Barron’s editorial page editor Thomas Donlan is no cheerleader for George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, but Donlan uses his latest column to identify some benefits linked to NCLB.
It required states to test all students and to define adequate yearly progress toward a goal of “proficiency” in reading and math. It also required states to impose sanctions against failing schools, up to wholesale dismissal of faculty and staff at schools that failed to improve after years of bad results.
For better and for worse, it was the first meaningful federal intervention in the conduct of U.S. public education, which is still run by localities, with state supervision.
There was one thing that the act definitely accomplished. It created an easy way of identifying malingerers in education: When you heard the term “high-stakes testing,” you probably were hearing someone who was part of the problem in American public education, someone trying to protect jobs, rather than do them.
Donlan turns his attention to a report from the Washington-based think tank Education Sector that showed a wide variation among states in education improvement since NCLB took effect.
The new achievement gap among the states is nearly two-thirds the size of that between black and white students nationwide, “a gap rooted in slavery, discrimination, and 200 years of shameful history,” Chubb said. “The new gap has nothing to do with economic resources, the historic differences of the states, or with where states stood at the beginning of the period.”
Chubb added that the explanation for the new gap is painfully simple: “Whether states have been serious about reform. The states that made the most progress have taken steps, in various ways, to raise academic standards and back them up with rigorous assessments, implement tough but thoughtful accountability systems, and strengthen human-capital practices to attract, develop, and retain educators who can deliver on high standards. Low-performing states simply have not.”
It’s good that North Carolina leaders are getting serious about education reform.
