What No Child Left Behind did and didn’t do
No Child Left Behind, the most influential and infuriating federal education law in 40 years, is not quite dead, but getting close. The Obama administration and Congress say they will discard it soon for something different. Nobody’s paying much attention to it any more. The term AYP has fallen out of favor among us education writers.
So I was pleased to see that two of those superbright economists who seem to be doing all the education research these days, Thomas S. Dee of the University of Virginia and Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan, have provided a quick summary of what NCLB did, before we forget it ever existed. They have reviewed all the relevant papers and come up with some surprising conclusions:
No Child Left Behind helped fourth and eighth grade math achievement the most, particularly minorities. It didn’t do much for fourth or eighth grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
NCLB inspired an increase in per-pupil spending of about $733 in states that did not have a school accountability program before the law was passed. But, confirming the complaints of local officials that the feds were hitting them with an unfunded mandate, almost all of this new spending was state and local, not federal, money.
The law appeared to increase instructional time for reading and math, but the authors caution that “the majority of evidence on this point comes from teacher and/or administrator survey data that is subject to some potential biases.”
And in what has to be the most surprising and most likely to be disbelieved of their conclusions, Dee and Jacob said “we also found evidence that NCLB led to increases in teacher-reported measures of student engagement.” That means teacher reports of student tardiness, absenteeism, class cutting, dropping out and poor preparation declined once the law was in place, although Dee told me in an email the data on this is also weak.
The paper’s title is “The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers and Schools.” Most of it is comprehensible even by those of us so traumatized by Economics 1 our sophomore year that we never took another course in that subject. Here is what they said about the fourth-grade math improvement:
“The estimates suggest that NCLB increased the proportion of 4th graders reaching the basic level on NAEP by 10 percentage points. . . .While we find that NCLB had larger impacts among lower-achieving students, we do not find any evidence that the introduction of NCLB harmed students at higher points on the achievement distribution. In contrast to some prior work within individual school districts and states, we find that NCLB seemed to increase achievement at higher points on the achievement distribution more than one might have expected. For example, in 4th grade math, the impacts at the 75th percentile were only 3 scale points lower than at the 10th percentile.”
Yes, I know. They didn’t remind us that correlation, which is what they are reporting, does not necessarily mean causation. They both live in academic environments where everyone knows that, and would be insulted to be reminded, like my wife telling me, as she did several times during our recent drive to California, that I had left the turn signal on.
Dee and Jacob end their paper with an interesting, and controversial, warning. They analyze an Obama administration blueprint, released last March, for its replacement of NCLB in the next reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The authors note that the new administration wants to keep testing students every year, just like NCLB, but allow for flexibility in how states calculate the results. States could, for instance, switch to value-added test results, which say how much each child improved from one annual test to the next.
The Obama blueprint also “calls for the use of non-test accountability indicators, especially measures of college and career readiness . . . [and] proposes to give states increased flexibility in how they might intervene in low-performing schools, only mandating specific consequences for the very lowest-performing schools and those schools with persistently large achievement gaps,” the authors say.
It is that potential lack of consequences, a toothless successor to the NCLB that no longer requires many schools to do much about low achievement, that concerns them. “The literature on pre-NCLB accountability policies suggests that simply reporting accountability measures that were unconnected to explicit consequences did not drive improvements in student achievement,” they say.
When Congress finally gets around to debating what should replace NCLB, I bet we will hear that sentence repeated many times.
Read Jay’s blog every day, and follow all of The Post’s Education coverage on Twitter, Facebook and our Education Web page.
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