorial help. And a fifth year could result in takeover — by private companies, charter schools or the state.
But what constitutes failure? If any subgroup of the school population — racial minorities, limited-English speakers, the cognitively disabled — fails to meet the mechanically prescribed "adequate yearly progress" standards, the whole school is deemed to have failed. And it’s no good suggesting that the slow learners stay home on test day. If fewer than 95 percent of the children are tested, that’s failure, too, and the same penalties apply.
How tough is it to meet the standards? Chicago posted a failure rate of 82 percent. (If 82 percent of the schools in the district fail, to what other schools will the children transfer for relief?) Other school districts have had similar results. The National Education Association’s Joel Packer, who has been lobbying Congress and the Department of Education to modify the legislation, says a Minnesota study concluded that, absent changes, about 80 percent of the schools in the state will be rated failures by 2012 — the year we’re supposed to witness the catching up of that last left-behind child.
"The problem is that there are 37 criteria that have to be met for ‘adequate yearly progress,’ " Packer explains. "If a school meets 36 of the 37, it’s deemed a failure as the school that got zero of the 37. And even if students are growing academically, they may not be growing at a fast enough pace to avoid failure. Say the goal is the 65th percentile in English, and you bring a group of kids up from the 35th to the 60th, you’ve still failed."
And sometimes the more improvement you make this year, the smaller the increment of improvement you’ll be able to show next year. A desk jockey can increase his stamina by a much larger factor than can, say, a professional marathoner.
There are other objections — aside from the fact that NCLB turns out to be an incredibly intrusive piece of legislation. It looks only at reading and math performance on a single day. It gives a school no credit for superlative performance in some areas, but full penalty of missing the mark in any area. Because it measures cohort against cohort — this year’s third grade against last year’s — it doesn’t even tell you whether any particular child is doing better.
But its main shortcoming as far as I can see is that it overlooks what I believe the problem to be: Many children aren’t doing as well as they should because they get less help than they should from home.
Shouldn’t we spend at least a part of our resources and energy helping those parents learn how to do their jobs better? Then maybe we could save the threats of punishment for those who know what to do, but refuse to try.
William Raspberry is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to
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