Let's not over-romanticize the good old days. Bob Schaffer encourages us not to sleep through important chapters of American history. I won't, if he won't.

I'm sure Mr. Schaffer had as good a public school education as I did. The "locals" in "control" of my education did a splendid job. The same cannot be said for the poor kids and kids of color who lived on the south side of Dallas, Texas.

We had great teachers and good facilities; they didn't. My parents knew how I stacked up each year against students around the country because the ITBS was administered annually to all the kids on my side of town. Unbelievably, black and brown kids weren't uniformly tested on the ITBS until the early 70s! When they were finally tested, we learned why the "locals" in "control" had been trying to hide the problem: the blacks showed at the very sad level of the 10th percentile nationally!

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 21.3 percent of blacks between the ages of 16-24 were dropouts in 1972. That number was halved by 2006, to 10.7 percent.

Blacks are graduating college in far greater numbers today than in "the good old days," according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

And minority students are doing significantly better on the NAEP. According to the Long Term Trend data, black 8th graders scored 262 on math in 2008, a full three grade levels higher than where they were in 1978!

The federal government became involved in education for a reason and because of history. And that history should definitely not be slept through. The locals were badly educating poor kids and kids of color. And that is not a time or a condition we ought to return to through a misty time machine.

Mr. Schaffer and I agree on choice and busting up bureaucracy wherever it is. I suspect we also agree on efficiency in spending and the abuses of unions. But to think that local politicians respect parent choice, resist union dominance, bust up bureaucracy, or spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently or better than the feds is, in my view, naiive.

But, more to my main point, there is a history here. And when I hear the locals complaining about AYP pinching too much (because schools where poor and minority kids do poorly are tagged), I realize I've seen this movie before. And I don't think we want to see it again.

Chairman Kline has it right. Too bad the Senate doesn’t.

Mr. Kline’s instincts are spot on and wise to a recent history punctuated by dramatic, massive, reckless and harmful expansions of federal influence into the states’ domain of public education. The era of unrestrained federal intrusion coincides with America’s exponential nosedive in international comparisons of academic performance.

The federal legacy of moving comprehensive education legislation through Congress, going back through the H.W. Bush administration, has been deplorable at best. These “landmark” laws were sliced, diced and compromised to the point of absurdity in every instance prior to their having become law.

The notion that there is some grand, coherent vision that can be divined in one of these monstrosities is a psychological case study in cognitive dissonance. Politicians are so impressed with themselves – and so is the press – for their abilities to pass such big bills. The quality of the work, however, is routinely and summarily ignored. That they actually do harm is a reality not even considered.

Sure they all mean well. And in Washington, that’s anymore good enough.

Mr. Kline should indeed press forward, for the sake of restoring sanity, considering individual components of federal education law – each in isolation. Such a concentrated effort could result in prioritized reform that actually helps. This would make far more sense than the disastrous Congressional habit of shoehorning titles, sections and paragraphs into bill drafts that, for the sake of compromise, can be made to fit.

For example, finding a strategy, as Mr. Kline says he wants to do, to fulfill the federal government’s commitment to the federal mandate (fabricated by the Court) regarding individuals with disabilities should be the number-one topic considered in isolation. In fact, Kline should assert there will be no further business until this gets taken seriously.

It’s been too long in coming. It’s a seminal indicator of whether the Congress will ever be capable of following through on a truly important obligation impacting every single government-owned classroom in America.

Unfortunately, there is the U.S. Senate. Mr. Kline’s approach would be an innovative one, but the chances of his antediluvian contemporaries in the “other body” going along are about as good as the US Department of Education’s chances of turning around failing schools in Denver (that means “virtually impossible” for those of you within an hour’s drive of the U.S. Capitol).

Then there’re the unimaginative elites among federal education policy wonkers – the flying buttresses to the imperialistic perspective that the private sector, governors, state legislators, chief state school officers, state boards of education, local school boards, superintendents, principals and parents – oh, and the U.S. Constitution – are irrelevant to the solution. They’ll be the first ones to pan Mr. Kline’s sensible inclinations.

Hopefully, Mr. Kline will plow ahead, firm he is in the right and, hopefully, with the backing of Speaker Boehner. History would be on their side. Back when we locals, and our Tenth Amendment, formed the basis for legitimate education leadership, the country was – where? – TOWARD THE TOP of international academic-performance comparisons.

America’s best hope for achieving a generally well-educated citizenry is through a strategy of decentralization and vibrant market-based competition including private and government-owned institutions; not by usurping and consolidating more federal powers. Those who say improvement is impossible without federal punishments, rewards, controls and standards, must have slept through the most important chapters of American history.

Far from being a fresh approach, rewriting NCLB in pieces would be a reversion to the bad old days of education policy making—an approach whose high price we pay every day in our disjointed education system.

At a time when our goal needs to be preparing every child for a college education, we need to be thinking of ways to bring the pieces of education policy into greater, not less, alignment. Pre-school, elementary and secondary education need to be preparing students to succeed at the next level of learning. We need to be thinking of ways to smooth out regional variations in education at least enough that colleges and employers in different parts of the country can depend on applicants bringing at least minimal levels of preparation and attainment with them, whether they come from urban, suburban or rural communities.

By that standard, piecemeal policy-making would be a big step in the wrong direction. What sense would it make to decouple benchmark reform from school accountability? Shouldn’t our policy on special education, whose cost is one of most districts’ largest and least controllable expenses, be considered in the context of our overall review of education policy? And instead of adjusting proficiency benchmarks in ways that take pressure off schools to reform, shouldn’t we be adjusting policy to accelerate, not delay, reform?

Like building a bridge--like education itself--crafting education policy needs to be a continuum, not an aggregation of disconnected pieces. It's bad enough that various aspects of post-secondary policy are considered and passed separately from each other and from K-12 policy, but to break up K-12 policy in little pieces almost guarantees a piecemeal policy.

The new alignment of Congress will affect both the policy-making process and its outcomes. But education reform advocates need to start in the right place to stand the best chance of winding up with the best possible policy at the end.

Mr. Kress is correct to remind us, as he often does, of the historic importance of No Child Left Behind and the improvements we’ve seen as a result of its enactment. However imperfect the law may be, its passage marked the first time in our nation’s history that we committed to educating every child. Regardless of how the law is changed, we must not waiver in this commitment.

Every child in America must be educated. Every child must have a reasonable choice of desirable schools, engaging instruction by highly-qualified teachers, mastery of relevant and essential curriculum, and the support required to pursue meaningful life opportunities in school and out.

Every legislator in the House and Senate should find no trouble agreeing with this, nor should any of the rest of us. Piecemeal or wholesale, tear it down as Ms. Ravitch implores, or patch it up as Mr. Hess suggests, any changes to NCLB must continue to satisfy five foundational principles of reform:

1. Good learning. Every child educated to meet the challenges of today’s world.

2. Good schools. A reasonable choice of desirable environments in which to learn.

3. Good teachers. A highly-qualified instructor in every classroom.

4. Good curriculum. Mastery of relevant and essential knowledge and skills.

5. Good lives. The pursuit of meaningful life opportunities for all.

We can argue endlessly about federal requirements that are too loose or too tight, about the potential of local control, or more charter schools, or the use of VAMs to determine teacher employment, or the equity of competitive grant programs. In the end, however, we either stand for the principles of reform or we do not.

NCLB has its problems. But it has its principles, too—principles worth supporting even if the means by which we support them need to change.


What Does It Mean to Be Educated?

We’ve been trying to answer the question of what it means to be educated for a long time. We seem to have settled uneasily on an loosely-defined combination of test scores, standards, and rites of passage like high school graduation and college acceptance.

Unfortunately, undue emphasis on quantitative measures, and our endless pursuit of the technocratic dream of a perfect student scorecard, has cost us some perspective about the things that really matter in education and in life.

Most of us know, when we take off our politics, that something as complicated as being well-educated is best defined by a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative components. Ironically, we distrust qualitative elements as unreliable while trusting, without question, quantitative elements that are shown to be unreliable all the time. But this is just human nature—or the nature of human reasoning in education.

After everything we've been through I hope we take into consideration three important lessons as we work to improve on NCLB:

1. Campbell’s Law applies. Given means and opportunity, some states will make it as easy as possible to claim that kids are educated with little regard as to whether they actually are. Government requirements for student achievement—even the modest requirements of NCLB—make many states nervous and some citizens angry. Testing, standards, and targets for improvement, necessary though they may be, intensify the politics of education, and may at times make improving schools more difficult.

2. “Proficient” may not be sufficient. Even with quantitative metrics, psychometrically valid tests, and curriculum standards, it’s still hard to know how well-educated many children are. So much of our attention has been paid to kids who don’t pass tests that we haven’t taken a good look at the kids who do. That is, we still don’t know if “proficient” is sufficient. What happens, I wonder, to the kids who just barely pass their state tests? What life outcomes await this unnamed, uncounted subgroup?

3. Better testing doesn’t inspire better teaching. A focus on measuring student achievement hasn’t contributed to the hoped-for focus on improving teacher achievement. Testing and standards are maturing, but teaching is not. Some might argue that NCLB causes this, but there is no direct evidence to support such a claim. What I see in the field is schools and teachers making bad )fear-inspired) decisions about teaching and learnng that have nothing to do with testing and standards. The msot likely explanation, however, is that we’ve just put more eggs in one basket than the other. Most of our time, effort, and attention has gone to what kids should know and be able to do, while relatively little has gone to how we might help them learn and be able to do it. It’s probably time to invert this emphasis.

Like pornography and good modern art, the well-educated student is still one of those “I know it when I see it” things. An effective reauthorization of the ESEA could move us closer to a better understanding of this issue if the following changes were made:

1. A new form of accountability is needed. We need better accountability and controls for states in the collection and reporting of educational data. Past history suggests that states mischaracterize their "educational earnings reports" just as often as Fortune 500 companies fudge their own accounting reports. As onerous as such legislation would be, I think we need some kind of Sarbanes-Oxley approach to educational data where governors have to vouch for state scores and can be held responsible for statistical shenanigans.

2. Let the sunshine in. We need transparency requirements for states with regard to how their tests are constructed, administered, scored, and modified over time. We need transparency requirements as well for schools. School choice is meaningless when families have no reasonable way of understanding how their children will be educated. The place you send your kid all day should have to disclose, in simple language, how it intends to educate your child. That just seems fair to me. It would also improve the market for information and bring at least a modicum of meaning to the process of selecting a school.

3. Parents must receive an education, too. We need parent education requirements that force states, districts, and schools to set down in writing—or newer media more suited to our age—exactly how it is one’s child is being educated. If I buy a car, I get an owners manual. If I “buy into” an education, I barely get more than a report card I probably can’t understand. This would be a deeper extension of point #2 above, something detailed for the families of children attending a school rather than an overview for families choosing a school. It should probably also include formal school-based parent education programs that allow parents to experience directly the kind of teaching their kids are receiving every day.

It makes a nice argument to say that NCLB’s requirements of minimum competency in readind and math for all kids were over-blown or statistically impossible. But let’s own up to the fact that we haven’t even come close—or even put forth a sincere effort; if we taught as well as we complained, our kids would probably be briliiant. In nine years, we’ve made just the tiniest bit of progress. This is better than no progress, and it's hard to imagine making it all had it not been for NCLB. But clearly, the pace of educational progress must be quickened and smart changes to NCLB could do this.

It’s one thing to blame a law for being too onerous. But quite another to overlook the irrelevant nature of that criticism. NCLB requires minimum competence in only two subjects—and it lets the states set the minimums as low as they want. Even under these softball circumstances, we’ve pushed little more than half our kids to this modest goal. If people are angry about NCLB it is more likely they are angry at themselves for being a part of a system that performs so poorly. NCLB isn’t the blunt instrument so many think it is. It’s really just a mirror. And some people don’t like what they see in it.

The focus of any changes to NCLB must be on raising student achievement and on better defining what it means to be an educated young person in the 21st century. Anything that has the potential to water down this essential element of reform is a step backward and a blatant expression of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, not just for children but for our nation as a whole.

People talk all the time about the punitive nature of NCLB. But in all my years working in schools, and the hundreds of schools I have worked in, not once have I seen a punishment meted out. On the contrary, most failing schools have received additional resources. And even most of those that have dropped all the way to the bottom—those that have never once in nine years made AYP—are still operating just as they always have with little or no punitive intervention. Finally, can we really define as punishment the reorganization or closing a chronically failing school? Or would it be more accurate to say that the children and adults who inhabit these schools are being punished every day?

Though I’m not an advocate for punishment, I am an advocate for responsible action. If anything, with regard to sturggling schools, the “heavy hand of government” has been too light on the tiller. There simply hasn’t been enough serious intervention to turn tough schools around. The federal SIG options haven’t worked because we allowed schools to choose the least effective approach most of the time. Truth be told, NCLB’s bark is far worse than its bite. But schools, like many a canine-wary mailman, are unwilling to deliver.

If anything, our nation’s reaction to NCLB suggests that its accountability provisions should be strengthened not eased. The issue is figuring out the most effective way to do that.


What Makes a Good School?

No one seems to like the way NCLB defines school quality. But that doesn’t mean the idea of defining it is wrong. Every parent in America, and probably even all the other adults who don’t have school-age children, probably wants every kid to go to a good school. Here again, what federal legislator would disagree with this?

What some have termed NCLB’s “good school guarantee” must be maintained and probably strengthened. How we define a good school needs to change. But the essential concept must not only remain but also be enhanced.

Here again, balancing quantitative and qualitative measures of school health might be more useful. I’d like to see school inspections become a part of school accountability. I recognize how unlikely such an idea is. But I still think it makes sense.

Another useful tool might be the development of a “model school” concept. Why is it, with all the information we seem to have today about our students and our teachers that I can’t easily obtain a detailed description of what goes on at our nation’s most effective public schools?

I just took down from my bookshelf, Karin Chenowith’s illuminating publication, “How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools” but I find within it just a few pages on each successful school and only the roughest outline of a conceptual model for replicating these successes.

What’s worse is that I only know about this book because I study education reform (it’s not exactly a best seller, you know), and that I had to pay a small fortune for it thanks I’m sure to the fact that Harvard Education Press knew it would not sell very many copies even though it is, in my opinion, an important contribution to our understanding of school change.

Why couldn’t we modify the ESEA to ask DOE to publish of more in-depth descriptions of successful schools and replicable models? It would cost next to nothing. IES would probably do a great job of it. What legislator would vote against the notion of knowing more about what we’re doing well and how we can do more of it? NCLB is often criticized for being all stick and no carrot. Here’s a simple way to grow some carrots.

Instead of guessing, then, about what a good school is, or how to make a bad one better, everyone in America would have free access to the blueprints of successful public schools. Public schooling should be grounded in public knowledge. This is important to maintain the integrity of reform and to win the trust of the people. Research performed by powerful philanthropic organizations or agenda-driven non-profits and think tanks often lacks credibility.

Secretary Duncan has often said that we know what works. Why not make that “we” a reality and share this knowledge freely with “we” the people? I study education for a living and I have no idea what Secretary Duncan is referring to when he says we know what works.

If we know, why not tell people about it? It seems to me that after 27 years of reform, and almost a decade under NCLB, we ought to have at least a few successes to show off.

One small change to NCLB regarding the documentation of school successes—using what we might call “model school definition” and (for turnarounds) “model school transformation”—would advance reform dramatically and with little cost or controversy. It would also be good PR for NCLB.

What Makes a Good Teacher?

With the Highly-Qualified Teacher provision, NCLB tried ensure a good teacher in every classroom. Sadly, the qualification mechanism was incorrect. But the idea was not. Every teacher should be qualified and states do a horrible job of qualifying. Furthermore, states show no interest in improving their teacher certification systems, so federal intervention is clearly required in this area.

If ever there was a need for a national effort in education, it would be in teacher training and certification. The states simply won’t do it. No state is going to make teacher certification a meaningful thing. No state is going to make sure its teachers are even minimally qualified, let along highly qualified.

The problem is the lack of positive incentives and the incredible morass of negatives. States would have to spend a lot more money to create effective teacher training programs. They’d also have to shake up their public university systems, probably scuttling most of their schools of education in the process.

Financially and politically, improving teacher quality is untenable for the states. This is why defining teacher quality and requiring high-quality teachers is an essential role for the federal government.

Changes to the ESEA should include not only a technical definition of a highly-qualified teacher, but a research-based applied definition as well. The new ESEA should also include legislation aimed at improving the quality of teacher training nationwide. If we don’t know how to define good teaching, or we don’t know to train teachers to meet this standard, we should fund federal research in these two critical areas.

One easy thing to do would be to create model programs. Model teacher training programs could be based on those of existing institutions but it might be better to start them from scratch.

This could be done through the Regional Educational Laboratories. Once again, IES is the most likely entity within our federal government to bring good science and research discipline to solving an essential problem of reform.

With model teacher training programs we could begin studying teaching quality in a legitimate way. It’s not smart to leave this aspect of reform to private organizations. While the work of The Gates Foundation, TFA, TNTP, individual researchers, and other organizations is welcome, it is likely to be biased philosophically, politically, or economically. IES, by contrast, has earned the trust of the nation over many years. It’s work is beyond reproach.

An ESEA-created multi-site model teacher training program would likely run long enough to be managed by people in both major political parties. As such, it is unlikely to be as narrow or biased as efforts by other organizations.

What is Relevant and Useful Curriculum?

We have been trying to improve the quality of K-12 curriculum in our country for more than two decades. It is unclear, however, if we have made much progress. I believe there are three reasons for this:

1. We’re only open to one way of improving curriculum. The only approach we’ve tried is curriculum standardization. The only theory we’ve invoked about curriculum is that everyone does better when everyone is taught the same thing. This may be true. And if it is, it’s certainly an easy fix. But since we haven’t improved curriculum in twenty years, and we’ve had many sets of standards to work with, I wonder if we’ve created an unintended longitudinal study of the limited effects of standardization on curriculum quality. My hunch is that standards are popular because they are an intellectual convenience. It’s so much easier to keep track of what we’re supposed to be doing if we’re all doing the same thing. It’s also much easier to measure education, and to turn kids’ knowledge and abilities into sets of numbers if we can use standardized tests based on standardized curriculum. If indeed it is true that having standards improves curricular quality—and we haven't proven this yet—then we’ll have to find out which standards are best. Unfortunately, if every state adopts CCSSI’s work, we’ll have only one set to work with and thus we will be unable to make any meaningful comparisons.

2. We pretend that curriculum is somehow separate from instruction. In theory, curriculum is separate from instruction; in our minds we can understand the difference between what gets taught and how it gets taught. But in the classroom, things aren’t so neat and tidy. The curriculum given to a teacher often determines its instruction. At the same time, instructional methods have extraordinary influence over curriculum content. We may have curricular standards but we don’t have instructional standards. Therefore, content can't be matched easily with delivery. If we took the reality of teaching into account, efforts like CCSSI’s would include rigorous field testing to determine the interaction of curriculum standards and instructional technique. But when curriculum is divorced from instruction, and never tested prior to its implementation, we have no reasonable way of knowing if it will be better than what we've had in the past or not. Curriculum and instruction must be studied and designed in tandem just as they are applied in tandem in the classroom. (As an aside: Don’t’ you think it’s odd that something like CCSSI's work that will have such wide influence on American education will be implemented without ever having been tested?)

3. We’re more comfortable codifying the past than creating the future. Having reviewed dozens of standards documents over the years, I find myself always asking the same question: How different is this curriculum from what has been taught in the past? How will the everyday classroom expression of CCSSI’s curriculum differ from the the everyday reality of what may have been taught in an average school in 1960 or 1910? We still have essentially the same subjects. Much of what is taught is still taught in the same sequence. We still follow the liberal arts tradition handed down to us over the ages. And yet, the world is a very different place now than it was just a century ago. What about computer science, financial literacy, or social and emotional intelligence? We know that these things are very important to life in our time. But they won’t be represented in any standardized curriculum. How many new and emerging disciplines will not be taught? All our efforts at standardization have sought to standardize only a single curriculum—the curriculum of the past. We’ve never tried anything else in a serious way. It’s as though standardization has become more important than the curriculum we seek to standardize. We want very badly to make sure that every teacher is doing the same thing, but we don’t seem to care quite as much about what every teacher does. To this we might add that, as research shows, instruction trumps curriculum every time. Quality teaching is by far that most important in-school factor in student achievement. Curriculum doesn't even come close. This is just another reason why curriculum standards should not be created in a vacuum, why they should be broadly field-tested, and why best practice instructional methods should be closely associated with effective curriculum delivery.

To date, it seems that our best effort at curricular improvement is the work of CCSSI. But CCSSI’s effort, valiant though it is, is only a small part of what actually ends up being taught to kids. So while the work is impressive in the scope of its adoption—thanks largely to some serious federal arm twisting via Race to the Top—we simply have no idea what the results of its implementation will be. Again, a little field testing would have been nice.

The biggest problem here, of course, is that we have only one set of standards to work with. It will be 2015 before we have new tests in place to measure these standards, and probably 2020 before we know much about their effect. So another ten years will go by before we know much of anything. And because we have only one curriculum to evaluate, the one thing we'll never know is how good it really is relative to anything else.

The new ESEA must address the challenge of curricular improvement. In requiring testing, NCLB essentially required states to move to a standards-based model of curriculum. Many people complained that the quality of the standards was uneven. But then, so was the integrity of the tests that measured them. So who’s to say what the bigger problem is?

Again, more research is in order. A new ESEA could allot funding for serious study of the kind of curriculum we really need. Let’s be honest: CCSSI, as good as it is, is just another guess. For the many people in our country who believe strongly that high-quality curriculum is the key to high-quality education, good scientific research about curriculum is vital.

Just as we have no useful definition of what makes a good education, a good school, or a good teacher, we also don't know what makes a good curriculum. A small amount of funding to answer this question should be part of a new ESEA.

What are Meaningful Life Opportunities?

In the excitement of executing data-driven reform, we’ve bought into what might be called the Myth of Preparation. The purpose of grades K-3 is now to make sure kids pass 3rd grade tests. The purpose of each subsequent grade is to prepare students for successful test performance. Accumulating successful test scores through 12th grade will now—according to CCSSI—leave students prepared for college and career. This is, of course, a ridiculous claim becuase we'll have to wait about 15 years before we have empircial information at all about how ready our CCSSI-educated kids are.

Measurement was supposed to be ameans by which our system might be improved but it has become an end in itself. The oft-repeated bromide, “What gets tested, gets taught!” has been conclusively proven. What hasn’t been proven is the more important idea that what gets taught gets learned.

For most people, most of the time, passing a test is not a meaningful life experience. Nor does test passage translate to or correlate with meaningful life experiences down the road. As education has become dominated by testing, the purpose of education has begun to change.

It isn’t clear that we’ve ever understood the purpose of education in our country. The best we can say is that education used to serve many purposes. A decade ago, we began to say that the purpose of K-12 schooling was tied to college, career, and citizenship. As of this year, citizenship fell off the list and college is now just a stepping stone to career. So, if we want to be honest, school is job training.

But what happened to life training?

Dewey probably said it best: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” But more and more this is not the case.

Another person I’ve discussed this issue with is Carol Vecchio, founder of the Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal. Her organization helps people find their way to meaningful roles in life. She and I joke that we push young people to cruise from kindergarten right through their college degrees, and then we find them in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble buying the latest edition of “What Color is Your Parachute?”

So much education, so little knowledge; so much studying, so little learning about oneself, one’s world, and what really matters to the individual children we aspire to educate.

Clearly, testing is something that matters to us. But somehow we have to get past test achievement and get to a place where we can build into K-12 education an explicit connection to life achievement. We have to see education, in Dewey-esque fashion, as a set of meaningful life experiences that guide young people to more meaningful life experiences once their formal education has been concluded.

I don’t know what role the federal government can play in this except to get out of the way. No one has ever suggested that testing in every grade from 3rd to 8th was necessary. Why not test less frequently? No one has pointed out something that many neurologists and cognitive psychologists know: that of the traditional school skills, writing is the single best brain workout kids can have. So why not test writing along with reading and math? Testing could be a more useful part of the system if we tested more strategically.

It’s unlikely we will ever have an education system that mirrors the experience offered by members of The Coalition of Essential Schools or other alternative approaches to the traditional factory model we seen so dedicated to preserving. The principles that define these schools, however, are often oriented toward making education a meaningful life experience—and to giving kids the experiences they need to make their lives after school more meaningful, too.

We can’t legislate the philosophical formation of schools. But we can make sure our legislation doesn’t accidentally create its own educational philosophy—a philosophy based on coerced conformity, minimum competence, and passive-aggressive compliance. The biggest risk of all is that of limiting the types of schools that can exist and the new types that can be created. Testing, standards, and an inappropriate emphasis on the quantitative reduction of educational experience, could become the fundamental organizing principles of most American schools. I don’t think anyone wants that to happen.

Legislation and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences

As much as this is a time for urgent action, it must also be a time of great humility. No Child Left Behind was historic and ambitious. But like all things monumental, it casts a long shadow, and deep in the umbra some people have discovered a few things they’re not happy about. Yet the monument itself—and what it represents as our nation’s first declaration of quality education for all—must remain standing.

Let’s continue to follow NCLB’s basic principles. Let’s continue to support it’s ambitious ends of competent students, highly-qualified teachers, and good schools. Let’s just be more thoughtful—using what we’ve learned over the last decade—in determining the means we use to get there.

With all due respect to Secretary Duncan and his reassuring refrain that we know what works, I would argue, based on well-known statistics and my own personal experience, that he is wrong (or that the “we” he refers to is an extremely small group of people I haven't run into yet). I think we know that some things have worked under certain conditions on a limited scale. But lines like that aren’t the stuff of great speeches.

I think we know many things that work but we don’t know how to get many people to use them. There’s policy and there’s implementation. Both are required. So even if we’ve got the former right—and there’s only the slightest indication that we do—it all comes down to the latter, and nobody knows how to make that work.

Whatever we decide to do, I believe humility is in order. We need more and better research conducted by impartial parties. We need more time to understand how changes in the global economy are changing the ways people live—and what they will need to learn to live better. Perhaps most important of all, we need to learn more about how legislation at the federal level plays out at the classroom level.

If there’s a single over-arching lesson to be learned from NCLB, it’s that we have many more lessons to learn. Perhaps, then, this round of reauthorization should be focused on learning—learning for kids, learning for teachers, learning about schools, learning about what works. That way, instead of just contending that we know what works, we can actually tell people what works—and show them how to make it work in their states, districts, schools, and classrooms.

There's not a word of truth in the assertions Diane Ravitch makes in the first paragraph of her comment.

The only way she can claim pre-NCLB NAEP gains are higher than post-NCLB gains is to put test results from 2002-2005 in the pre-NCLB period. That's a little hard to do since NCLB was passed in 2001.

Regardless of where one puts those scores, she ought to compare the whole period of time in which the accountability policies she opposes and I favor have been in effect. Would she like to compare 1989-1999 to 1999-2009?

She claims thousands of schools are going to close under NCLB. There's nothing in the law that requires closure of schools.

There's no evidence anywhere that NCLB has caused "rage against public education."

And though a few states lowered their performance standards in the past decade, most research studies show that just as many states, if not a few more, have actually raised their standards.

Get your facts right, Professor.

SCRAP NCLB AND START OVER

American educators are famously divided about all sorts of issues, but there is one about which they agree with amazing consistency: NCLB is a disaster. It has not produced big gains in test scores (except on phony state tests). On the federal NAEP, the gains were larger pre-NCLB. It has encouraged states to lower standards and play with the tests so as to pretend to reach 100% proficiency. It has unleashed rage against public education because of reality that no state is even close to 100% proficiency. Its remedies don't work, its sanctions don't work, it is punitive. Hundreds if not thousands of schools will close because of NCLB, because they enroll high numbers of kids who can't read English or who entered the school far behind or who live in desperate poverty.

Rep. Kline is right: Congress should keep its promise to fund special education. It never has approached the 40% that it promised to pay for its mandates.

And Congress should take the federal government out of the business of telling states and districts how to reform schools. It has expanded the federal role far beyond the competence of Congress or the administration. A good principle: Help our schools get better. Stop attacking them.

Diane Ravitch

Rick Hess is right: we are more likely to see a temporary “AYP patch” in the next Congress than anything else, with the possible exception of the “teacher quality” definition in NCLB and reworking of Title II. The practical question on an AYP patch is not whether there would be significant support in Congress for it—there would be in both chambers—but how the White House plays the issue or what they’d extract from the Republican-led House in return for it.

If it weren't so tragic, it would be funny.

For the past couple of weeks, official Washington has been wringing its hands over the most recent PISA results. This is a ritual that takes place with each PISA announcement. Don't get me wrong: I, too, am concerned that our students are not performing at the exemplary levels of students in Shanghai, Taiwan, and elsewhere.

What makes me crazy is that official Washington can turn on a dime and now begin to wring its hands over the supposedly "unreasonable" and "impractical" expectation that students jump the low bar set by NCLB eight years ago for 2014! You see - policymakers had the gall back then to think that poor kids and kids of color ought at the very least be able to perform at a minimal level set by the states, their own sense of "grade level," after the states were given 12 years to get them there. This ridiculously low expectation is now derided as "unachievable" by the very same folks who are upset that the good children of Shanghai are outperforming our children. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Let's recall some history.

After NCLB was passed, the states wanted to be given more time before they were pressed to do better, arguing that if they could be allowed to keep the bar low for the first several years, they could be counted on to achieve greater gains in the out years, once their reforms were in place. The USDOE granted their wish for "balloon payment" plans, and now that we're in those out years, the very same states have our current USDOE leadership saying we're about to have a "train wreck" unless the 2014 deadline is further extended.

Also, recall that the law never said that 100 percent of the students had to be over the low bar. It understood that a certain percent of students would be absent for testing and that other students who are seriously disabled couldn't be assessed within the group. But the vast majority in the Congress who voted for the law thought that if we were going to be competitive with other nations surely we should at the least expect that virtually all of our cognitively able students could achieve a state set, minimal level of proficiency after 12 years of solid effort. Some even thought the bar could then be raised to go to even higher heights.


But, no. Now we're told that the one thing that must be done legislatively - above all else - is to get rid of the 2014 deadline, even if it means that the other key issues crying out for attention in a reauthorization must be postponed. And the way I read it is that the folks who are moaning for relief are not asking for an extension that matches increased performance standards, or for tweaking to effect a transition to higher performance standards (not content standards!) Rather the underlying motive once again appears to be the same motive that caused the request for the balloon payment plans in the first place, that is, "take the damn pressure off of me, and keep it off of me!"

The sad part, of course, is that the pressure is there to get poor kids, kids of color, and disabled kids at least up to "grade level." And now we're supposed to take that pressure off, now when we've gotten to the time when the states said they'd get the big promised gains?

For all who think tweaking is in order, I have ideas about fixes that are appropriate. You may have some, too. But tweaking is not what's being proposed.

But, even sadder, is all the moaning over the PISA results. We're going to catch up with the Asian tigers when we can't get stay committed to getting our poor kids and kids of color over the low bar of "grade level"? To paraphrase our good Secretary, it will be utter fraud to say that we'll educate these students to the new, higher standards when we so readily abandon the commitment to educating them to lower standards, after 12 years of trying.

Actually, as I think about all this, there is no choice between laughing or crying. It's cryin' time!

As I've said before, I don't think much will happen with NCLB (nee ESEA) before 2013-- whether as a full bill or carved into little pieces. In fact, as several veteran Hill staff have noted, NCLB balances so many interests and has so many interlocking parts that it's tough to know how it could effectively be broken into smaller steps. That's doubly true in a fiscal environment where Congress won't have new dollars to sweeten the pot or soften the blow for aggrieved interests.

That said, I'm standing by my prediction that, before the 2012 elections, Congress and the Obama administration will find a way to enact some kind of "NCLB patch" which suspends the consequences of a law that will shortly label most American schools as failing to make AYP. I don't expect a "stripped-down" bill or "piecemeal" legislation, but something simpler; legislation that says, "Those consequences? Disregard for now, we were just kidding." I'm anticipating somethng like the annual "doc fix" Congress passes to halt mandated cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, or the annual "Alternative Minimum Tax patch," which spares millions of taxpayers from the AMT without actually addressing concerns with the 41-year-old statute

Would an "NCLB patch" be good policy? Nah. Would it make it harder to muster the will to address problems in NCLB? Probably. But it has one great virtue: it's the easiest way for Congress to alleviate pain for lots of constituents, while angering only a handful of impassioned education reformers at places like the Education Trust. Congress is bad at addressing big, complex problems but excels at stopgaps that ease the pain. Like the "doc fix," the AMT patch is never offset-- such measures are adding billions upon billions to the deficit this year. Yet Congress hardly blinks an eye as it routinely passes these costly patches with bipartisan smiles. A cost-free bill that halts the clumsy remedies of a reviled NCLB will be easy pickings by comparison. My bet: a bipartisan measure rendering NCLB toothless, by making its remedy provisions voluntary or by otherwise declawing AYP, will pass sometime in late 2012. And that'll be the only "piece" of NCLB that does.