Return to Innovator Contents Policy Tsunami: No Child Left Behind Creates Major Educational Waves
In early 2002, with stron
g bi-partisan support, President George W. Bush reauthorized
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, signing legislation commonly known
as No Child Left Behind. NCLB codified a raft of reform ideas, ranging from
accountability through testing to implementation of scientifically-based research
to flexibility in states’ use of federal funding. A broad coalition of
education stakeholders supported its goals, arguing that there were no acceptable
excuses for the gaps in student achievement and learning—between rich
and poor, between those in special education programs and those in general
education tracks, between blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians.
While some have characterized NCLB as a departure, UM School of Education and Public Policy Professor David Cohen notes that NCLB is only “the most recent manifestation of a two-decade-old movement.” He believes “American public education is early in [the process of] a great change, from a system of schooling where schools are regulated, evaluated, and legitimated by the resources that states and localities allocate, to a system where schools are regulated, evaluated, and legitimated by the results that they produce.” Cohen says that the movement toward articulated standards and benchmarks, which began in California in the early 1980s and spread across the nation, paved the way for NCLB. In the process, he notes that a “fundamentally different conception of fairness or justice in schooling” has emerged: “equal school outcomes among social groups; equal group outcomes between African American and Caucasian students, or Latino and Caucasian students; equal outcomes across socioeconomic classes.”
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Key
Provisions of NCLBAs Former Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education and current UM School of Education professor Susan Neuman puts it: “We at UM School of Education believe a high quality education is every child’s right. We believe we need to be actively involved in this work. We may rightly disagree on the means, but we subscribe to the vision. It’s an admirable goal that all UM faculty, within and outside of SOE, can coalesce around.”
Two years later, the legislation is facing new challenges. As states, districts, and local school boards attempted to enact the policy, they discovered unexpected consequences (such as experienced special education and middle school teachers running afoul of the Teacher Quality provisions); gaps in their own capacities (troubles creating grade level tests and disaggregating data; too few technically skilled “turnaround teams” to aid struggling schools); and the reality of budget shortfalls. Neuman says, “What was written as law needs to be adapted, because it may not be working as well as intended.”
In 2001, Neuman, then director of UM’s Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, was named Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education by President Bush, a position she’s called “a 24/7, Blackberry-driven job,” in a recent profile in the Ann Arbor News (9/2/04). In that role, Dr. Neuman literally crafted some of the provisions of NCLB. She also had the opportunity to see firsthand how ideals are compromised through the workings of governmental bureaucracies: “That is the heartbreak of going into a policy world like that.” While she admires the ambitious vision of NCLB, she now fears it may be “an unworkable law.”
Neuman explains the thinking behind the law: “The theory of action is like this: the goal of NCLB is greater achievment. The key inputs are teacher quality, the use of scientically based teaching materials and practices and the prevention of problems before they occur through high quality early childhood education. The law focuses on teachers and teaching, and less on parent and community involvement. By providing parents with information, the law encourages an open marketplace through charter schools, choice, and vouchers.” However, Neuman notes, “These theoretical notions are being tested.”
SOE Faculty Respond
While faculty members at UM’s School of Education express a diversity of perspectives and stances toward this legislation, many are engaged in research, inquiry, design experiments, or advocacy that speak to one or more aspects of No Child Left Behind. Dean Karen Wixson says, “Faculty members here at the School of Education have different research interests and analytic frames, but they are deeply interested in the goal of equity. We’re right there in the thick of things.” She notes that the new Center for Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics, headed by faculty Deborah Ball, Hyman Bass, and Ed Silver, is focusing on teacher quality in mathematics, an issue addressed in the NCLB legislation. In addition, a number of faculty in literacy, policy, and quantitative evaluation are engaged (see boxed profiles).
The consensus around the larger equity-focused aim of the NCLB legislation will probably hold, although timeline changes and other modifications have already been made. Neuman predicts, “You’re going to see regulatory changes. If the Bush administration remains in office, they’ll want to wait until the next authorization cycle. But a different administration may try to make revisions to the legislation retroactively. However, there is a strong bipartisan agreement on the goal of NCLB which remains strong.”
by Laura Roop
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of Innovator
Also see the feauture "SOE Faculty Working with the No Child Left Behind Act"
