Hire Ed: the secret to making Bush's school reform law work? More bureaucrats

Washington Monthly, March, 2004 by Marc S. Tucker, Thomas Toch

The North Carolina and Kentucky programs make clear, however, that turning around failing schools is labor-intensive--and not inexpensive (both states spend about $6 million to turn around a small number of schools, and currently have neither the money nor the staff to do much more). Some accountability advocates suggest that the threat of sanctions or the loss of students alone can be enough incentive to improve school performance. In practice, however, such schools typically still require outside help to do it. For schools in the worst shape, which are often in chaos, with leaders who are weak and ineffective, stronger incentives to do the right thing won't make much difference. Says Ted Stillwell, Iowa's commissioner of education: "You cannot just give them a booklet on how to be better schools."

But NCLB doesn't give states much help in providing this kind of assistance, certainly not on anything like the scale required. As a result, the legislation threatens to overwhelm even those that have made real progress fixing failing schools. Why? Simple arithmetic. Under NCLB, instead of a dozen schools, North Carolina faces the prospect of having to turn around 500--nearly a quarter of all the state's schools, says Elsie Leake, associate superintendent for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The situation is the same in Kentucky. "We're set up to handle tens of schools," says Director of Assessment William Insko. "NCLB is requiring us to work with hundreds."

To the moon

There's a reason why NCLB is causing so many more schools to be labeled as failing (some 26,000 schools, or one in four nationwide, failed state standards this year and face sanctions if they do so again next year). It is that the new federal law requires far more detailed demographic analysis of test scores than most state-mandated tests do. Under NCLB, each school's scores must he broken down and reported by gender, race, family income, etc. Students within each group must make progress every year towards a prescribed benchmark. If any one of the groups fails to make its "adequate yearly progress" target for two years in a row (and it can be a different sub-group from one year to the next), the whole school is graded a failure. As a result, many schools that once thought they were doing well because, say, their white middle-class students were getting decent test scores, are now being labeled as failures because some subgroup within the school, say Hispanics, isn't doing nearly as well. NCLB was specifically designed this way to make sure schools would not be able to ignore the academic needs of these disadvantaged groups, it is why several civil rights groups supported the law, and why the president can rightly claim that the law's intent is to "leave no child behind."

The ambition of the No Child Left Behind law, then, is right on target. The problem is that states are a long way from having the capacity to carry out the law's mandates. By identifying so maW schools as failing--as North Carolina and Kentucky suggest, the numbers are often exponentially more than even the most rigorous state accountability systems turn up--NCLB has also created a pair of perverse incentives for states and schools to act in ways directly counter to the law's intent.