The Bush administration has often been accused of Orwellian doublespeak in naming its programs, and NCLB is a masterpiece of a law to accomplish the opposite of what it apparently intends. While claiming to be the law that-finally!-improves public education, NCLB sets up public schools to fail, setting the stage for private education companies to move in on the $400 billion spent annually on K-12 education ($500 billion according to recent statements by Secretary of Education Rod Paige). The consequent destruction or reduction of public education would shrink government and cripple or eliminate the teachers' unions, nearly five million mostly Democratic voters. It's a law to drool over if you're Karl Rove or Grover Norquist. The Perfect Law, in fact, as in The Perfect Storm.
It doesn't look that way at first glance. Indeed, NCLB appears to fly in the face of all that the Bush administration stands for. That administration has tried to deregulate and outsource virtually everything it touches. Yet from this most deregulatory of administrations comes NCLB laying 1,100 pages of law and reams of regulations on public schools. On closer inspection, those pages are just the law's shiny surface to blind and confuse onlookers.
The principal means to accomplish this amazing end is called Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP. All schools that accept Title I money from the federal government are compelled by the law to show AYP. If they don't, they are labeled "failing schools." The official tag is "in need of improvement" but no one outside of the U. S. Department of Education uses that term.
The concept of AYP in Title I is not new, but NCLB yokes it to sanctions that become increasingly punitive with each consecutive year of failure. These sanctions alone should have been a clue to Democrats that the law was not what it said it was, for punishment is not an effective means to achieve either individual or institutional change.
NCLB requires not only that each school make AYP, but that each of many subgroups make AYP. For many schools, once test scores are disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, special education, and English Language Learners, there are thirty-seven separate categories. All categories must make AYP. If one fails, the school fails. Not surprisingly, a study found that more diverse schools were more likely to fail-the odds that one group doesn't make it are against them. Even if all subgroups make AYP, it counts only if 95 percent of the kids in each group showed up on test day. If not, the school fails.
Here's how it works: all schools must test all students every year in grades three through eight in reading and math (and in a couple of years, science as well) and test one high school grade. For these tests, each state establishes a baseline of achievement. Its plan for AYP must be such that by the year 2014, 100 percent of the state's children achieve at the "proficient" level. At the moment, each state defines "proficient," but that will likely change. For some states, the progress from baseline to end state is a straight line. Other states have an accelerating curve with little required initially but a great deal of improvement required as the witching year of 2014 approaches.
How realistic is a goal of 100 percent proficiency? Well, at the 2004 convention of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the California Department of Education presented projections indicating that by 2014, under AYP, 99 percent of its schools would be failing. In fact, this projection appears to be optimistic. It was predicated on assumptions about how fast test scores will improve. So far, these assumptions are not being met.
A reader might say, "Yes, but that is California. California is so educationally awful that it inspired a John Merrow PBS special, 'From First to Worst: The Rise and Fall of California's Public Schools.'" And it is true that in the National Assessment of Educational Progress's 2003 reading assessment California was at the bottom: forty-ninth at the fourth-grade level and tied with Hawaii for fiftieth at the eighth-grade level.
But consider a 2004 headline in the St. Paul Pioneer Press: "All Minnesota Left Behind?" The article beneath the headline described a report from the state's legislative auditor projecting that by 2014 some 80 percent of Minnesota's schools would be failing and that many of them would have failed for five consecutive years, a condition that unleashes the most draconian of NCLB's sanctions.
Academically, Minnesota is not California. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), twenty-five of forty-one participating nations outscored California in mathematics and only four (Iran, Kuwait, Colombia, and South Africa) scored lower (the remaining twelve scored about the same). In science, twenty scored higher and six scored lower. For Minnesota, the numbers are quite different. Only six of the forty-one nations outscored Minnesota in math, and only one outscored it in science.
This means that in a few years 80 percent of the schools in a state that outscores virtually the entire world will be labeled as failures.
Why would anyone foist such a no-win system on the public schools? To answer this question we must go back to the original legislation and note that it contained Bush-backed voucher amendments. If passed in this form, students would have been able to use these vouchers at any school that would accept them.
Congress struck the voucher provisions from the law. In the 2000 elections, voucher referenda in California and Michigan had suffered more than two-to-one defeats. The defeats were unusually decisive and not just because of the margins. Milton Friedman had argued that voucher efforts lose because, although the voucher proposals are "well thought out and initially warmly received, the educational establishment-administrators and teachers' unions-then launches an attack that is notable for its mendacity but is backed by much larger financial resources than the proponents can command and succeeds in killing the proposals."
In the 2000 referenda, though, advocates outspent opponents-in California by two to one-and the outcome was still not close. The public at large decisively rejected the concept of vouchers in one liberal and one conservative state. After these referenda, even ardent voucher advocates such as Harvard's Paul Peterson opined that vouchers would be of interest only to a small proportion-perhaps 5 percent-of parents, mostly those with kids in inner-city schools. Congress decided that they had no place in NCLB.
IF BUSH SUCCEEDS in his reelection campaign, vouchers will be back. Actually, they already are. Bush proposed a $75 million voucher program for a half-dozen cities. Congress trimmed it to a $15 million program for only the District of Columbia. The proposal passed the House by a single vote but was repeatedly rejected by the Senate until it was attached to a $328 billion omnibus spending bill. Even Democrats who opposed vouchers thought that law too important to kill just to keep vouchers out of the District. The bill passed sixty-five to twenty-eight. A second-term Bush would no doubt broaden the scope of voucher proposals.
Vouchers, of course, send money to private schools and remove money from public schools. At present, the principal beneficiaries of vouchers are religious schools, especially Catholic schools. In Cleveland, one of two cities with ongoing, tax-funded voucher programs, 96 percent of voucher-using students attend church-affiliated schools and 67 percent attend Catholic schools.
The D.C. program will offer a child up to $7,500 per year, but the elite privates in the D.C. area charge more than $20,000 tuition per year. Independent private schools have also shown no interest in vouchers out of fear that government money will lead to government control.
Catholic schools, on the other hand, charge much less and have been hemorrhaging students. In 1960, Catholic schools accounted for 12.4 percent of all students. In 2000, 4.7 percent. The Catholic connection was made clear when Bush made his strongest pitch for the D.C. voucher proposal in the East Room of the White House to 250 members of the National Catholic Education Association, in town to mark their 100th anniversary. It could be seen as a cynical ploy to buy the Catholic vote in November. (Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry opposes vouchers. As a presidential candidate, John Edwards voiced similar opposition. Both expressed the position that vouchers help only the few, draw resources away from public schools, and inappropriately send taxpayer dollars to private institutions.)
THUS, AFTER the 2000 elections, even voucher proponents concluded that the middle classes were pretty much satisfied with their schools. To make vouchers attractive to the middle classes, some way would have to be found to drive a wedge between the parents and their public schools and shatter that satisfaction. AYP's impossible standards provide the way. At the AERA convention mentioned earlier, representatives from the Boulder Valley School District, the district that surrounds the University of Colorado at Boulder, reported that parents were surprised when some of their "good" schools failed. It causes, the researchers said, "dissonance" in the parents. One can only wonder how much louder the dissonance will clang as the number of failing schools grows. Already the law appears to be taking its toll. A June 2004 survey by Educational Testing Service found that in 2001, 8 percent of parents gave public schools an "A" and 35 percent gave them a "B." In 2004, the figures had fallen to 2 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Currently, there are few non-religious schools to receive vouchers, but if the vouchers are there, one can expect the for-profit Educational Management Organizations to expand (currently, there are 53 such companies managing 461 schools). Indeed, the first overbearingly ambitious plan from the largest such company, Edison Schools, Inc., depended on Bush's father and his father's secretary of education, Lamar Alexander. Alexander was once a paid consultant to and board member of Edison's then-parent company, Whittle Communications. Edison's founder, Chris Whittle, had planned to have one thousand private schools by 2000, and that plan hinged on Bush père and Alexander's pushing vouchers through Congress (though it was never mentioned in any Edison press releases). When Bush lost to Clinton, the plan came a cropper and left Whittle managing a few schools, not owning a thousand. But Chris Whittle is an ambitious man, and if the vouchers are there, he will come.
One can get some sense of where people think NCLB will lead by looking at what is being said about it by organizations that should, ideologically, oppose it. In 1996, for example, the Heritage Foundation, whose mission statement says it promotes free enterprise and limited government, condemned federal intrusion into education as a "liberal solution." Yet, this organization, once dubbed by Slate editor Michael Kinsley as "a right-wing propaganda machine," not only endorses NCLB but also brags that one of its policy analysts, Krista Kafer, "produced two papers that helped define the lines of debate" over NCLB.
The most ardent voucher proponent in academia is Harvard's Paul Peterson, also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hoover proudly announced that Peterson, along with Erik Hanushek, another senior fellow, had been named to a Bush-sponsored National Education Panel to evaluate NCLB.
The Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly contended "the tests mandated by NCLB had ripped back the curtain and exposed a major national problem." But, she went on, NCLB wouldn't do much about that problem. We need "innovative solutions to introduce competition into the monopoly system." Vouchers, in other words.
With the voucher-touting right solidly lined up in favor of NCLB, shouldn't the center and the left be just a bit suspicious of it?
EVEN WITH EACH state having a unique definition of proficient, most schools fail. The situation will likely get worse. If each state has a unique definition, no two states can be compared. Lack of comparability alone would make some people uncomfortable, but some of the early results seemed, well, anomalous. In the first estimate of how many schools would fail, Michigan projected fifteen hundred, while Arkansas foresaw none. This finding did not produce, so far as is known, a stampede of Michigan parents seeking to educate their children in the Razorback state.
There will be pressure to seek a common yardstick that, in this most normative of nations, will let people compare the states. It exists. It is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP reports results two ways: in terms of scores on the tests and in terms of what percentage of the students attained its three "achievement levels": basic, proficient (the magic word), and advanced. Secretary Paige has already said that he will use the discrepancy between NAEP and state test results to shame the states into better performance (ironically, the biggest discrepancy turned up in Texas, where Paige had been superintendent of Houston public schools. Texas said 91 percent of its eighth-graders were proficient in math, NAEP said 24 percent).
The result from Texas gives some idea of the problem. The NAEP achievement levels are ridiculously high. In the 2003 math assessment, for instance, only 32 percent of the nation's fourth graders reached the proficient level. Even in high-scoring Minnesota, only 42 percent were designated proficient (for some minorities, nationally, the percentage proficient fell as low as 5 percent). American fourth-graders were well above average on the TIMSS math test and third in the world in science. But only about a third showed up as proficient on NAEP math and science tests administered the same year. Kids who are virtually on top of the world are not proficient? It makes no sense.
And it gets worse. The NAEP levels are not only ridiculously high, they are "fundamentally flawed," to use the words of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAEP achievement levels have been examined and found wanting by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing; the National Academy of Education; the National Academy of Sciences; the General Accounting Office; and individual psychometricians. The reports say that the process is confusing, internally inconsistent, and lacking in evidence for validity. These conclusions would condemn any proposed commercial test to the trash bin. But NAEP chugs along ignoring the flaws. Having many students score low has political uses.
If NAEP comes to be the common yardstick, the dissonance in people's minds will only increase because the NAEP standards ensure that no one will ever attain 100 percent proficiency for any group. Asian American students score considerably higher than other ethnic groups in math, but on the 2003 NAEP math assessment, their best performance was 48 percent proficient at the eighth grade. In his AERA presidential address in 2003, Robert Linn of the University of Colorado estimated that we could have all twelfth graders proficient in math in 166 years.
Many other problems with NCLB are smaller and of a more technical nature. For instance, the role of summer loss in poor students but not middle class or affluent students, meaning that some schools that do well during the school year will not make AYP because of what happens when they are closed. Then there is the impact of the "choice option." Students in schools that have failed for two consecutive years must be offered the option of choosing another school. This requirement leads to logistical nightmares-currently Chicago must offer the option to two hundred thousand students but has only five hundred spaces-and to peculiar alterations in the schools' test scores. Purportedly, the choice option must be offered first to the "neediest" students, namely those with the lowest test scores. But if these kids leave, the sending school's average score goes up through no merit of its own. At the other end, the receiving school will find it harder to maintain AYP with these incoming hard-core non-achievers.
And no one seems to have thought much about mobility. In some schools, the kids in the building in May are not the kids who were there in September. How, then, can the school be held accountable for their performance?
Although private companies are not yet taking over schools, they are already cashing in on the law. The law makes provisions for "secondary providers"-private firms-to tutor low-scoring students and provide other services. The Wall Street Journal estimated that there are some 24.3 billion dollars for companies to lust after in aid to high-poverty schools, reading programs, technology improvements, and building and running charter schools. Educational Testing Service vice president Sharon Robinson is said to have called NCLB a full employment act for test publishers.
The big problem with NCLB, though, remains that its intent is the opposite of what it claims. Former assistant secretary of education, Chester E. Finn, Jr., once said, "The public education system as we know it has proved that it cannot reform itself. It is an ossified government monopoly." As the preordained casualties from NCLB mount, the Chester Finns, George W. Bushes, and the think tanks on the right will intensify their attacks on the "government monopoly" while holding vouchers as the solution. If their attacks on public schools are successful, NCLB will indeed have proved to be The Perfect Law.
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