Bush's No Child Left Behind Act Gets A Failing Grade
A new Harvard University study finds that President Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind education act might need a new name, perhaps something like Not As Many Children Left Behind -- Except Some Who Are Underprivileged or Minorities or Live in States That Don't Want the Results to Make Them Look Bad.
The study from the Civil Rights Project at the university, titled, "The Unraveling of No Child Left Behind: How Negotiated Changes Transform the Law," found that the program designed to level the playing field for all students sometimes benefited white, middle-class children over minorities in poorer regions. The program suffers from unevenly applied standards based on changes demanded by unhappy states, according to author Gail Sunderman.
"It was intended to help improve the performance of minorities and lower-income students and narrow the achievement gap, but I don't think we have any evidence of that," Sunderman said. "What we found was that rather than address those flaws outright, the Department of Education has adopted a political strategy to try and quell political opposition to the law that is growing on the local level."
In light of figures that showed that only 50 percent of black and Hispanic students were graduating from high school, the act was intended to create national standards that would lift the numbers across the board. But Sunderman found that with the exception of Vermont, every state had asked for changes or somehow bargained to reduce the number of schools and/or districts given a failing rating. In the case of Washington state, more than 18 changes were requested to the existing law.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, children in all racial and demographic groups have to boost their scores (using pre-determined goals) on standardized math and English tests every year, or else their schools will face sanction. In the worst cases, schools may be shut down.
"Because every state can get its own combination of changes to the act, there is no longer any clear uniform standard governing the program," Sunderman said. That has led to situations where schools in mostly white districts are able to avoid the penalties placed on those in largely poor or minority districts by taking advantage of the more than two dozen rule changes the states have requested.
Sunderman said many of those changes came as a result of the upsurge in schools that were tagged as "needing improvement" under the act, including some that were previously considered to be top performers. During the first two years of the act, the administration strongly rejected any attempts to alter the parameters of measurement.
"There's been a lot of pushback from the states, with a lot of them adopting resolutions voicing dissatisfaction with the law," she said. "Even Utah, a staunchly Republican state, has argued against it and tried to have it eliminated. The states are in opposition to the expanded federal role in education and the lack of adequate funding for the program."
The first shift in policy came after the administration realized that the small tweaks to the rules it made in 2003 and 2004 regarding the counting of students with disabilities and limited English skills were not enough to satisfy angry states. In 2005, a new version of the act was unveiled amid increasing criticism, with some of the strongest opposition coming from Republican states.
As an example of the kind of uneven rules being applied across the country, Sunderman said in some cases rural Midwestern regions were given extensions on deadlines for teacher qualifications that were not available to poorer rural areas with larger minority populations in the South.
The report concludes that the changes have helped reduce, temporarily anyway, the number of schools identified as needing improvement, while not necessarily raising educational standards.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that one of the act's hallmarks, its requirement that schools with consistently failing grades serving mostly poor children offer their students either a new school or private tutoring, is going mostly unused.
In New York City's school system, the nation's largest, less than half of the 215,000 eligible students sought free tutoring for the school year that ended in June 2005, according to the Times. And even with those low numbers, the city's participation rate is better than the national average. Across the country, about 2 million students were eligible for tutoring in the year ending 2004 and only 226,000, less than 12 percent, received it.
New York city and state officials could not identify the single reason why the program has failed, but pointed to many factors. Among them: too little federal money allotted for tutors, poor advertising to parents, too much paperwork and a failure to penetrate the neighborhoods with the highest number of underprivileged, failing students.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education could not be reached for comment at press time.
