    
Issue Brief #4: No Child Left Behind In Connecticut and across the nation, no education reform has generated as much hope or controversy as the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.
Signed into law in January 2002 amidst bipartisan fanfare, No Child Left Behind combined a significant increase in federal Title I funding with a series of provisions designed to ensure greater accountability for results. Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy proclaimed that “[n]o piece of legislation will have a greater impact or influence” on maintaining America’s leading position in world affairs.1 President Bush, in signing the bill, remarked that its fundamental principle “is that every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and [states] must show us whether or not every child is learning.”2 The law was greeted by widespread acclaim. More than four years later, that bipartisan accord has broken down. A chorus of critics regularly denounces the program as unwieldy, unworkable, underfunded, and an intrusion on local control of education.3 To date, ten states have explored ways to withdraw from portions of NCLB and Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Oklahoma and Wisconsin filed amicus briefs in support of a National Education Association lawsuit challenging the legality of the law.4 In August 2005, Connecticut became the first state to sue the federal government over NCLB, claiming that the testing provisions represented an illegal unfunded mandate.5 What’s All the Fuss About? The No Child Left Behind Act is a sprawling, thousand-plus page document covering a variety of federal education programs, so summarizing its contents is no easy matter. But the heart of the law revolves around a few key concepts.6 Testing. States are required to test students in reading, math, and—starting in 2007—science. These tests must be given annually in third through eighth grades and once in high school (usually in tenth grade). The results from these tests must be broken out by different “subgroups” of students, such as racial and ethnic groups, low-income students, and special education students. This requirement ensures that high overall levels of achievement do not mask pockets of low-performance among different student populations. Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The law requires almost all students to reach “proficiency” in reading and math by 2014. To measure progress towards that goal, states set yearly “AYP” goals—target rates of proficiency in reading and math (broken out by various racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and special education “subgroups”) that increase year to year. Interventions. After a school has failed to “make AYP” for two years in a row, students may apply to transfer to another school. If a school fails to make AYP another year, students become eligible for “supplemental educational services”—free tutoring, usually provided after school. Schools that fail to make AYP four years in a row may be subject to more forceful intervention, How Is It Working? Though many of NCLB’s core ideas had been implemented by states in the prior decade, the law’s passage was a revolution in education reform. Never before had the federal government put its spending power behind a national strategy, with incentives and consequences, for closing the achievement gap and getting every student to proficiency. While few have publicly disputed the importance of NCLB’s central goal, as the accountability provisions have taken hold there have been bitter disputes over whether NCLB is the best way to achieve it, and whether the law is working as intended. Since 2002, a number of challenges have emerged in realizing the full potential of NCLB to close the achievement gap. Deference to States. A number of commentators have noted that the effectiveness of the building blocks of NCLB’s accountability scheme—annual testing and AYP—depend on states choosing tests that assess student performance against some rigorous and demanding standard. And the annual goals that are used to measure whether a state is making adequate yearly progress are largely left to each state’s devising. Some argue that many states have deliberately manipulated their “cut scores”—the score a student must achieve on a state test to be labeled proficient—to make progress towards proficiency easier.7 Other analysts have noted that states have “backloaded” AYP goals, meaning that schools will have to make tremendous strides towards proficiency in the years just before 2014, a process akin to a “balloon mortgage.”8 To these observers, states have too many opportunities to game the system.9 Practical Problems. Others have pointed to the practical problems with implementing many of NCLB’s provisions. For example, districts with high numbers of failing schools have found that there are few available spots in schools that are making AYP, which has rendered the Year 2 “transfer option” useless in many districts.10 Similarly, studies have shown that the quality of tutoring services funded by NCLB is mixed, with many showing little effect on progress towards proficiency.11 Finally, 71 percent of school districts reported in a recent survey that they have decreased instructional time given to other subjects such as civics, history, or foreign languages to focus on the core subjects tested under NCLB.12 Calculating AYP. When NCLB was being shaped, many organizations and experts argued that AYP should be calculated on a “value-added,” rather than an absolute, basis.13 That is, schools—especially those with large numbers of children performing below grade level—should be held accountable for making adequate gains in performance, not for reaching some pre-set proficiency goal. Supporters argue that this approach would avoid penalizing schools that made large gains while missing pre-set goals, and would be more sensitive to the reality that not every school starts on an equal footing when it comes to student performance.14 For a variety of reasons, including data unreliability and a commitment to achieving universal proficiency, Congress rejected this approach. Despite these criticisms, proponents of the law point to clear gains in student performance nationwide since the law was enacted. Nine-year-olds, for example, have made more progress in reading in the past five years than in the previous 28 combined. Reading and math scores for African-American and Hispanic fourth graders, and math scores for African-American fourth graders and Hispanic eighth graders, reached an all-time high last year. And the achievement gap, while still large, has shown signs of closing. Furthermore, more teachers than ever are now certified (though no state has achieved NCLB’s goal of every child being taught by a “highly qualified” teacher),15 and millions of dollars have poured into supplemental educational services for students most inneed.16 Given time, say NCLB supporters, the law’s single-minded focus on achievement has yielded tangible results. How Has Connecticut Responded? No Child Left Behind has already had an impact on the Connecticut testing system, which was previously limited in elementary and middle schools to grades four, six, and eight. To comply with the law, in 2006 testing was expanded to grades 3–8 and in 2007 science will be added to the subjects tested. But Connecticut has also been at the forefront of states challenging No Child Left Behind. In March 2005, the U.S. Department of Education rejected Connecticut’s request for an exemption from the annual testing requirements.17 In response, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal filed a lawsuit against the federal government that claimed the enforcement of the testing requirements represented an illegal unfunded mandate.18 Meanwhile, in Connecticut, Cheshire became one of only three districts in the nation to reject Title I funding to avoid NCLB’s accountability provisions, forgoing $79,600 in federal funds.19 Prospects for Connecticut’s suit appear poor. As Cheshire’s actions make clear, Title I is a voluntary program—no state or district must accept federal funding through the program, and thus every state and district can exempt itself from the strings attached to the money. And while the question of whether NCLB is adequately funded is complex, the best answer seems to be that any gaps in funding are specific to certain localities, and not state- or nation-wide.20 The larger question is whether the lawsuit indicates that Connecticut has taken seriously the need to close what amounts to the largest achievement gap between rich and poor students in the nation.21 Indeed, this was the ground on which the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP intervened to oppose the suit, arguing that the state was trying to shirk its responsibility to poor and minority students.22 The data generated by NCLB’s accountability provisions suggest a number of areas in need of improvement. Forty-three of the state’s 185 school districts failed to make AYP in 2005, and 39 of these districts are repeat offenders—including such large urban districts as Hartford, New London, Bridgeport, and New Haven.23 At the school level, nearly 20 percent of Connecticut schools failed to make AYP in 2004 -05, and 13 percent have failed at least two years in a row.24 Were NCLB to be overturned in the courts, these schools and districts would be able to continue to receive Title I funds without demonstrating any progress in raising student achievement. The Bottom Line In the end, one can point to many ways in which NCLB has fallen short of what its sponsors hoped, and ways in which the law could undoubtedly be improved. Nevertheless, Connecticut educators, community leaders, parents and policymakers are increasingly engaged in an intense exchange about how to close the state’s achievement gap—a highly public discussion that was barely taking place prior to NCLB’s passage. All-in-all, the scope, resources and clear expectations of NCLB are helping move us closer to the day when every Connecticut child gets the education they deserve from our public schools. Endnotes 1. Senator Edward Kennedy, Remarks on the Floor of the Senate, January 4, 2002. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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No Child Left Behind is actually a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was signed into law in 1965 as a centerpiece of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The program, which created Title I federal education funding for schools with disadvantaged populations, has been the single largest source of federal support for K–12 education for more than three decades.