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On leaving no child behind

Public Interest - September 22, 2004

PASSED by Congress in 2001 and signed into law by President George W. Bush one short year after his inauguration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the most ambitious federal education statute in decades. Save possibly for Medicare reform, the act is the hallmark domestic accomplishment of the administration's first term, and it is proving to be a spectacularly contentious one.

NCLB's sprawling 1,100-plus pages radically overhaul the federal role in education, rewrite the rules, and reassign power--including more to Washington than ever before. It strives to boost overall pupil achievement, narrow a host of "learning gaps," and assure every student a "highly qualified teacher." The engine behind it, though, is a historic attempt to impose a results-based accountability regime on public schools across the land. Given near-universal support for this idea of educating all American children to a higher standard, and general agreement that schools can and must do better, even the law's harshest critics feel compelled to laud its objectives before citing concerns about its mechanisms, timetables, regulations, or funding.

It is still too early to judge NCLB's efficacy or predict its ultimate fate. We are less than three years into its twelve-year schedule for boosting student achievement to universal "proficiency" (in math and reading, mainly in grades three through eight). After all, it took more than a decade for the machinery of its legislative ancestor, the less ambitious Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, to function approximately as Lyndon Johnson and Congress intended. But NCLB has already stirred a furious national debate. It has become a hot topic in the 2004 election. Its fragile bipartisan consensus is in peril. And it's not too soon to venture preliminary assessments of the workability of some of its key provisions and to suggest needed repairs.

Implementing any statute as complex as NCLB brings inevitable headaches. Different agencies and government at different levels must learn to work in new ways, officials must take on unfamiliar roles, and educators must alter ingrained routines. As these arrangements are negotiated, a certain amount of confusion is to be expected. Such problems are normal. They usually diminish with time and experience, and are mainly of interest to students of government process. However, some laws also summon more fundamental woes by incorporating perverse incentives, incompatible interests, or unworkable expectations. These do not go away with aspirin and a night's rest. They may, in fact, require surgery. NCLB is afflicted with several such maladies, and there is considerable risk that the public discontent and professional animosity they are engendering will undermine the legislation's many meritorious features.

The DNA of NCLB

To grasp why NCLB inspires both accolades and catcalls, not infrequently from the same observers, one should begin by noting that this legislation is both evolutionary and revolutionary. Many of its leading ideas have received bipartisan support over the years, while other aspects of the legislation are wholly new and more controversial.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, both candidates promised aggressive action on education. Texas governor George W. Bush promoted as a national model his state's strong and relatively successful standards-based accountability program, leavened with charter schools and other elements of school choice. Vice President Al Gore sounded remarkably similar when he said things like the following: "Every state and every school district should be required to identify failing schools, and work to turn them around--with strict accountability for results, and strong incentives for success. And if these failing schools don't improve quickly, they should be shut down fairly and fast, and when needed, reopened under a new principal." Gore also favored limited forms of school choice--as had Bill Clinton.

The similarity of the Democratic and Republican positions resulted from both teams' acceptance of the same analysis of what ailed American K-12 education--and how to cure it. This diagnosis hearkens back to the celebrated 1983 report A Nation at Risk and the Washington-driven remedies urged in its aftermath by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Bush called his plan "America 2000" and Clinton termed his "Goals 2000," but few outside the Beltway could spot major differences. Both started with the belief that American schoolchildren were not learning enough, especially when it came to the "three R's," and that this could be set right by inducing states to set explicit academic standards, deploy tests to determine whether and how well students and schools met those standards, and create behaviorist "accountability" mechanisms whereby rewards would come to schools that succeeded and interventions of some sort would befall those that failed. Long before NCLB, governors of both parties had embraced this strategy and a number of states had acted upon it. Though conservatives and liberals bickered about how far Washington should go in prodding laggard states, by 2000 the federal statute books already contained several incentives, notably a pair of laws that Clinton nudged through Congress weeks before the 1994 GOP takeover.

In 2001, Bush rode into the White House touting the results of Texas school reform. Seeking to leapfrog obstacles that had blocked earlier national efforts to boost pupil achievement, he promoted a more forceful role for the federal government--one that would use mandated tests and consequences to compel state and school cooperation, while increasing school choice for parents and granting states more freedom in spending federal aid dollars. Within days of taking office, he dispatched a legislative blueprint that drew heavily on his experience in Austin. From the outset, however, Bush also insisted on bipartisan support and his legislative strategists pressed to win it. The complex law that resulted accordingly drew in ideas from the Left and the Right--often without reconciling their inconsistencies.

After nearly a year of negotiation, administration and congressional leaders hammered out a bipartisan measure that commanded support not only from most Republicans but also from such prominent Democrats as Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy and California Representative George Miller, the ranking members of Congress's two education committees. The price of that broad support, however, was a radical reshaping of the original Bush proposal. The compromise bill joined Bush's quality-focused, results-centered approach to a host of equity-oriented provisions dealing with matters ranging from the performance of racial groups to the assignment of teachers, while sharply curbing the White House's school-choice and state-flexibility proposals.

NCLB is routinely labeled a "Bush" law--in no small part because the White House spent 2002 and 2003 claiming it as the president's major domestic policy achievement, while Democrats did the opposite. But in fact its provisions are a Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of "New Democrat" schemes, administration proposals, Kennedy's and Miller's ideas, and input from countless other constituencies, all superimposed upon habits, assumptions, and rules that had accumulated since Lyndon Johnson sat in the Oval Office. It is at once the feisty progeny of earlier reform measures, while in other respects it has no precedent: It creates stern federal directives regarding test use and consequences; puts federal bureaucrats in charge of approving state standards and accountability plans; sets a single nationwide timetable for boosting achievement; and prescribes specific remedies for underperforming schools.

NCLB faces both political and institutional challenges. It has grand ambitions, but its means are meager. At present, federal funds amount to barely seven cents of the public school dollar, giving Congress limited fiscal lever-age. Constitutional responsibility for education is vested in state capitals, too, and Americans cherish local control of public schools via 15,000 district-level school boards. Moreover, the formidable lobbying operation of the "education establishment," as it is often called, works to limit change to modest annual spending increases for an ever-proliferating array of "categorical" programs.

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