Learning from No Child Left Behind: How and Why the Nation's Most Important but Controversial Education Law Should Be Renewed

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THE HOOVER INSTITUTION TASK FORCE ON K-12 EDUCATION

Learning from No Child Left Behind

How and Why the Nation's Most Important but Controversial Education Law Should Be Renewed

John E. Chubb

HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 571

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

First printing, 2009

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chubb, John E.

Learning from No Child Left Behind : how and why the nation's most important but controversial education law should be renewed / by John E. Chubb.

      p.       cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8179-4982-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8179-4983-9 (electronic)

1. United States. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. 2. Educational accountability—Law and legislation—United States. 3. Education—Standards—United States. 4. Education—United States—Evaluation. 5. Educational equalization—United States. I. Title.

LB2806.22.C47 2009

379.1'580973—dc22                                                           2009007008

Contents

Preface

Learning from No Child Left Behind

Student Achievement

Lessons and Recommendations

About the Author

About the Hoover Institution Task Force on K-12 Education

Index

Preface

No federal policy is as important to the future of education in America as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since its passage in 2002, the law has provided the nation with ambitious goals, concrete timetables, and potent remedies for raising student achievement and providing every American child a decent education. This is historic stuff, in a country that has long left education policy to the states and local school districts. With NCLB, the United States has committed itself to solving, as a nation, the education problems that have stymied policymakers since at least 1983, when a federal blue ribbon panel confirmed with A Nation at Risk the severity of the situation: achievement in math and science that lags many other nations around the world and gaps in achievement at home, between Blacks, Hispanics, and whites that leave most minority students ill prepared for life after high school.

But no federal education policy is as controversial as NCLB either. The law requires that students be tested in reading and math every year beginning at grade 3, and holds schools accountable for helping ever increasing portions of their students demonstrate proficiency every year. By 2014, the law requires that schools bring 100 percent of their students to proficiency. If schools fail to make sufficient progress, the law allows students to choose other schools and receive tutoring at district expense. Schools that fail to make adequate progress face increasing sanctions, including the possibility of closure. Public educators generally oppose the law, arguing that the expectations and sanctions are unfair and under-funded. State policymakers, sympathetic to the cries of educators, have shaped their own education laws, including especially their academic standards and definitions of proficiency, to make things easier for educators—thereby weakening NCLB. Critics of the law sometimes ridicule the very purpose of NCLB, to ensure that every child is proficient in the near future. But it should come as no surprise that a law that attempts to do as much as NCLB attempts to do, or that does so by upsetting the historical balance between federal and state power, should generate controversy. This is to be expected. Real change never comes easy.

As President Obama and Congress work to reverse the worst economic slide since the great Depression, it is all the more important that the nation's education problems remain a top priority. economic growth depends ever more strongly on the quality of education; the stronger a nation's education system, the greater the returns in the international marketplace. The president clearly appreciates this, and has won support for an $800 billion economic stimulus plan that promises to boost federal education spending in the short run and the long by tens of billions of dollars a year—doubling federal support for public schools. But this spending will be a missed opportunity if the money is not spent in ways that, while staving a financial crisis also promote fundamental school reform. NCLB can and will help guide this massive infusion of funds. But no one knows for how long. NCLB, which is authorized by Title I of the elementary and Secondary education Act, is operating under a temporary authorization, and needs to be reauthorized. Arne Duncan, the new secretary of education, indicates that NCLB's reauthorization is in fact a top priority for the administration, but has not set a schedule for getting it done.

What should the administration do? In anticipation of the challenges facing the new administration, and the criticality of NCLB to education in the United States, the Hoover Institution Task Force on K-12 Education took up this question in 2008, giving the law as much time as possible to surface issues, self correct and otherwise prove its mettle. We had studied the law during its early days, and written in Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child, that NCLB had historic potential but significant weaknesses that we urged policymakers address. In the years since, the US Department of Education has ameliorated some of these issues. More important, the law has developed a track record that permits a more rigorous examination of its effects. Six years of test scores have piled up since NCLB became law. Researchers have begun more nuanced analyses. The Task Force reviewed the data and the extant research. We looked at the direct evidence of NCLB's consequences. We also considered the evidence, which is more abundant, on the principles on which NCLB rests: accountability, transparency, school choice, standards, teacher effectiveness, and much more. We debated, vigorously on most issues, and came to the conclusions we share here.

Several conclusions stand out. First, the nation is making academic progress. Student achievement is increasing, after a generation of stagnation, especially for the disadvantaged students that NCLB sought most directly to help. Second, as students are learning, we are learning more as a nation about what really works to raise student achievement. Third, while it would be premature to ascribe achievement gains directly to NCLB, it is safe to say that the principles on which NCLB is based provide an empirically sound foundation for serious school reform. Fourth, NCLB contains elements of unfairness, some of its provisions do not