Everything You Wanted to Know About NCLB

The No Child Left Behind Act, passed with bipartisan support as President Bush’s first major legislation in January of 2002, has been an attempt to attach a semi-private business model to public education, which heretofore has been woefully unaccountable. The federal government has basically told all public schools that they must come up with an adequate system of measuring their progress, both academically and in the realm of personal safety. Schools face a range of sanctions if they do not improve on their shortcomings.

In theory, the law sounds ideal. Schools that don’t measure up must improve. Students in failing schools are permitted to transfer, presumably to better schools. Schools with low-income students get what is known as “Title I” money from the federal government, of which 20 % is to be set aside for the transportation costs of the student transfers and also for after-school tutoring and classes. However, relationships between schools and the tutoring companies that have sprouted up to take advantage of the NCLB law have been strained. “We’re paid with their dollars,” said Steve Quatrociocchi, an executive vice-president at the Princeton Review, which has business with about two dozen school districts, including Chicago.

Democrats and other NCLB opponents argue that the law is underfunded, that the schools forced to improve aren’t given enough federal resources to help themselves. For this reason, the law has drawn various strong reactions across the country. Harford County School Board member Mark Wolkow remarks that the law seems like a “systematic attempt to destroy public education.” Republicans and other advocates argue that the law forces schools to effectively enter a free market, and if the underachieving schools must close, so be it.

The most notable opposition to NCLB may have been the report in late February by the National Conference of State Legislatures, which stated that "the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education." As a result, several states are balking at full compliance. The Republican-dominated state of Utah passed a bill recently that orders state officials to ignore provisions of a federal law that conflict with Utah 's education goals or that requires state financing. Likewise, Connecticut's state legislature recently concluded that compliance with NCLB was not worth the trouble, as the state figured that compliance was merely duplicating the state's own accountability measures. Connecticut's Education Commissioner, Betty J. Sternberg, does not want to opt out altogether, however, as that would cost the state $109 million in annual federal subsidies. Just this week (August 22-26), Governor Jodi Rell and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal have made good on their nearly five-month-old threat to sue the U.S. Department of Education, making his state the first to take its objections about the law to the federal courts. As reported in Education Week, the suit contends the failure to fully fund the law violates a provision in the nearly four-year-old education statute itself that says states will not be required “to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this act.” “Our message today is: Give up the unfunded mandates, or give us the money,” Mr. Blumenthal said at a press conference in his office after filing the lawsuit.

Anecdotally across the country there have been many speed bumps on the highway to all schools succeeding under NCLB. In New York City, 150 middle schools were considered failing in one area or another so that students could transfer out, and only 115 schools were considered strong enough to accept transfers. At the Booker T. Washington Middle School in Manhattan, so many students have transferred in for the 2004-05 school year that the school has had to cram more than forty students in most classrooms. Principal Lawrence Lynch says NCLB is a “nightmare.”

In Pine Level, North Carolina, Micro-Pine Level Elementary School was labeled as failing because in one out of sixteen categories, progress in special education, test scores were not adequate. The federal formula has mandated that 75% of the special ed. kids, many of whom are borderline retarded, were to score “proficient” in math. Meanwhile, Micro-Pine students had performed so well by state standards that the school earned a $1500 award for each teacher.

Pine-Level principal Kim Wellons might have reported seven fewer special ed. students, which would have brought the number of special ed. students under a threshold, allowing Pine-Level not to report any results for those students. Many schools across the country are now similarly under-reporting their numbers of students of various categories, like special ed., Latino, and children in poverty.

Whether a school is “persistently dangerous” is up to local definition as well. Many states have had such a high threshold for such a rating that no schools in the state are deemed to be unsafe. In California, Locke High School of Los Angeles had 33 assaults with a deadly weapon, 116 beatings, 66 robberies, and 17 sex offenses in 2003-04. However, the standard for safety at Locke is tied to expulsions, and the school has used thirty expulsions per year as the standard. In 2003-04, the school expelled eleven students. In Maryland, however, sixteen schools in Baltimore City are one year away from such a negative rating, after which students get to transfer to . . . somewhere.

Click Here for how NCLB is affecting the District of Columbia.

Incidentally, NCLB also mandates that each school by 2005-06 have a “highly qualified” (as defined by each state) teacher in every classroom. Stay tuned to see how the states and D.C. define “highly qualified.”

Sources: Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, The (D.C.) Northwest Current, eSchool News OnLine, The American Conservative