Can an emphasis on accountability stimulate educational reform?
By Leanne Star
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If ever a piece of legislation had good intentions, it was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The result of a bipartisan effort, the 670-page act summarizes its mission eloquently: "To close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility and choice, so that no child is left behind." Photo by Jim Ziv. |
But the road to educational reform is paved with good intentions - something that perhaps no one knows better than G. Alfred Hess Jr., research professor of education and social policy and director of the Center for Urban School Policy. Hess has a nose for nuance. Experience has taught him that educational reform can never be achieved as easily or as quickly as the public would like and that some reforms can have unintended negative consequences.
"No Child Left Behind has an ambitious agenda and timeline, and in lots of ways it has oversimplified complex issues," says Hess. "Some of its goals may never be realized." Nevertheless, Hess sees the legislation as a worthwhile challenge, not only for schools across the United States, but for researchers at the School of Education and Social Policy.
" The improvement plans being proposed by individual states to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind must be based on scientific research. That brings a new rigor into how we evaluate education and has a direct impact on schools of education," says Hess. "The big question is, 'How do we think about public education in the 21st century?' Do we think about it in terms of what we put into it, or do we look at the outcome?"
That shift in emphasis - from input to outcome - is at the heart of No Child Left Behind. The old thinking, that throwing more funding at schools would fix everything, has not worked, says Hess. "Resources are important, but they don't guarantee success. Chicago provides a good example of that. The improvement in resources from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was not matched by the outcome of better test scores."
The new emphasis on outcome borrows another page from Chicago's experience. "No Child Left Behind brings to the national level the kind of accountability Chicago pioneered in the 1990s," says Hess, who had a big part in that [See "Grading Chicago Schools" in the spring 2002 issue of Inquiry]. The legislation, which mandates that students meet specific state achievement goals every year, requires that schools test children annually between third and eighth grade and at least once during high school. The testing requirements are being phased in, with some tests, like those in science, not required until the 2007-08 school year.
Even so, the new requirements have already had an impact. In July the Chicago Tribune ran a page-one article under the banner headline "State schools stumble on tests." According to the article, "the number of Illinois public schools labeled as academically failing nearly tripled to more than 600 [in 2003] as tough new federal reforms [No Child Left Behind] expanded to include the performance of subgroups of children based on race and economic status." Previously, schools were judged only by their composite test scores. Now states must separately track minority, low-income, limited-English and special-education students. Each subgroup within a school must meet the standard.
The Tribune article touched on a further consequence of the legislation, the choice mandate - the opportunity for students in underperforming schools to transfer into better schools within the same district. Last year, the article noted, "though 160,000 students in 245 schools were technically eligible to transfer, the vast majority stayed put." The challenge posed by the choice mandate is much more severe for states in the Northeast and Midwest, which have large numbers of districts with only a few schools, Hess notes. Illinois, for example, has nearly 900 districts, some with only one school; most elementary districts have four or fewer schools. With so few schools in a district, the opportunity for transferring is severely limited, and may be non-existent if other schools in the district are also under the choice mandate.
Although Hess says the pre-legislation approach of averaging all test scores often swept under the rug schools' failure to educate certain subgroups, he sees a thicket of difficulties in achieving equity. One is what Hess calls the Lake Wobegone paradox, where "all the children are above average." Ensuring that all students meet standards requires a Solomon-like ability to set those standards, a task that states have been left to accomplish on their own.
A further difficulty will be creating tests that measure educational success. "The current testing milieu was not really ready for this legislation," says Hess. "Most tests distinguish between kids. No Child Left Behind requires different tests that measure what each child knows and determine whether that knowledge matches what society wants children to learn." Because little federal money is available for states to design different sets of tests, the states are in a quandary, says Hess. "The states have to meet a federal standard, but the federal government doesn't design tests."
Even once all the states have tests in place, some critics worry that the yearly testing mandated by No Child Left Behind might have a negative effect, with children and teachers spending too much of their time on test preparation. But Hess says that in Chicago the result will actually be less testing. Chicago students currently take two sets of tests every year, one for the district and another for the state. With full implementation of the legislation, district tests should be unnecessary.
What educators should do, says Hess, is focus on achieving the reforms necessary to raise test scores: "We need to change the way kids and teachers interact. The most critical thing in kids' learning is the quality of their interaction with teachers." As an example of a positive development in this direction, Hess cites efforts of SESP faculty to create ways to better engage students in active inquiry in science classes. [See "Scientists in the Classroom," spring 2000 issue of Inquiry.]
Hess notes that changing the way children and teachers interact is particularly problematic in inner-city schools, where an aging teacher force - many hired without adequate training during the teacher shortages of the '60s and '70s - is coupled with a more disadvantaged student population. "We're asking a lot more of teachers. But we've done a better job of integrating special-needs kids into the classroom than preparing teachers to deal with them. It's much like the integration of minority students into previously all-white schools. It's much easier to move bodies than to move minds."
If anyone is ready to tackle such complexities, it is Hess, whose research team studied the effort to redesign Chicago high schools in the 1990s. As challenging as it may be to implement No Child Left Behind, Hess believes the results will be well worth the effort. "More than anything else it symbolizes that the issue is 'What are kids learning?' That applies to children in every group. Our job is to ensure success for all."
Leanne Star is a freelance writer.