Rothstein: NCLB Doomed

Richard Rothstein has an article in the latest American Prospect entitled "Leaving 'No Child Left Behind' Behind." Here are some excerpts, but we recommend that you read the entire article.

• NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever. The coalition that promoted the 2001 bipartisan law has hopelessly splintered, although NCLB's advocates in the administration and the Congress continue to imagine (at least publicly) that tinkering can put it back together.
• NCLB was flawed from the start. The 2001–2002 stampede ignored well-established statistical and management theories predicting perverse consequences for test-based accountability.
• One such consequence is goal distortion, the subject of extensive warnings in the economics and management literature about measuring any institution's performance by quantitative indicators that reflect only some institutional goals. Management expert W. Edwards Deming urged businesses to "eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals" because they encourage short-, not long-term vision.
  
• NCLB relies on an annual test, but single tests can be misleading.
• Even with inordinate attention to math and reading, it is practically and conceptually ludicrous to expect all students to be proficient at challenging levels.
• The law strongly implies that "challenging" standards are those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), periodic federal tests of national student samples. But while NAEP tests are excellent, their proficiency cut-points have no credibility.
• Any single proficiency standard invites sabotaging the goal of teaching all children, because the only ones who matter are those with scores just below passing.
• For bubble kids, schools have substituted test prep for good instruction.
• Growth models have even larger error margins than single-year test results because they rely on two unreliable scores (last year's and this year's), not one.
• Although NCLB will not be reauthorized, the underlying Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), with funding for schools serving low-income children, will continue. NCLB will remain on the books, increasingly ignored. Virtually every school with minority, low-income, or immigrant children will be labeled a failure; the federal government will be hard-pressed to punish all. Eventually, under a new administration, ESEA will be renewed, perhaps including vague incantations that states establish their own accountability policies, once Washington abandons the field.