How to Go Forward With 'No Child Left Behind'

By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 15, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to "fix the failures" of the No Child Left Behind law, which rates schools based on student performance on annual math and reading tests.

The law, one of President Bush's major domestic achievements, was enacted with broad bipartisan support. But that consensus faded, and efforts to reauthorize the law stalled in the past year as lawmakers awaited a new president.

Under the law, schools must reach steadily rising performance goals. Certain schools that fall short face sanctions as severe as a management shake-up.

With Congress poised to begin the debate anew, a student, a PTA president, a charter school advocate, a teachers union leader and a superintendent offer ideas about how to improve the law. They also offer suggestions if Obama and Congress decide to give the next version of the law a new name.

Arvin Ahmadi

Student representative to the Fairfax County School Board; attends Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite regional magnet school

I think No Child Left Behind and its intentions are on the right track, but it definitely needs a dose of pragmatism and realism. You can't hold every American school to the same standards. Some need the bar to be lowered.

You can punish a school for not reaching the level deemed by No Child Left Behind, but it is not necessarily going to bring the results that you want.

NCLB basically takes the depth out of learning in a lot of situations. As a student, I hear a lot of my teachers talk about lifelong learning. For material to stick, it helps to go into it in depth.

Debbie Ritchie

Maryland PTA president

The federal law requires that there be assessments, but it has been up to each state to create its own. My question to them would be: Are we really comparing apples to apples, or are we comparing apples to bread? The assessment that's being done in Maryland -- can we compare it to what's being done in South Dakota?

I don't think we want the federal government to create the assessments. But we should have a standard throughout the United States. What does fourth-grade math look like?

If you don't have reading and math, you can't do anything else. But what I've seen is that everything becomes very focused and narrowed. We're losing arts because we have to get that reading and math in there.

Are we shortchanging our kids in a well-rounded education by having a narrow focus?

Edgar B. Hatrick III

Loudoun County school

superintendent

I think it is a fatally flawed version. It assumes that all children can somehow succeed at the same level, and it also assumes that vastly different measures of success could be allowed state by state and then used comparatively.

My hope is the new law will return to its roots and will focus on children in poverty. They are the most at-risk children in our society. The evidence is clear that when kids don't have good health care, when kids don't have access to cultural and academic stimuli outside the school, they are at a disadvantage from the moment they walk in.

I think the law has got to recognize the limited funding of education by the federal government. For very little money in the game, the federal government has the ability to impose huge changes on local schools. I think that there are ways to shine a spotlight on schools that are both not succeeding and not trying to succeed. I think it doesn't have to be through what I believe are misguided sanctions.

Randi Weingarten

American Federation of Teachers president

We need a federal law that is really aligned with how to get continuous sustainable improvement in our education system. How do we address the achievement gap head-on? How do we improve teaching and learning head-on? How do we build a workable accountability system that helps and doesn't punish schools?

As much as educators have a huge role, we don't have the only role. That's why I've talked about community schools. What's happened in the past few years is it has been so out of whack that it has become more of a testing and a blame game than about how we help kids.

We have to have a way that we not only recruit the best and the brightest into teaching, but we keep them.

Jeanne Allen

Center for Education

Reform president

The tests should be bench-marked against NAEP (a test known as "the nation's report card"). If you say that in fourth grade you expect kids to know quadratic equations, you need to show in your state plan that that's what you're measuring in fourth grade.

I think principals and teachers are really smart people. We need to be firm on the outcome and allow the flexibility locally to figure out how to get there.

We should measure how well schools do from year to year on top of how well we want the ideal fifth-grader to achieve. We need to reward progress in the interim while we work to hit the proficiency standards. I think we should give people a pat on the back for making progress toward the goals.

Before it was No Child Left Behind, the federal education law was known

as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Should the next version

be renamed? What do you suggest?

Ahmadi: The name "No Child Left Behind" is great; it sounds promising. But after everything that we've seen and all the complaining with standardized tests, students sort of cringe now when they hear No Child Left Behind. I think it could use a new name.

Ritchie: The concept of NCLB is sort of Making Every Child's Potential a Reality, which is the tag line for the Maryland PTA. I don't know what kind of acronym that would be, but I think that's what the intent is.

Allen: I don't see any other reasons besides political reasons not to leave it No Child Left Behind. We have a generation of people who are going to think it's all brand new if we change the name. I think we should resist the temptation to flatter our egos in favor of continuity. We have to get the public to understand this is now a fact of life.

Weingarten: I think it should have a name that's aspirational. Whether it's Opportunity for All Children, there has to be a can-do name for our federal law.

Hatrick: If you think where the feds have really gotten involved in education nationwide, it has been to help children who are most at risk, whether they are in special education or children in poverty. There is probably something that can be done with that hope notion. It doesn't have much sex appeal.