FOR as long as there have been maths tests, there have been cheats. But whereas a schoolboy caught furtively copying his neighbour’s answers can expect a zero and an angry letter home, states that rig exam results are showered with federal cash. This is one reason why the No Child Left Behind Act, a noble attempt to impose discipline on American schools, needs revision before it merits an A grade.
The premise behind the law was sensible enough. Before it was passed in 2002, state education bureaucrats were reluctant to collect and publish the kind of data that would have allowed parents to make comparisons between schools, or to tell if a school was improving over time. Good schools received few rewards; bad ones had little incentive to improve. President George Bush sought to change that.
Under No Child Left Behind, students must be tested on maths and reading every year between the ages of eight and 13, and once in high school. Test results must be published and broken down by race. Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress” face penalties. Parents of children at consistently failing schools must be allowed to move them to better ones.
All good stuff. But there are catches. Federal subsidies to the states depend on students meeting standards that the states themselves set. States thus have a multi-billion-dollar incentive to game the system. In Arizona, for example, only one-fifth of eighth-graders were rated “proficient” at maths after taking the state test in 2003. Two years later, that proportion had magically tripled. Does this mean that the test got easier to pass? “Yes,” says Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s plain-talking governor.
Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham Foundation:
The report being released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington uses harsh terms in critiquing the standards that are intended to guide instruction in Wisconsin schools. “Depth is nowhere to be found,” it said of the science standards. “This document has no structure or method,” it said of the world history standards. “Skimpy content and vague wording,” it said in describing the math standards.
In June, a different group ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in the country in frustrating the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Also in June, a third organization focused on Milwaukee and Wisconsin as examples of places where more inexperienced – and therefore, less proficient – teachers are disproportionately assigned to high-needs schools. And two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education rejected as inadequate Wisconsin’s plans for dealing with federal requirements that every student have a “highly qualified” teacher.
along with Kevin Carey: “Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB “
Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states’ rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation’s diverse states and schools.
In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute “proficiency”—the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
The Pangloss Index ranks Wisconsin as the most optimistic state in the nation. Wisconsin scores well on some educational measures, like the SAT, but lags behind in others, such as achievement gaps for minority students. But according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified. School districts around the nation are struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the primary standard of school and district success under NCLB. Yet 99.8 percent of Wisconsin districts—425 out of 426—made AYP in 2004–05.
How is that possible? As Table 2 shows, some states have identified the large majority of districts as not making AYP. The answer lies with the way Wisconsin has chosen to define the AYP standard.