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Dear Colleague Letters

January 2012

Dear Colleague:

January 2012 was the 10th anniversary of No Child Left Behind. This is significant because the overarching goal of the law was to have 100% of U.S. school children academically proficient or above this year. The original legislation also required the Congress to reauthorize NCLB with or without changes after 5 years, which hasn’t happened, apparently because politicians on both sides of the aisle are fearful of either changing it or reauthorizing it without change.

It is amazing that this bipartisan legislation (90% of the House and Senate originally voted for NCLB) has reached the point where everyone seems to be avoiding dealing with the law. What happened? They have succumbed to the controversy that embroiled the law from the very beginning.

Most of the controversy centers around two major provisions in the law. First, many educators, and parents as well, feel that educational accountability ought to examine factors other than, or at least in addition to, standardized test scores. They claim that too often schools have abandoned anything and everything that is not immediately connected to the test scores. In my judgment, the overemphasis on test scores was never the intent of the law. Rather, the excessive emphasis on standardized test scores is the by-product of the flawed implementation of the law, the responsibility of the individual states.  We could have and still can do better.

Another problematic provision is the requirement that schools demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Anyone familiar with concepts like continuous improvement and total quality could have predicted that AYP done the way it was would likely produce a fire storm of criticism. We have always held that schools should be judged by its own performance and against its own baseline. If a school shows even one percentage point of improvement year after year it will eventually reach the intended goal of 100%, but not all schools will get to the goal in 10 years.

In spite of the controversy surrounding NCLB, most educators agree that being required to report student progress disaggregated by various identified subgroups has been beneficial. It has served to shine a light on the equity issues in education that were heretofore commonly ignored.

Hopefully, if our elected officials ever summon the courage to take up the reauthorization of NCLB, they’ll fix those parts that need fixing, add flexibility where appropriate but, by all means, persist in the requirement that our mission is to successfully educate all children. We’ll know we have accomplished our mission when the gaps in student performance for our racial, ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups no longer exist.

 

Respectfully,
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Lawrence W. Lezotte
 
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