A Few Notes on NCLB

So, I made the mistake of reading of this series of love letters masquerading as an interview about NCLB between Andrew Rotherham and George W. Bush (via Laura Clawson at GOS). President Bush thinks his signature legislative accomplishment is a resounding success and that its critics are unfair? I never would have imagined.

As worthless as that interview is as a journalistic endeavor, it did remind me of just how much Bush still repulses me. As disappointed as I am with Obama (especially on education), at least he doesn’t make make me feel sick whenever I see/hear/read him.

Rotherham’s solo defense of NCLB does not even have that small bit of perspective-keeping to recommend it. I clicked through to it, hoping to find a defense of NCLB that wasn’t the usual “some scores on some tests for some demographics have improved somewhat, therefore it is a success.” I was mostly disappointed:

The No Child law didn’t get everything right the first time, but that’s the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas — think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security — to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.

Rotherham conveniently forgets that No Child Left Behind had a very clearly defined goal that went beyond “make education slightly better.” It aimed, nay, demanded, 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. By its own measure of success, NCLB is a complete and utter failure.

Rotherham goes on:

Together, the focus on data and accountability is fueling a growing urgency about the need to improve our schools. The law highlighted the magnitude of the gaps in achievement and outcomes that divide students by race and income and makes it harder for people to argue, in essence, that “our schools are doing fine if you don’t count the poor and minority kids.” Oh, and by the way, there has been some improvement in achievement for low-income and minority kids, the law’s intended beneficiaries — which is no small thing in a country that systematically overlooks these students.

Here’s the thing: people (notably but far from exclusively this guy) noticed these inequities long before NCLB and its merry band of reformers came along. Civil Rights groups demanded more equitable education funding systems and enforcement of Brown v. Board in court and often won. Considerable progress was made in closing the gap before the Supreme Court decided that school segregation wasn’t so bad after all, and, oh yeah, standards-based reformers convinced everyone (or rather, everyone that mattered) that equitable funding was a meaningless goal.

I had hoped that Rotherham would defend NCLB’s core principle of accountability, but alas, he does not. Indeed, it the fact that Rotherham and his compatriots no longer need to make even the most cursory defense of the concept that he celebrates most about NCLB.

Accountability holds great appeal, obviously. Who doesn’t want accountability? I would certainly like some measure of accountability for those bastards who burnt our economy to the ground and then suffered not even the most minor of consequences. I would like accountability for those sons of bitches in government who have decided to destroy jobs rather than fix the economy. I would like accountability for those who recklessly replaced a system of public education with a system of public test prep. But, as I have learned time and time again, only plebs can be held accountable. To hold anyone with any amount of power to account would tear the country apart, or something.

But I digress. The real problem with accountability when applied to education, aside from Campbell’s law which I have never seen an education reformer acknowledge let alone engage with, is that, shockingly, education does not only take place within the classroom. NCLB demands that schools carry not only their own weight, but that of society in its entirety. It is unclear why standards-based reformers believe we can have equitable educational outcomes without an equitable society. That is not to say that no progress can be made without societal changes, but certainly not the uniformly high outcomes that NCLB demands.