Perhaps it’s not so unusual that the same person who fought to get a waiver from NCLB’s tutoring requirement is the same person who is pushing a fast track for making the bill’s requirements more flexible. When some of Arne Duncan’s Chicago schools were failing kids, he asked then Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for a waiver from the requirement that students be permitted to leave and take their tutoring money elsewhere. Arne Duncan thought he could do tutoring better than the private sector, so he sought to deliver tutoring rather than send the money out of house. There’s no data on whether it worked, and some in Chicago say not much changed during that period of time following NCLB, other than a heightened awareness of the problem and a tenacity by Duncan to pursue some modest, external reforms (charters, some contracting). Once a school superintendent, always a school superintendent. And while Duncan is not the issue, his brand of reform puts Superintendents and school boards in the driver’s seat. Problem is, last time they drove that car, it kept getting banged up.

But it was NCLB’s teeth -- the threat of loss of money or worse -- that got people motivated. The hard, fast consequences of accountability, and the spotlight on data, however challenged by differing vantage points, prevented the country from hiding the shameful state of education in our schools, from the world or ourselves.

If the law and solutions it offered had actually been enforced fully, not waived upon request, and activated as intended, we would be having a very different conversation today. Instead, despite the sunshine on pitiful achievement, states and schools have been allowed to slip through the cracks – as ever – in the years since NCLB was enacted, all to the detriment of our kids. (Can anyone stand up for Central Falls High in Rhode Island, a school where seven percent of 11th graders tested proficient in math?)

Now the President and his Secretary of education want to remove even the lightweight hammer that existed, and be more positive, more accommodating and more flexible in their rewrite of the law. They want to be, well, kinder and gentler, and for what? So that people whose titles supposedly put them in charge of schools can say they made local decisions? How quickly will change occur when there’s no firm consequence in place? It won’t.

Thankfully, the demand for fast-tracking a change in law that, however flawed, still accomplished much, is falling on deaf ears. Even when the Secretary warned of an 82% failure rate, the House didn’t jump to his rescue. That’s not because they are a bunch of ill informed Republicans or freshman still-in-training. They have more interest than anyone in gutting the law. It’s because Duncan offered no real solution that hasn’t be tried and failed before (e.g. voluntary consent and monetary incentives. Think Title 1).

‘Race to the Top’ was a temporary blip of mostly inconsequential changes. The real changes are now happening because Governors are fed up with having to balance a budget on enormously generous union-driven pension and benefits packages. That’s causing them to look hard at tenure, last-hired, choice and more.

Ignoring those realities and driving a demand for a new bill by August might be in the best interest of the education establishment, but it is not in the best interest of our nation.

When ESEA was nearing passage, researchers warned that over time most schools would be labeled ‘failing.’ Within several years, a series of studies of different states concluded the same, saying that by 2014, 70% and more of schools would not have sufficient numbers of students scoring proficient on their state’s tests. Now Sec. Duncan says the rate will be even faster, with some 80% of schools likely to be deemed failures in the coming year. Perhaps it won’t be so bad, that the earlier estimates are more accurate. In any case, it is very high.

Does it matter? Depends on the consequences, which with NCLB are punitive, especially to teachers and principals.

If you are being blamed for not achieving what reasonable analysis said you never could, given the resources and circumstances, yes it matters. NCLB induced a lot of very defensive teaching to the test. Teachers have been blamed for this, but if those with the official power to set the goals say the goal is to boost scores, why is it that teachers are supposed to act like the real goal is something else? It does not happen in other endeavors and won’t in education. There is an old saying, I am told Sicilian, that “A fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case, is NCLB.

Schools, teachers and students need adequate resources to get their job done well. Study after study says that in many locales, they don’t. They need curriculum, assessments and expectations worthy of human dignity, Instead, they get “fill-in-bubble” and “write five paragraphs to a trivial prompt” as the mandated goal of schooling, with curriculum narrowed and instruction reduced to test prep in order to meet those officially enforced goals.

By many measures, too many children are not being well educated. Mostly these are children from low-income families, disproportionately children of color. The illusion that test and punish would lead to high-quality education for these children was at best a pipe dream and at worst a means to avoid addressing the destructive consequences of extensive poverty (the U.S has a far higher percentage of children in poverty than other ‘advanced’ nations) and ill-resourced schools.

Other nations have less child poverty and do better than the U.S. on international exams and high school graduation rates – and they don’t rely on testing as a tool of change. The U.S. imposes high-stakes testing, fails to address poverty, and does less well.

And in response to the NCLB mess, the Obama-Duncan “solutions” perpetuate core concepts of NCLB that need to be eliminated, adding some new, research-unsupported and certain-to-be destructive twists, such as tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Hard to tell what it will take to bring sense to federal education policy. The Forum on Educational Accountability is trying (see its recent recommendations), as are others, but it remains an uphill push against this dominant ideology.

What is a "failing school"? This isn't just an existential question. One of the chief problems with No Child Left Behind is its measurement standards. Essentially there are 37 ways for a school to "fail" and one way to succeed. So to start, the definition of "failing" is misleading. There is widespread agreement that the current snapshot of school performance under NCLB – looking at two standardized tests taken one day of the year – does not provide an accurate label of whether a school is excellent, making progress or struggling to serve it students well. As a result, few people have any confidence in NCLB’s method to label "failing" schools.

The predictions of the percentage of "failing schools" next year should not be the impetus that spurs Congress to act now to fix this law. Rather, it is the number of students who are struggling without the services they need to be successful or in jeopardy of dropping out that should prompt Congress to take immediate action. We hope Congress will re-write the law to provide students with the tools and resources they need to achieve their academic goals and provide educators with the tools and resources they need to deliver the best education possible to America’s students.

The next version of ESEA must:

Prepare all students to thrive in college, careers and life. The new law must ensure that students learn to think critically and solve problems, skills essential to living and working in the 21st century. It must support the use of data to improve instruction and use multiple, valid sources of evidence of growth in student learning and school performance over time.

Elevate the teaching profession. The new law must help districts recruit and retain excellent teachers and education support professionals. There should be rigorous preparation for entry into the teaching profession along with comprehensive systems of induction, mentoring and professional development for educators.

Make schools safe and equitable. The new law should provide sustained and targeted support and research-based intervention strategies for struggling schools and provide funding for all schools that is adequate, equitable and sustained.

What a sad journey for Arne Duncan.

He started out a bold reformer, with a lot of cash in stimulus money to lubricate the way for major change.

But now, without the cash and seemingly desperate to pass legislation, he seems lost in space.

States that did not receive Race to the Top funds appear - predictably - to be moving off in a variety of directions on their own. And even states that did receive the funds seem to be aligned as long as the tie through the funds lasts.

With diminishing influence through cash, the Administration apparently now is panicking to find new leverage through legislation. And nowhere has the panic been more clear than the Secretary's testimony last week in which he tried to scare the Congress into thinking that 82% of the schools are going to be treated as failures by NCLB.

Mind you, only slightly over 30% are missing AYP currently ,and less than 20% are facing any kind of consequences at all. It wasn't long ago that the Secretary wore a totally different Chicken Little mask, decrying how terrible we're doing academically against international competitors. One might have concluded from those speeches that the inevitable railing against NCLB would have been that it identified too few schools, rather than too many, as needing improvement!

But, no, the President shows up at a middle school and showcases it as an example of NCLB's over identification of schools. This, he does, despite the fact that only slightly above half of the Blacks, Hispanics, and the economically disadvantaged in the school are proficient in math.

Lost in space indeed.

I wish the USDOE, as Tom Loveless has suggested, would release its backup data to show the basis for its new scare prediction.

Also, I wish that the USDOE would show the steps it is taking (other than softening waiver after waiver) to press and even help the states speed up the improvement in academic achievement they promised in their plans from the early 2000s.

Finally, since the good Secretary keeps trashing NCLB for trying to hold schools accountable for educating disadvantaged students to the lower goal of grade level, I'd like for him to show us how he is going to hold folks accountable to the higher standards of postsecondary readiness. Or, is the real and hidden truth that there will be NO accountability for the achievement of disadvantaged students, except those in the bottom 5% of the schools?

It's going to be a difficult path back to earth for the Administration. It's now regularly turning off the bipartisan reform coalition. Notwithstanding its grandstanding on NCLB, its positions are unappealing to Republicans because they do not support choice, they do not unravel federal involvement in spending programs, and they do not slow spending growth. And, frankly to the Administration's credit, some of its positions are deeply disappointing to the unions.

It's hard to see reauthorization any time soon.

As for Ms. Ravitch's comments, I would remind the good historian that Texas' white, Black, and Hispanic students today are performing better than their peers across the nation on the NAEP in EACH AND EVERY category in 4th grade reading and math as well as 8th grade reading and math. Further, broken down on this disaggregated basis, Texas is not far behind Massachusetts. And, compared to the more similar California, Texas' Blacks and Hispanics are generally between one and a half to two years ahead of their peers in California on the NAEP!

As for Mr. Welner, I would remind him that since consequential accountability (of which NCLB is the latest chapter) became the norm in the country by 1999, the NAEP scores for disadvantaged kids particularly have gone way up:

In the 2000s, after a decade of stagnation, reading scores for 9 year old Blacks have gone up an astonishing 21 points; they've gone up 14 points for Hispanics.

In the 2000s, after a decade of stagnation, math scores for 9 year old Blacks have gone up 13 points; they've gone up 21 points for Hispanics.

In the 2000s, after a decade of stagnation, math scores for 13 year old Blacks have gone up 11 points; they've gone up 9 points for Hispanics.

(Sadly, 8th grade reading remains stuck decade to decade for all students, a challenge we must all take on.)

The accuracy of Secretary Duncan’s dire prediction is irrelevant. Nothing happens when schools don’t make AYP. At worst, they get more money. Very few schools that have fallen all the way to the bottom have undergone any kind of real restructuring, so what would it matter if 100% of American schools fell short of the mark?

Most people who work at the district or building level know that few schools have tried sincerely to meet their goals. I’ve been in literally hundreds of them where the preferred reform activity is killing good ideas that make teaching easier for teachers and learning better for kids. So the revelation that most schools won’t reach the goals is hardly front page news.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

One thing the anti-NCLB crowd doesn’t often talk about is that much of NCLB never got implemented because so many of the people it affected worked so hard to weasel out of it. That’s something I’ve seen for years, but it never gets reported because it can only be observed behind closed classroom and principal’s office doors. That’s where reform is really happening—or not.

To make matters worse, states lowered their cut scores and made their tests easier to pass, schools and districts cheated on their testing, and much of the money that went to schools in trouble was wasted by people who seemed to prefer their troubles to positive change. We can’t blame NCLB for these behaviors. Educators chose them independently. The law didn’t make them do it.

The Pogo Principal

Throughout NCLB most of my clients intentionally declined to implement the recommendations they sought from me even though I proved, by implementing them successfully in their own classrooms, that they worked just fine. NCLB didn’t cause principals to develop spontaneous blindness to good practice. Most educators just wanted to ignore it; many told me they simply hoped it would eventually go away.

And now it is about to.

The enemy wasn’t NCLB, it was us. The very people who did the least to implement the law have won—to a small extent at least. Because all they had to do to “prove” NCLB a failure was not implement good practice. And not implementing something is a very easy thing to do.

Good Intentions in Theory; Poor Understanding in Practice

NCLB always seemed well-intentioned to me, if perhaps a bit naïve. Most education policy does not account well for what it’s really like on the ground in schools and classrooms across America. Even a president can’t push his agenda through millions of classroom doors if the folks who stand behind them won’t let his agenda in.

This is where reauthorization should be focused: less on creating a watered-down mandate for miscellaneous change and more on creating specific structures for change and a national culture of change. That will take a stronger bill, not a weaker one. And yet, most of the ideas floated for potential implementation seem weaker and less coherent than what we have now.

Got a Better Idea?

NCLB should have been reauthorized a long time ago. But it hasn’t been. There are many theories about timing and agendas and waiting for mid-terms and all that. But we’ve come to the end of these little fantasies and we really are out of time. I think the reason we haven’t reauthorized NCLB is that, for all its unpopularity, no one has come up with anything better.

NCLB is far from perfect. But the Obama Blueprint is in no way an improvement. You can tell because not even hardcore anti-NCLB folks are very excited about it. And later on, when he gives the best parts of it away to the Republicans in pursuit of his fantasy of bipartisanship, the eventual reauthorization will likely resemble a patchwork of poorly coordinated ideas that will prove to be little more than the tattered remnants of a law that supposedly we never liked in the first place.

At this juncture, reform seems to have deteriorated to the point where we prefer to create less of something we don’t like rather than creating more of something we do. That doesn’t speak well of our intentions, our abilities, or our ethics. But it speaks loud and clear nonetheless. Legislators don't want to touch NCLB because they don't have the courage to do what needs to be done to improve it.

The Sky is Falling

Ever since the midterm, Secretary Duncan has turned from bold reformer to Chicken Little. We are no longer racing to the top because, apparently, the sky is falling, we’re broke, and we’re all gonna have to magically become innovative or learn to love broccoli.

Ed reform has become something akin to that strange dead salmon metaphor Sarah Palin flummoxed us with two years ago. We’re not making any progress. The key players involved—in the White House, at DOE, and on both sides of aisle—are just floating downstream because they can’t come up with significant improvements to a law they apparently all dislike.

Don’t Know Whatcha Got Until It’s Gone

The farther we get from NCLB, the better it’s going to look. Not because it was so perfectly conceived and executed but because people spent more time complaining about it than they did improving it. This is not how we do things in school. When kids turn in work that doesn’t work, we take them aside and we help them make it work better. This simple spirit of timely action and constructive improvement is what we have needed all along to create a promising reauthorization.

We like to complain a lot about teachers these days. But I can’t see that legislators are setting much of an example. The thing we hate the most in teaching—and I’m speaking as an educator now—is when people pass their problems along to the person who has to deal with them the next year. But this, it seems, is exactly what we’re doing with NCLB. Each newly-elected legislative body figures out a convenient reason to push the problem onto the next legislative body. Meanwhile, reform languishes, cynicism abounds, and inertia sets in.

President Obama has called for reauthorization before the coming school year. Good for him. Why he couldn’t have made the call a little earlier is, I’m sure, perfectly clear to pundits and policy wonks, but utterly unfathomable to those of us who are working in schools day to day. We deserved something better.

The Pit and the Pendulum

The most intransigent educators in our system said that NCLB was just a passing fad. This gave them the justification they needed to do nothing in their schools. The longer we postpone reauthorization, and the weaker reauthorization is, the more we will have done to validate the most dangerous attitude in all of education—that school swings back and forth like a pendulum, always returning to the same place, thus requiring no change on the part of any of us because the system itself never really changes.

Like the famous Poe character awaiting his fate in the pit, I am hoping with all my heart that this time—just this once—the pendulum does not complete its predictable arc. Starting over is not an option for me.

The Obama Administration and Education Department are correct: our schools are in dire straits, and we cannot wait to act. The longer we wait, the further behind we become as a nation compared to other countries. We have failed too many of our students, for too long.

When I arrived in Memphis two and half years ago, we took a holistic and honest assessment of our district. What we found was an unacceptable graduation rate (62.1%), an astonishing 6 percent of kids graduating college ready, and a growing number of educators despaired of ever making a difference, among many other core issues plaguing the district. We did not shrug our shoulders and hope no one would notice: Instead, we designed an aggressive, bold, and courageous plan to transform our schools and student performance. We call it our “Cradle to Career” Road Map of Critical Benchmarks for MCS students.

We have made progress, but have a long way to go. We overhauled our curriculum to be aligned with the national core standards and newer and tougher state standards. We now offer strategic supplementary supports to students who are overage for grade and at risk for dropping out. Through these efforts and others, our graduation rate has improved by 8.7 percent (70.8%), without lowering standards. We enacted a district-wide writing program, resulting in straight A’s in writing on the State Report Card for grades 5, 8, and 11; and, we have intensified our Pre-K through third grade continuum to get more children on the path to learning at younger ages. Moreover, our Teacher Effectiveness Initiative has created a leading edge framework for recruiting, supporting, evaluating and rewarding good teaching that will largely influence the state’s new measures.

In Memphis, we have made a commitment to improving our schools. So too, has our state: Tennessee raised its academic standards last year, going from having among the lowest standards in the country to among the highest, and closely aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

While No Child Left Behind is a valuable tool for improving the education we offer our children, we must not discount teachers in our local and statewide reform efforts. Anyone doubting that change can come about from the “inside out” needs to look no further than the Memphis City Schools.

In short, yes, the situation is dire for American public education; yes, educators can and must agree on proficiency standards. And, no, an August 2011 deadline for this high stakes work is not crucial. Rather, make haste slowly. Get it right this time!

There is indeed an urgency. Americans want to change the status quo in our schools. NCLB is the status quo. NCLB is about using student tests to drive school reform. But testing is not teaching, nor is it learning. It's just measuring -- and we know that it's not measuring so many things that we as parents and community members care about. We also know that the testing is distorting how our children experience school.

It is, accordingly, sad and dispiriting to watch as the adminstration promotes ESEA reauthorization ideas that essentially double down on NCLB. Instead of tests with high stakes for schools, we will have tests with high stakes for teachers. We know what will happen: we'll see even more teaching to the test, further narrowed curriculum, and further increases in state test scores with no comparable increase in NAEP scores.

Change I can believe in would not intensify NCLB -- it would replace it.

It is urgent to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act before almost every public school in the United States is called a "faillure" for not reaching 100% proficiency, a goal not reached by any nation in the world, ever in history. Setting impossible goals simply sets up public education to fail.

It is imperative to remove all the punishments and "remedies" that were added when ESEA became NCLB.

NCLB has caused untold damage to American public education. Teachers are demoralized, cherished community schools are closing, and the whole charade is based on a myth, the myth of the "Texas miracle." In 2001, Washington and the nation was abuzz with talk of the Texas miracle: All the state had to do was test every child every year, publish the results, reward the winners, shame the losers, and--poof!--test scores went up, graduation rates went up, and the achievement gap was closing.

Except it wasn't true. We now know that the 8th grade reading score for Texas on NAEP is unchanged from 1998 to 2009. No miracle there. Just weeks ago, former First Lady Barbara Bush wrote an article in the Houston Chronicle, urging no cuts to education, because students in Texas are 46th, 47th, 48th in mathematics and literacy in the nation. No miracle happened.

We have a law that is based on a claim that was not true. Scholars like Stephen Klein and Walt Haney wrote at the time (back in 2001) that it wasn't true, but Congress paid them no heed. We (I include myself) wanted to believe. But we were fooled, and now the entire nation is testing kids endlessly, seeing cheating scandals erupt, making billions for testing companies, but setting up tens of thousands of public schools fail, be stigmatized and privatized. This is beyond stupid.

NCLB is a failed federal policy. As soon as possible, Congress should remove the punishments (closing schools, firing staff, privatizing schools, etc.) at once. It should examine ways to return ESEA to its original purpose, which was to send funds to the schools that enroll the neediest students, so that they can overcome the considerable disadvantages associated with poverty and not knowing how to speak or read English. No school was ever improved by closing it. No child was ever helped by closing his or her school.