Dropout Nation

Certainly New America Foundation higher education czar Kevin Carey is one of the most-thoughtful inside-the-Beltway reform players. After all, it was his 2004 report for the Education Trust on the importance of teachers in improving student achievement that helped usher in the very teacher quality reforms (including using objective and longitudinal student achievement data in evaluating teacher performance) that are now coming into place. And his profile of once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch has done plenty to further remind all of us that she doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as either a traditionalist or a public intellectual.

But even Carey occasionally gets it wrong. He did so in spectacular fashion this week in his column in The New Republic on the Obama administration’s evisceration of the No Child Left Behind Act and its Adequate Yearly Progress subgroup accountability provisions. Arguing that the early optimism about No Child from reformers “proved unfounded”, Carey declares that there is little evidence that the law has led to “a new era of educational opportunity for disadvantaged children” or for all children in general. From where he sits, the Obama administration’s gambit is a better approach to advancing reform, even if it “leaves the vast majority of students in schools that are exempt from any meaningful federal attention.”

Neither of Carey’s arguments holds up to close scrutiny. If anything, Carey fails to consider the success of No Child in launching the reform efforts that are now gaining traction — and how those initial reforms have led to improvements in student achievement. More importantly, Carey fails to thoughtfully analyze how the Obama administration’s waiver gambit will impede the very efforts to transform American public education championed by his centrist Democrat and conservative reform colleagues as well as himself.

Although Carey admits that the reforms No Child has unleashed led to improvements in math performance, he argues that the law has done little to address the illiteracy crisis at the heart of the nation’s overall education crisis (the subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast). Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tells a different story. Between 2003 and 2011, the percentage of all fourth-graders reading Below Basic proficiency declined from 39 percent to 33 percent in 2011; the percentage of black students who were functionally illiterate declined from 60 percent to 51 percent during that period, while the percentage of poor and minority kids reading Below Basic declined from 54 percent to 48 percent. To quantify this overall (based on federal enrollment data and Dropout Nation‘s projections of fourth-grade enrollment for 2010-2011), it is likely that 217,432 fewer fourth-graders were functionally illiterate — and likely to drop out — in 2011 than in the year after No Child was passed. Meanwhile more students were reading at proficient and advanced level, increasing by three points (from 31 percent to 34 percent), a faster level of growth than the two percentage point clip between 1998 and 2002.

No Child also helped force states and districts into taking the first key steps in providing all children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, with the strong, comprehensive college preparatory curricula. Between 2002 and 2011, the percentage of high school seniors graduating after having taken at least one Advanced Placement exam increased by a two-fold; this includes a three-fold increase in the number of black high school seniors taking at least one A.P. exam, and a two-fold jump in Latino students taking A.P. exams. The law has also encouraged such efforts as the National Math and Science Initiative, which has helped boost the numbers of poor and minority high school kids taking AP courses by breaking through the cultures of low expectations within districts which consider those children unworthy of high-quality learning (and has even less regard for the mothers and fathers, who are often not informed about the reading, math, and science coursework their kids need and should get in order to get into the traditional colleges, technical schools, and apprenticeships that lead to middle-class white- and blue-collar careers). In short, No Child is helping reformers beat back the racialist Poverty and Personal Responsibility myths held by traditionalists (and even some of their reform allies) that is at the heart of the nation’s education crisis.

This isn’t to say that No Child is perfect. Carey is right in noting that the very flexibility in the law (along with the U.S. Department of Education’s implementation of AYP) allowed states to game it by failing to elevate (and in some cases, deliberately lower) standards and proficiency targets more-rigorous in the first place, then moving to ramp them up just a few years before the 2014 target would come into play. The law also doesn’t hold fully hold accountable important elements in improving the quality of teaching, curricula and school operations; this includes university schools of education, which continue to do a shoddy job of recruiting and training the teachers whose talents are the most-critical factor in improving (or bringing down) student achievement. And the fact that AYP doesn’t focus on the crisis of low educational achievement for young men of all backgrounds, the most-persistent symptom of the nation’s education crisis, has allowed districts to continue practices such as overlabeling of young men as special ed cases that toss more futures into the abyss.

But No Child’s mix success should be expected. After all, No Child is just the first step in advancing systemic reform and not the end-all. Given that at the time of the law’s passage, most Americans not engaged in education though traditional public schools were generally serving their kids (and all children) well, there was no way that reformers could pass a law that would serve to fully overhaul the super-cluster. That there was little data on student, district, and school performance before the second advent of standardized testing in the decade preceding No Child’s passage also limited what reformers could have done. No one fully understood how traditional teacher compensation systems, and traditional ed schools make it difficult for districts to provide kids with high-quality teachers, nor was there enough evidence on how Zip Code Education policies (including zoned schooling) keeps four out of every five children and families from choosing schools that are of high-quality and are the best-fits for their learning needs.

But for all those flaws, No Child has hardly been a failure. In fact, it has been the single-biggest advance in education policy, both at the federal level and among states and local governments, since the Defense Education Act of 1958. For the first time in the history of American public education, federal education policy set clear goals for improving student achievement in reading and mathematics, and finally focused attention on using data in measuring teacher quality. It also made it clear to suburban districts that they could no longer continue to commit educational malpractice against poor and minority children, as well as focused American public education on achieving measurable results instead of damning kids to low expectations. Through its Adequate Yearly Progress measures, the low quality of education across the nation’s public schools — especially in suburbia — was exposed for all to see. It gave researchers the impetus to look at the nation’s high school graduation rates (and present in clear, stark terms the high school dropout crisis); the shameful revelations that states were often reporting inaccurate graduation rate numbers (and using calculation methods that hid the reality that many kids were dropping out) forced education officials to take much-needed steps in reporting accurate (and sobering) numbers. No Child also proved that accountability (and the information on performance that it unleashes) works. For reform-minded governors and school leaders, No Child’s accountability measures gave them the tools they needed to beat back opposition to their efforts from traditionalists in their own states. The law also led reformers to expose the gamesmanship states were engaging in, helping them further their own efforts.

Without No Child, there is no Race to the Top, no teacher quality reform movement, no discussion about value-added assessment and no real national focus on stemming achievement gaps. In fact, without No Child, there would have never been an expansion of school choice and Parent Power — including the passage of Parent Trigger laws in six states and the expansion of school voucher programs — over the past two years. And for that, No Child deserves more credit that Carey (and others) gives it.

Meanwhile the Obama administration’s evisceration of No Child through its waiver gambit, which Carey implicitly defends, has already proven to be a set-back for sustaining and advancing the very systemic reforms Carey and reformers are promulgating. By allowing states to ditch racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup categories and replace them with a super-subgroup subterfuge that commingles poor and minority students into one, the administration is making it difficult for families, especially black, Latino, and Asian families who are joining the middle class for the first time and moving into suburbia — to get the information they need to make smart decisions for their kids, and impede them from helping to advance systemic reform. (It also makes it difficult for researchers and reformers to access the comparable state-by-state data they need for their own respective work.). By allowing states to focus on the worst five percent of schools (along with another 10 percent of schools with wide achievement gaps), the administration is also letting districts not under watch off the hook for serving up mediocre instruction and curricula. The fact that the administration is pushing states to enact and implement “college and career-ready” standards (including the Common Core’s reading and math guidelines) as a condition of the waiver is meaningless because it cannot by law force states to follow up on its promise by putting actual curricula in place. And in blessing moves to replace subgroup accountability with A-to-F grading systems and “super-subgroup” subterfuges, schools and districts can ignore their obligations toward the poor and minority kids in their classrooms and still appear to be exemplary.

How the administration is conducting the waiver process in practice also raises questions.  The Department of Education has granted waivers to states in spite of concerns raised by the panels reviewing the requests. New York State, for example, received a waiver even though reviewers were concerned that it was “unclear” whether the Empire State’s education agency had consulted American Indian tribes (whose children attend traditional district schools throughout the Upstate region) on any aspect of the waiver package; Native groups and other civil rights-based reformers have already complained virulently that other states — including New Mexico and Oklahoma — didn’t bother to do this either. The fact that the Obama administration granted a waiver to Virginia even though its application wasn’t worth the paper upon which it was written (and the Old Dominion’s efforts in improving school and district performance have trailed the rest of the nation), and gave Ohio a waiver despite not having put the teacher quality component of its application in place, makes clear that the administration isn’t paying attention to what is happening on the ground. (That Virginia officials still don’t know how the state will proceed in measuring school, district, and student performance even after gaining proposing such a system as part of their waiver request, further shows the thoughtlessness of the administration’s decision.)

Add in the questions about the legality of the waiver process (especially given that President Barack Obama is allowing states to ignore whole sections of federal law), and the fact that the administration is effectively doing the bidding of education traditionalists and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, who have long-pushed for eviscerating No Child, and one can easily see that the waiver gambit is the polar opposite of good policymaking. Ultimately, this will do far more harm to the futures of children than simply allowing No Child to be enforced as is. And no centrist Democrat reformer, especially Carey, can defend the effort with a straight face.

What Carey and other reformers should be doing is demanding the Obama administration and Congress to craft a new version of No Child that leaves AYP in places, builds upon it by making gender a subgroup category (a suggestion made by Why Boys Fail author Richard Whitmire and I last year, and one supported in some reform circles), places ed schools under greater scrutiny, and embraces the competitive grant model that the Obama administration has used with success in getting states to expand choice and improve teacher evaluations. This would do far more for advancing reform than supporting an administration tactic that does nothing for providing all children with the high-quality education they need to write their own stories.