In recent years, we have heard that we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to school improvement. The past decade has taught us that there is no such thing as perfect when it comes to ESEA. But recent actions have demonstrated that good – at least for now – is best measured with an egg timer versus an hourglass.

As originally put forward last week, the Harkin-Enzi bill offers some promising steps forward. Attempts to address some of the needs of underserved children are particularly encouraging, including the increased rigor around the definition of low-performing schools to include dropout factories and the closing of the “comparability loophole,” which has led to significant funding inequities within districts that serve low-income students. The development of a commission on the assessment of English Language Learners is also very encouraging, as is increased accountability, flexibility, and more equitable funding for public charter schools.

The same could have been said about the teacher evaluation provisions, but no longer. Originally, the ESEA draft required states to develop mandatory teacher evaluation systems that included student outcomes as a variable. Such a system is essential if we are to ensure that all students – particularly those from historically disadvantaged populations and in our lowest-performing schools – have access to the best teachers. But such a provision is no more in the Harkin draft, quietly removed over last weekend and replaced with language requiring such systems ONLY in school districts that receive TIF dollars. So instead of working to guarantee all students an effective teacher, the bill draft only requires measures of effectiveness for those districts that are already incentivizing effectiveness, leaving the vast majority of schools, districts, and kids who need effective teachers with no requirements to measure it.

This troubling shift is just another example of a dangerous tendency toward lack of accountability coming from the top. Those components that can be deemed “the good” are undercut by providing no real benchmarks or goals for performance. The increased flexibility given to states on many counts in this proposal is needed, and welcome; nevertheless, that flexibility should not come at the price of accountability for results or a commitment to provide all students a high-quality education.

“Continuous improvement” is just not good enough. Despite a decade of working to leave no child behind, achievement gaps are still as significant as ever, posing real questions as to how and when low-income students and students of color will close the gap and reach equity – equity in access, equity in funding, and equity in achievement.

That equity does not come by giving states the leeway and regulatory “outs” not to expect more than the most minimal level of improvement every year. This approach is completely unacceptable unless we’re satisfied with where our nation stands – which we shouldn’t be.

No matter what ends up happening with ESEA reauthorization, it seems clear that the next version of this law will push an increased amount of responsibility and authority (not to mention financial obligations) to states. As this happens, state-level advocacy organizations will also need to evolve and continue to set the bar for reform and challenge the tendency to aim low. The final ESEA policy must institute stronger leadership at the federal level to help guide the states. Without it, we are simply rearranging deck chairs, failing short of efforts to do “good,” and denying too many students the promise of a good school, an effective education, and a future filled with opportunity.

The collective effect of the ESEA reauthorization plans released in recent weeks—the Obama administration’s waiver offer, Sen. Lamar Alexander’s draft legislation, and the two versions of the “bi-partisan” Senate HELP committee draft—would be to reduce the pressure on states to hold their public schools and school systems accountable for student performance.

The authors of the plans have evoked NCLB’s (politically unrealistic) demand that every group of students in every school be “proficient” in math and reading, federalism, the Common Core State Standards, and the Tea Party in rationalizing the proposed shift. What they haven’t talked about is that 1) states have had wide latitude for the past decade under NCLB to set student standards, 2) most states have opted for low standards (in some instances, lower than they had in the pre-NCLB era, and 3) large numbers of students have failed anyway.

The federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress released a study a few months ago suggesting just how low most states have set the bar for their students. It compared state standards in reading and math to NAEP’s own standards.

No states had fourth-grade reading standards high enough to meet NAEP’s “proficient” levels and two-thirds of the states had standards below NAEP’s “basic” level, meaning that students didn’t have to show they could make even simple inferences from reading passages or identify details that support conclusions. Nor did any state match NAEP’s proficient standard in eighth-grade reading. In math, one state met NAEP’s fourth-grade proficient standard and another met NAEP’s eighth-grade math standard.

So now Washington policymakers—under intense pressure from Republicans running on anti-Potomac platforms, an anti-accountability education establishment, and state leaders of all stripes running from the embarrassing performance of their schools—want to give states still more leeway on standards, as well as let states decide what the consequences are for schools where students are failing.

Some say that many states are likely to raise their standards in the coming years because they’ve signed onto the new and rigorous Common Core State Standards. A better gauge of states’ mettle is going to be the rigor of the new tests being aligned to the common core standards by two state testing consortia, the number of students that ultimately adopt the tests, and how high states set passing scores on the new tests.

And because the recently released ESEA blueprints limit consequences for poor student achievement to only the states’ very worst performing schools—or let state decide if they’ll hold any schools accountable—the prospects of raising expectations for students, and thus student achievement, under the blueprints are more hopeful than realistic.

NCLB had significant flaws, including perverse incentives for states to lower standards. But the solution is to fix the law, not abandon the nation's boarder expectation, embedded in the law, that public education educate the nation's students to higher levels.

The Senate proposal for replacing No Child Left Behind again fails to address the fundamental, longstanding flaw in federal K-12 education policy: requiring states to fairly fund public schools, particularly those serving poor communties, in return for receiving federal dollars. Aside from demanding states fix their broken, deeply inequitable, finance systems, neither Congress nor the Obama administration are even willing to impose a firm, clear maintenance of effort requirement to ensure a modicum of resource stability from year-to-year.

So it looks like, whatever emerges from Congress or the waiver process will give the states the green light to shortchange our nation’s most vulnerable students the resources needed to achieve whatever performance and accountability measures emanate from Washington. Even worse, states can continue cutting state school aid -- cuts which fall hardest on those students who need the most to achieve -- whenever politics in state capitols demand it, with no consequences from the federal government.

Put simply, Congress is again poised to let the states use federal funds to subsidize and maintain educational inequality.

Straw men can be enormous fun. After all, it’s so easy to set them up, rip them apart, and appear oh-so-smart in the process.

That’s how this current Adequate Yearly Progress fight feels to me. The truth is I don’t know anyone who’s proposing that the current version of AYP be continued, mainly because there is broad agreement that we’ve learned a lot in the last 10 years that needs to be reflected in a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Yet all the chatter in Washington is about whether AYP should live or die.

By focusing on this narrow dead horse, we’re avoiding the question that most urgently needs our attention: What should the federal government ask in return for its $30+ billion annual investment in K-12 education?

In the early days, the answer was, “proof that the dollars are spent on the children for whom they are intended.” And given that federal involvement was and is mostly intended to help children who have extra needs, that made sense, especially since there was clear evidence that some school districts were ripping those dollars off to build swimming pools and the like.

But over time, that tight focus on money led to practices that did not make sense — like projectors that could only be used with certain children — or that were educationally counterproductive, like pull-out instruction. Moreover, a lot of federal energy was spent examining accounting ledgers, but nobody ever asked the important question: Are the kids learning more?

So, in 1994, at the recommendation of a broad-based commission, Congress made a big shift from monitoring inputs to asking for outcomes. In return for relaxed controls on spending federal dollars, the new law asked states to adopt accountability systems requiring “substantial and continuous progress,” then to report how many schools receiving federal dollars met their goals.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, with the exception of “substantial,” those are exactly the words in the new Senate draft. But what happened after the 1994 law passed should give pause to anybody entertaining the idea that this approach will work. Many states defined “progress” as not falling backward very far. Others set shockingly low goals: “improve mean performance level across grades by an average of 0.05.” Still others set nonsensical goals, like “decrease the percentage of students scoring in the lowest quartile of state assessments,” as if that were even possible.

Not surprisingly, it was their disgust with such anemic goals and the slow rates of progress that led Congress to reclaim their goal-setting role in 2001, imposing an accountability system from Washington.

Many would argue that times have changed — that state leaders are better now. After all, aren’t these the same chief state schools officers who developed and signed on to the Common Core Standards?

They sure are, and they deserve a lot of credit for that. But let’s be clear: Adopting high standards hasn’t been the biggest problem. The problem has been in creating aggressive timelines to actually get students to meet those standards.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe these are mostly good people. However, the intense pressure within their states pull them down toward smaller goals, not toward aggressive goals; toward a pace that is comfortable for adults, not one based on what’s right for kids. If you want recent evidence, take a look at the graduation-rate goals states set for themselves under NCLB.

Frankly, the only leverage that improvement-oriented state leaders have in staying aggressive is the leverage they get from the federal government. That’s why, say the best of these leaders privately, “I still need the federal government’s knee in my back.”

We think that there’s a way for Congress to continue providing that much needed knee in the back, while also allowing states the flexibility they need to act on what they have learned. Here’s how it would work: Congress would establish ambitious but demonstrably achievable goals for states — for example, reducing by half the number of students in each major group who don’t meet standards over the next six years. In turn, states would adopt that goal or something equally ambitious, and then set annual targets for schools and districts, making their own decisions about how to achieve those goals.

A system such as this would vastly improve the federal approach to accountability, while acknowledging what we all know: that we’ve not come nearly far enough on our journey toward equity in education to discard the best lever our leaders have in shifting their systems from what adults want to what our children need.

The implicit theory of action of No Child Left Behind appeared to be that, if educators knew their jobs were at stake, they would work much harder and smarter to improve student performance. The legislation predicated a date by which all students would perform at a proficient level and laid out a menu of penalties for schools and districts that failed to make adequate yearly progress toward that deadline.

Even though the Congress put a considerable amount of additional dollars on the table to sweeten the deal, it did not work, for three reasons. First, it proved politically impossible to set a uniform national standard of proficiency across the states. Second, the sanctions in the legislation caught too many schools, especially schools serving mostly majority middle class communities, in its snare, which was politically untenable. And, third, the assumption that the educators knew what to do and only needed a kick in the pants to do it was just plain wrong. There was very little capacity in the system to pull off the major improvements in student performance required by the legislation.

So, we knew that whatever replaced NCLB, it would not contain the much-reviled Adequate Yearly Progress requirements. And they are in fact gone from the Harkin proposal. But the anger is still there, the intention to make the education establishment do what it so obviously—to the Congress—would not do if left to its own devices.

Adequate Yearly Progress has been replaced in the Harkin bill by another strategy to hold the educators’ feet to the fire. States will be required to put in place systems for evaluating principals and teachers using rating schemes that have at least four rating categories, and which are mainly based on the performance of the students for whom they are responsible or on other factors that can be shown to be closely tied to student performance. These ratings will be made public, as will the formal qualifications of the teachers. And they will be used as the primary basis of personnel decisions to be made about the educators in our schools. That system would be put in place for all schools. For the schools with the worst performance, the bottom five percent, the sanctions for failure to improve are once again draconian and include the staff losing their jobs. Once again, the implicit message is, if you don’t perform, you will be fired.

There is no country among those with the best education performance that has a system that remotely resembles the one that lies at the heart of the Harkin bill. Every one of those countries is operating on the premise that they will fail unless they attract to teaching and school leadership a large fraction of their best and brightest young people. There is nothing in this legislation (at least I do not think there is; I have not read all 800 pages) that does the dramatic things we would have to do to attract the best and brightest young Americans to a career in teaching. There is nothing that would dramatically raise teacher compensation, greatly raise the admissions standards of our schools of education, prevent our states from waiving the high standards we do not yet have for getting a license to teach, or do any of the other things the top performers have done.

The Harkin bill does include a section on ‘Teacher Pathways to the Classroom” which could address a few of these issues in a few places, but seems very unlikely to produce the systemic changes that are needed. Congress can be as angry as it likes about the poor performance of the system, but it will not change until that same Congress does what the top performers have done to increase the capacity of the system to get the job done. And, by the way, our most successful competitors are all getting those superior results for less than what it costs us. You would think the Congress would be curious about how they do that.

In my earlier (below) entry I mentioned "the counter-productive mandates around teacher evaluation." This probably could use some fleshing out. The basic structure of the system in the bill we saw last week specified guidelines for teacher evaluations, based in significant part on student tests scores. Those evaluations would then be used as part of a separate system designed to more equitably distribute well-evaluated teachers. The last part of this is a goal that's very much worth pursuing. But, if the underlying measures drive poor practices (as do high-stakes test-driven reforms) and if the underlying measures have serious issues of reliability and validity (as these do), then the equity-focused elements are unlikely to be successful.

If policymakers hope to address inequities between districts and schools -- and I very much support such efforts -- the places to focus are working conditions and resources. Principals in high-needs schools will find applications increasing substantially when their schools become more desireable places to work. Sadly, this era of labeling, sanctioning, and churning has made these schools even less welcoming.

As of Monday, the Harken-Enzi bill has the support of Sen. Alexander, and the counter-productive mandates around teacher evaluation have been limited to districts that receive Teacher Incentive Fund money (as reported in Ed Week).

I find myself very much agreeing with Chad Wick that any actual bipartisanship in this Congress is to be rejoiced. But the substance, even with today's improvement, is still more of the same. It's still centralized outcome demands grounded in student testing and test scores. The drafters haven't learned the two key lessons from the NCLB experience: (1) students don't learn because Washington makes a demand; they learn by being in engaging, challenging, well-resources classrooms; and (2) those Washington demands are met through a process of goal displacement, with narrowed curriculum and teaching to the test being the surest way to increase test scores.

Because these lessons have been ignored, the ESEA reauthorization process is tinkering around the edges. Those involved seem proud that they aren't just shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic; they're also giving the ship a new coat of paint AND it's a slightly different shade.

So as much as our expectations have been lowered for this Congress, and as much as we should genuinely praise the HELP Senators for their collaboration, bad policy remains bad policy. We should be wary of this bill.

The following is from Mike Petrilli, Fordham's executive vice-president:

We finally have a serious, thoughtful ESEA reauthorization proposal in the Senate, one that should gain support from both sides of the aisle and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But here’s a warning: it’s not the bill that scheduled to be marked up tomorrow.

No, that bill, authored by Senate education committee chairman Tom Harkin and ranking member Mike Enzi, is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left.

And sure enough, progressives have already made their opinions clear on why the bill should be stopped dead in its tracks. But it should offend conservatives (including the Reform Realists among us) too, though for very different reasons. Such conservatives should back the aforementioned proposal put forward by Senators Alexander, Burr, and others, instead.

Here are the Harkin-Enzi bill’s major offenses:

• An expansive new reach into high schools. While the legislation deserves credit for handing many accountability decisions back to the states, it would launch a whole new series of federal interventions in the nation’s worst high schools. Targeting “dropout factories” might sound like a good idea until you consider the Department of Education’s capacity (or lack thereof) for tackling something so complicated and complex from Washington.

• A Fairyland provision on the equitable distribution of teachers. It would ask the U.S. Department of Education to make sure that states are allocating effective teachers in an “equitable” manner, so that poor and minority students don’t have an unfair share of bad instructors. While laudable, it’s more utopian than anything the Great Society dreamers proposed. (Current law requires the equitable distribution of “highly qualified” teachers, but it’s a moot point since virtually everyone meets that low standard.) Following this mandate would require states to dramatically overhaul their school finance systems, equalize teacher pay, move teachers (against their will) to different schools or districts, and more. Closing the “comparability” loophole at the district level—also required by the bill—would require similar disruption. Some of these reforms are worth pursuing—but at the state and local levels, not from Washington.

• Maintaining the onerous “highly qualified teachers” mandate while adding a new one on teacher evaluations. One of No Child Left Behind’s most hated provisions is the requirement that teachers earn designation as “highly qualified.” Not only did this get the feds into the position of micromanaging teacher qualifications, it also did so in a clumsy way, focusing on paper credentials. The Administration’s waiver package moves to a policy of “non-enforcement” around this provision, signaling that it’s time to move on. And the Alexander proposal scraps it entirely. Meanwhile, Harkin-Enzi keeps the “highly qualified” rules in place for newly hired teachers, and adds an additional requirement that states develop teacher and principal evaluation systems—fine in theory but another chance for a federal mandate to mess up a perfectly good idea.

• Rather than eliminating or consolidating wasteful programs, it adds new ones. As far as I can tell, few major programs are put on the chopping block, and several more are created, including a new initiatives for high schools, STEM, literacy, and “safe and healthy schools.” As the country is running a historic deficit, this is the best we can do?

Any one of these would be a poison pill for conservatives. Taken in combination, it makes Republicans’ decision easy. Scrap the bill and start over—with Senator Alexander’s proposal as the jumping-off point. It’s a much stronger bill, closer in many ways to the Administration’s own Blueprint, and much more serious about re-calibrating the federal role in education. And if Democrats won’t go for that—well, wait for a more favorable environment in 2013.

Senator, you have devoted your long career to caring about the well-being of disadvantaged students, especially students with disabilities.

The policies that have been put in place by many fine Democrats and Republicans have led to the best achievement levels on the NAEP for both children of color and children with disabilities in the long history of that assessment.

This progress began many years ago, but it accelerated when the states began to implement systems of consequential accountability and the federal government extended accountability throughout the whole nation and to significant underserved subgroups of children.

IDEA was an incredibly important first step for students with disabilities. But it was NCLB that required schools receiving federal aid to improve the achievement of students with disabilities in order to be deemed to be performing acceptably. Where there was too little progress for these students, schools were pressed to do more and to do better.

Senator, as you know, local and state politicians and educrats have chafed under this pressure. In fact, the real truth, not much discussed in the press, is that the pressure around special education is the single most controversial feature of NCLB.

But you also know - because you care and you see - schools have been far more serious and far more successful in educating kids with disabilities in the past decade than in any previous period.
The arc of policy in ESEA from the 80s through IASA and then NCLB and IDEA through NCLB has caused much greater knowledge of, and concern for, the needs of disadvantaged children in all schools that receive federal aid.

Why in the world would we now say, as a nation, that we will take the pressure off, except for kids in the worst 5% of schools? This will be catastrophic for students with disabilities since only a tiny percentage of them attend those particular schools.

At this stage of your caring career, why would you sponsor a move that reverses the arc of policy and beats a retreat in our demand that schools give disadvantaged students the quality education they deserve?

At a time when Washington can agree on very little, it is remarkable that Senators Harkin and Enzi released a bipartisan ESEA reauthorization bill. Regardless of your opinion on its contents, these two leaders deserve significant recognition for their ability to work across the aisle, prioritizing compromise over the all too familiar partisan paralysis. These compromises are just the beginning of the endurance they will need to manage the first Senate ESEA mark-up in 10 years.

As with any major reauthorization, there will always be critics. While I respect their opinions greatly, I believe there is much to celebrate in the Harkin-Enzi bill. Before I elaborate on these points, I think it is important to remind those in search of the perfect bill that this is a long process and there are many voices at the table.

That said, I must commend Senators Harkin and Enzi for recognizing the shortfalls of No Child Left Behind. In an era of finite resources and infinite innovations, we must empower states and districts to become leaders in accountability reform. Harkin and Enzi’s proposal establishes a high bar with college and career standards, preserves the commitment to disaggregated accountability, and differentiates interventions so states and districts can target resources on the schools that need it the most. Not to mention, the proposal finally calls for action in the country’s lowest performing high schools – addressing a significant gap in the current law.

Critics are correct to point out that this proposal places a lot of trust in state governments to design accountability systems that ensure all students are college and career ready upon graduation. Sure, these are the same states that lowered standards to avoid penalties under No Child Left Behind’s framework. But these are also the states that came together recently to adopt a new set of college and career ready standards and aligned assessments. And these are the same states that just last week announced their intention to apply for waivers under No Child Left Behind in exchange for significant state reforms around standards, assessments, teacher evaluation systems, and the development of a new adequate yearly progress benchmark. I find it comforting that state governments appear to be in a far better place than they were five or 10 years ago.

While I hope the final bill is not entirely silent on “adequate yearly progress," I recognize the importance of putting one step in front of the other. We would have missed the opportunity to debate these key points if the HELP Committee’s leaders hadn’t taken such a bold bi-partisan move.

It does not appear to us that there is sufficient common ground between the Harkin bill and what we have seen come from the House to suggest that ESEA will be reauthorized any time soon.

We are concerned by the lack of an implicit assumption in the Harkin bill that state and local education leaders can act in good faith and are indeed equipped and capable of making crucial decisions related to the daily operations of the nation’s schools. While the legislation is a welcome step away from AYP and does provide some increased local control for assessments, accountability is still federal, there is strong heavy reliance on one-time snap shot testing, schools have to test every child every year, and there is a disconnect between the understanding that current assessments are broken and the fact that it will take time to get meaningful ones in place.

The bill retains the current heavily prescriptive approach to turn around models, with four of the six models requiring the firing of teachers/principals.

We like the mention of growth models, multiple measures, and adaptive assessments, and would ask that the final bill provide greater flexibility to states and locals in designing their growth/multiple measure systems.

When it comes to teacher evaluation: We like that the legislation recognizes the importance of having valid, reliable teacher evaluation systems. We don’t think the federal government should be prescribing the number of tiers. And collectively, some of the proposals, while flexible at the state level, translate into inflexible prescription and juggling at the local level. As an example: there are requirements for comparability measures, teacher/principal distribution, and teacher/principal evaluation that, when taken collectively, tie the hands of schools in staffing their buildings, especially in small, rural schools.

Speaking of rural, we are happy to see a reauthorization of REAP and would like to see one further change in the program, to switch the poverty indicator from census poverty to free and reduced lunch poverty.

Lastly, we are concerned by the codification of Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation. We think that the creation of additional competitive programs is in conflict with the original intent of federal education policy (Referring to Title I and IDEA) and that codifying these yet-unproven programs is directly hurtful to other formula programs.

As your introductory prompt observes, many supporters of No Child Left Behind are complaining that Senator Harkin’s proposal weakens the NCLB benchmarks by substituting “continuous improvement” for “adequate yearly progress” towards a fixed proficiency goal.

But as I wrote in my Economic Policy Institute blog last week, there is less here than meets the eye. “Continuous improvement” continues the poorly conceived NCLB approach, seeking an unrealizable national whip that will somehow transform American schools for the better. The effort ignores both evidence and common sense.

The proposal developed by Senate Democrats will relieve states of having to meet federally specified achievement goals in math and reading. Instead of requiring all students to be “proficient” in these basic skills by 2014 (as NCLB demands), or to be “college ready” by 2020 (as the Obama Administration proposes), the Harkin bill will require only that schools show "continuous improvement" for all students, and for students from low-income families, those who don’t speak English, minority students, and students with disabilities (see page 52 of the draft bill).

According to a report in Education Week, “state and local officials likely will be exchanging high-fives, since that would give them much of the flexibility they're looking for.”

They are in for a shock. “Continuous improvement” is no more reasonable or achievable than “proficiency for all,” or universal college readiness.

Of course, citizens should expect every public school to strive for its peak level of performance, but some schools have much farther to go to reach this level than others. Unlike present policy, a well-designed accountability system could judge how far each school can and should go, and whether it is on the right track to get there for the several populations it may serve. In each case, this is a difficult judgment to make, and a slogan is no substitute. In this regard, a single one-size-fits-all metric such as “continuous improvement” is no better than “proficiency for all.” The Broader, Bolder, Approach to Education campaign has described the outlines of a more reasonable accountability system, and a book, Grading Education, goes into more detail.

NCLB’s attempt to require all students to be proficient at a challenging level led to the absurd result that nearly every school in the nation was on a path to be deemed failing by the 2014 deadline. The demand ignored an obvious reality of human nature - there is a distribution of ability among children regardless of background, and no single standard can be challenging for children at all points in that distribution.

Expecting all children to be college-ready suffers from the same problem, and more. In a nation where 32% of all young adults now earn bachelor’s degrees, and where the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that only 30% of job openings by 2018, even in a healthy economy, would require a bachelor’s degree or more, the notion that 100% of students would be able to succeed in an academic college by 2020 is even more fanciful.

So why not “continuous improvement” instead? It’s a nice slogan, borrowed from a management fad promoted by W. Edwards Deming and others who thought this was the key to Japanese auto manufacturing success. But while consistent attention to small improvements makes sense as a management tool, no company has ever continuously improved, overall, indefinitely. There are spurts of improvement, and plateaus, and then the most successful companies fade, to be overtaken by others. No management expert would recommend that firms be dismantled if they are consistently profitable, but just not more profitable year after year after year.

But continuous improvement will now, if Senate Democrats have their way, be the trajectory for every school in the country, by law.

Today, some students and schools already perform at their peak capacities. Many high-performing students and schools should be praised for maintaining high levels of performance, not condemned for not improving further. Imagine a parent with two children of high natural ability, one of whom is an “A” and the other a “C” student – should the parent have equal expectations of both for improvement? I’m certain that Sen. Harkin and his staff have not made a study of schools and students nationwide to determine that there nowhere exist schools for whom maintenance of quality, rather than improvement, should be our expectation. If there are such schools, they will be the first to be labeled failing under a continuous improvement standard.

More importantly, many “C”-performing schools and students are now achieving at their peak capacities, in view of the external constraints over which public education has no control. Many disadvantaged students, and schools serving them, are low-performing not because of inadequate school efforts, but because children come to school unable to focus because they are hungry or suffer from untreated minor illnesses such as asthma or tooth decay, or with inadequate early childhood literacy preparation because their parents are poorly educated, or with interrupted instruction because of homelessness or displacement from housing instability, or stressed because of parental unemployment shocks, home foreclosure, or neighborhood crime.

It is easy for Senators to issue fiats that schools serving such children should “continuously improve” their math and reading test scores, but many of these schools are already performing gargantuan feats, given their social and economic contexts. Indeed, many (not all) schools with low test scores serving disadvantaged children are having more positive impacts on their students than typical “high-performing” schools serving affluent children who would test well even with the poorest instruction. A Congressional proposal that both types of schools should “continuously improve” is based on no empirical examination of what is possible in different types of schools, and how what is possible might vary.

A new Russell Sage Foundation book edited by economists Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane, Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools and Children's Life Chances, notes that growing income inequality in America has been accompanied by a widening gap between the achievement of students from rich and poor families. In a Chicago Tribune op-ed, Duncan and Murnane explain why they (and one of their co-authors, Stanford economist Sean Reardon) think this has occurred:

Growing economic inequality contributes in a multitude of ways to a widening gulf between the educational outcomes of rich and poor children. In the early 1970s, the gap between what parents in the top and bottom quintiles spent on enrichment activities such as music lessons, travel and summer camps was approximately $2,700 per year (in 2008 dollars). By 2005-2006, the difference had increased to $7,500. Between birth and age 6, children from high-income families spend an average of 1,300 more hours than children from low-income families in "novel" places — other than at home or school, or in the care of another parent or a day care facility. This matters, because when children are asked to read science and social studies texts in the upper elementary school grades, background knowledge is critical to comprehension and academic success.

With unemployment now stuck at unacceptably high levels, especially for the parents of minority children, the ranks of students without family-provided enrichment activities can only grow, and the isolation and concentration of such students in schools serving peers without such activities can also only grow. National legislative demands that schools show “continuous improvement,” without any amelioration of the economic hardship faced by parents, would be laughable were it not so tragic.

And then there are the reductions in resources available to schools, a result both of the faltering economy and Republican attacks in many states on public education. Last month alone, 24,000 jobs were eliminated from public schools. Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute has calculated that since the recession began in December 2007, nearly 278,000 public school jobs have been eliminated; another 48,000 necessary to keep up with growing enrollment were not created, for a total loss of educators and other public school workers of 326,000. Such reductions will continue until the economy stabilizes.

Some who are hostile to public education cheer this development, seeing it as the shedding of inefficiency. But I’d guess that the Senate Democrats who are drafting the ESEA re-authorization are not among them. Sen. Harkin and his colleagues probably think that counselors, reading specialists, librarians, classroom aides, parent coordinators and teachers whose jobs are being cut make a positive contribution to student achievement. Yet if so, how can Senate Democrats demand that student achievement show “continuous improvement” when these Senators can do nothing to prevent the resources on which that improvement depends from being eliminated?

Some schools, of course, should improve, and dramatically so. Some schools serving low-income students and some schools serving affluent students operate at far below their potential. But those that are doing as much as we should expect cannot be distinguished from those that are doing far less, simply by looking at student test scores or how those scores grow or don’t grow over time. Making such distinctions requires holistic evaluation of school curriculum, leadership, and teacher quality that is expensive, requires trained experts, and is nested in broader community social and economic contexts. States now have no resources or capacity to implement such accountability systems, and proposals for a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act are noticeably silent when it comes to addressing this shortcoming.

If ESEA is re-authorized with a simple requirement that all schools and students show “continuous improvement,” we’ll be back for the next re-authorization in five years with new demands for wholesale waivers from Congressional expectations that had no basis in reality.