Darling-Hammond Op-Ed:No Child Left Behind needs more than tests

No Child Left Behind needs more than tests

May 28, 2004
Pasadena Star-News

By Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera

FIFTY years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, there is a growing consensus about the need to provide a high-quality education to all children in America. No Child Left Behind, the ambitious federal education law passed in 2001, has succeeded in helping to build this consensus.

However, despite the laudable intentions that led to its adoption, key aspects of the law are fundamentally flawed and our nation remains a long way off from realizing the goal of providing a high-quality education to all children.

There is general agreement that there must be high standards of performance for all students, teachers and schools standards that provide students with the knowledge and skills needed for the new economy and a vibrant democracy.

NCLB has done nothing to insure that all students have access to the essential ingredients required to meet these higher standards, namely qualified teachers, a challenging curriculum, adequate supplies of books and materials, and safe, clean facilities.

In the absence of these critical educational opportunities, calls for high standards are little more than empty promises.

NCLB has significantly expanded the federal role in education with its tough accountability measures that require schools to show evidence of academic progress for all.

However, by enlarging the federal role, the law has reduced the role that parents and teachers play with respect to key decisions in local schools. In so doing, NCLB has undermined the most important principle of accountability in American education, namely that schools should be accountable to the families and communities they serve and not to bureaucrats in the federal government.

Finally, NCLB calls for all children to be proficient in reading and mathematics by the year 2014 as measured annually by test scores. Schools that do not reach the targets are to be punished and students are allowed to exit failing schools.

Unfortunately, the laws' complex regulations for showing adequate yearly progress have created a bizarre situation in which most of the nation's public schools will be deemed failing within the next few years including those that achieve at the highest levels and those that are steadily improving.

In fact, nearly one-third of all public schools have already been declared failing under the law, including most of those in Minnesota, the top-ranked state in the nation in mathematics, some of the nations highest standards.

Ironically, states that adopted the most ambitious standards and assessments during the 1990s are beginning to lower their standards, and many have abandoned measures of critical thinking and performance, just as the labor market increasingly demands these kinds of skills.

Meanwhile, many inner-city and poor, rural schools most in need of support are likely to receive even fewer resources as they pay a diversity penalty for serving a wide range of needy students and stand to lose funds rather than getting the help they need.

NCLB calls for all children to be guaranteed good schools and highly qualified teachers. However, many of the schools with the greatest need for improvements are severely underfunded and serve students with high levels of need.

Just punishing these schools and labeling them failures will not make them better. They need resources to improve. Unfortunately, NCLB has never been fully funded, and it does little to ensure that students actually have the opportunities to learn that would allow them to pass the tests.

Sadly, No Child Left Behind is already leaving millions of children behind, and if modifications are not made to the law, our system of public education will be damaged even further.

The law does not address the real needs of our schools, nor does it offer genuine accountability that would promote better practice. It substitutes testing for investing and bureaucracy for democracy.

Instead of blaming our schools and strangling educators with new regulations, we need an agenda that will stimulate and support productive improvement. This will require a different approach, beginning with strong efforts to close the opportunity gap the huge and growing inequalities in children's access to basic health care, food and housing, and preschool education.

It will require more equitable and adequate funding for our schools, and closing the gap between under-resourced schools in central cities and poor rural areas and those in affluent suburbs.

It will require a major federal initiative to underwrite strong preparation and recruitment incentives for well-qualified teachers who will teach in high-need schools.

And it will require new approaches to accountability approaches that value a wide range of measures of learning, including performance assessments of students' abilities to reason, think, research, create and defend their ideas; indicators of student participation, progress, and leadership as they go through school; and evidence of school practices that include strong ties to parents and communities.

If we really want to leave no child behind we will have to do more than require that students be tested regularly.

We need a federal law that makes it possible to raise standards and expectations in public education and to provide children with a world-class education. Policy-makers and the general public should accept nothing less.

Pedro Noguera is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. Linda Darling-Hammond is currently Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University .