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December 13, 2007
Debating the No Child Left Behind Act: New Reason Roundtable
Should No Child Left Behind Act be fixed or scrapped? That’s the question addressed by the contributors to the latest Reason Roundtable. But they have diametrically opposite views. Erin Dillon of Education Sector emphatically argues to fix it and Andrew Coulson of the Cato institute equally emphatically to scrap it.
Dillon believes that those who maintain that NCLB is useless if it does not give parents an exit option to take their kids to whichever school they want are naïve. They end up wasting precious resources on dead-end political battles, leaving in the lurch parents whose kids are stuck in failing schools. They are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Coulson believes that the NCLB is a useless distraction that hasn’t – and can’t – do anything to reform public schools while violating our constitution. He thinks the only way to help parents is to get rid of the law and push school choice initiatives at the local and state levels now.
Check out their discussion and post your own thoughts below:
http://www.reason.org/roundtable/nochildleftbehind.shtml
Posted by shikhad at December 13, 2007 11:14 AM
Sorry, but I can't take hardly anything seriously coming from the CATO Institute. Starting from the premise that anything subsidized or regulated by the government is bad is quite limiting. Public schools are by necessity a government function. School quality is in the national interest. If we left it to locals, public schools would still be segregated. If we depended on family income alone to subsidize education, millions of children would be on the streets. Without federal support, we wouldn't have the best higher education system in the world. Sorry to be so simplistic. But it's hard to approach the issue of education vis a vis Cato in any other way.
To date the new school capacity that exists has been created through local grassroots and state legislative efforts that have grown new or better schools despite interventions from the federal government. If we stopped spending the $23 billion + on No Child Left Behind and created programs that gave parents access to tax credits, I seriously doubt that that current school performance would decline. The more likely scenario (given evidence from the literature review referenced in Andrew Coulson’s paper) is that outcomes for achievement would improve as families had more individual education resources and a wider variety of education providers competed for those resources.
Erin Dillon from Ed Sector underestimates school innovation at the state and local level, while overestimating the ability of the federal government to use carrots or sticks to change individual school behavior. States were moving to standards-based reform and testing based accountability long before the federal government became involved. In fact No Child Left Behind was an effort to scale up the best state accountability programs.
States like California and Florida have had a constant battle to bring their earlier accountability systems in line with the federal requirements for adequate yearly progress. California uses two systems of student accountability as local stakeholders are unwilling to give up the information provided by the pre-NCLB accountability system.
In addition, there are multiple outside groups that are now willing to help parents evaluate school performance by analyzing state data, from Greatschools.net to Standard and Poor’s. I am very skeptical that parents demand for localized achievement data would diminish without No Child Left Behind. There is little chance that California, for example, would stop trying to implement a longitudinal data system without No Child Left Behind. As technology makes these systems increasingly less expensive and easier to manage, states will seek more information about students rather than less. I seriously doubt we will “go back to the dark ages” without the federal No Child Left Behind Act. If anything, the No Child Left behind Act has muddied the achievement data that is presented to parents by constantly changing what it means to be “proficient.”
As long as the NAEP (which is already being used to discern the real achievement gap in individual states), is being used to benchmark student achievement in every state, states will remain focused on reporting achievement data for all subgroups. Why spend billions of dollars on No Child Left Behind to enforce state-level testing programs if in the end we have to refer to a national test to decipher what is really happening in the states?
Even if you believe that public school choice is best way to produce more high quality school capacity, to date the public school choice programs with the most robust outcomes for students have been driven by state and local school policy. For example, in Michigan hundreds of students have left low-performing Detroit public schools for the surrounding districts under a robust open enrollment state school choice policy. Detroit has been forced through competitive public school choice into a real crisis mode where more radical school changes are now possible. This was not driven or impacted in any way by No Child Left Behind. Similarly, in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Oakland, it has been local public school choice policies that has driven change and forced existing public schools to get better or close. So even if one is not a proponent of vouchers or tax credits, it is state and local governing institutions and not federal top-down policies that have led to the most robust public-school choice policies.
In light of the efforts in many states to water down the meaning of proficiency and to use statistical maneuvering to hide the performance of some groups of students, I am highly skeptical that these states, without federal pressure, would continue to report accurate data disaggregated by student group. It is difficult to at once blame states for avoiding NCLB’s requirements to improve school quality and provide good information to the public, and also expect that they will suddenly do both of these things once the federal pressure is removed.
I agree that school choice could be used to push for both of these things—better information and higher school quality. But before we’re able to implement school choice on a broad scale, we need to build our supply of quality schools. If we don’t, many students will be left with no real choices available. Lessons from the charter sector tell us that it’s difficult and expensive to locate schools in urban and in rural areas—two places we know need better schooling options. The risk is that, because of the limited supply of quality options in some areas, existing education disparities will only be exacerbated. And Detroit is an excellent example. While hundreds of students might benefit from the open-enrollment program, that still leaves thousands in the existing Detroit schools. These students have no real choices available, and the quickest way to remedy that is to improve on the existing public schools. When we do that, those students will have an actual marketplace in which to exercise their choice.
NCLB can/should mean ignore no child; that is collect data, conduct studies, and publicize the heck out of malfeasance (states with low standards) and brilliance; i.e. use the bully pulpit.
Charles Barone? How can anyone with access to a search engine make a statement like :"Public schools are by necessity a government function." If Barone means that schooling is by necessity a government function, which seems to be the intended meaning, that statement is false at several levels. We can subsidize schooling without involving government (=politics) in operating schools. It wasn't long ago that people widely feared what Barone says is a necessity; political control of what children should be taught. Intelligent people disagree on whether politics should be involved in deciding what children should be taught, but it is not a "necessity." That quality education is in the public interest may be the best reason to keep the government (politics) out of it.
Professor Barone, please read E.G. West's Education and the State, or some of Coulson's work that explains how we can support schooling without involving government money. And or James Tooley's Reclaiming Education.
Ms. Dillon then goes on (inadvertently, I’m sure) to misrepresent the position of school choice advocates, saying that: “Some choice proponents suggest that a quick solution to the supply problem is to allow students to attend existing private schools through a voucher program instead of building supply among public schools.” But this, she laments, “is unrealistic: The capacity simply doesn't exist in the private sector to absorb enough students from low-performing schools—private schools currently enroll only slightly more than 10 percent of all students.”
In reality, no serious school choice advocate suggests that vouchers or any other strong private school choice reform would simply fill seats in existing schools. On the contrary, choice advocates point to the natural supply response described above, in which the increased ability to afford private schooling would increase demand for private schooling, and thereby spur the creation of new schools.
And this is indeed what happens in practice. As I previously pointed out to one Ms. Dillon’s erstwhile Ed Sector colleagues, school choice programs in the Netherlands and Chile, for-profit tutoring chains across Asia and increasingly in the United States, and ubiquitous private parent-funded schools in the slums and villages of Africa and India all demonstrate how supply of private schooling rises to meet demand. The only reason that supply of private schools is low in the United States today is that the government has seized for itself a 90 percent monopoly by taxing the public and spending roughly $13,000/year per pupil on district schools. Eliminate that funding discrimination against private supply, and private supply will return – as it has returned where the funding discrimination has been reduced by school choice policies (or was largely absent to begin with, as in the tutoring sector).
This debate serves to bolster my conclusion that most U.S. education pundits have only the most limited familiarity with the international evidence on market and non-market provision of education. Because of this empirical parochialism, they are unaware that markets work as well in the field of education as in every other field. American children would be well served if the nation’s education thinkers would all sit down with a few international literature reviews of the scores of public/private sector education studies that have been compiled over the past quarter century, or the historical evidence going back thousands of years. As a starting point, my own reviews of that evidence are available here: http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/How_Markets_Affect_Quality.pdf and here: http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philosophy/dp/0765804964.
And, turning back to NCLB, there is new evidence from the PISA and PIRLS international tests that U.S. student performance has either stagnated or declined across grades and subjects since NCLB was passed. I summarize those results here: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121007E
We know markets work in education. We know that NCLB doesn’t.
Comment by: Charles Barone at December 14, 2007 07:07 AM
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Andrew Coulson is on target when he describes the illegal and misguided role of the federal government to regulate local schools through the No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind has been an expensive regulatory boondoggle that has given states perverse incentives to lower standards and game accountability requirements. As I documented in How Schools Cheat, (http://www.reason.com/news/show/36161.html) the No Child Left Behind has created a situation where states dumb down standards and lower cut scores for proficiency while simultaneously reporting increases in proficiency for all sub-groups of children.To date the new school capacity that exists has been created through local grassroots and state legislative efforts that have grown new or better schools despite interventions from the federal government. If we stopped spending the $23 billion + on No Child Left Behind and created programs that gave parents access to tax credits, I seriously doubt that that current school performance would decline. The more likely scenario (given evidence from the literature review referenced in Andrew Coulson’s paper) is that outcomes for achievement would improve as families had more individual education resources and a wider variety of education providers competed for those resources.
Erin Dillon from Ed Sector underestimates school innovation at the state and local level, while overestimating the ability of the federal government to use carrots or sticks to change individual school behavior. States were moving to standards-based reform and testing based accountability long before the federal government became involved. In fact No Child Left Behind was an effort to scale up the best state accountability programs.
States like California and Florida have had a constant battle to bring their earlier accountability systems in line with the federal requirements for adequate yearly progress. California uses two systems of student accountability as local stakeholders are unwilling to give up the information provided by the pre-NCLB accountability system.
In addition, there are multiple outside groups that are now willing to help parents evaluate school performance by analyzing state data, from Greatschools.net to Standard and Poor’s. I am very skeptical that parents demand for localized achievement data would diminish without No Child Left Behind. There is little chance that California, for example, would stop trying to implement a longitudinal data system without No Child Left Behind. As technology makes these systems increasingly less expensive and easier to manage, states will seek more information about students rather than less. I seriously doubt we will “go back to the dark ages” without the federal No Child Left Behind Act. If anything, the No Child Left behind Act has muddied the achievement data that is presented to parents by constantly changing what it means to be “proficient.”
As long as the NAEP (which is already being used to discern the real achievement gap in individual states), is being used to benchmark student achievement in every state, states will remain focused on reporting achievement data for all subgroups. Why spend billions of dollars on No Child Left Behind to enforce state-level testing programs if in the end we have to refer to a national test to decipher what is really happening in the states?
Even if you believe that public school choice is best way to produce more high quality school capacity, to date the public school choice programs with the most robust outcomes for students have been driven by state and local school policy. For example, in Michigan hundreds of students have left low-performing Detroit public schools for the surrounding districts under a robust open enrollment state school choice policy. Detroit has been forced through competitive public school choice into a real crisis mode where more radical school changes are now possible. This was not driven or impacted in any way by No Child Left Behind. Similarly, in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Oakland, it has been local public school choice policies that has driven change and forced existing public schools to get better or close. So even if one is not a proponent of vouchers or tax credits, it is state and local governing institutions and not federal top-down policies that have led to the most robust public-school choice policies.
Comment by: Lisa Snell at December 14, 2007 08:03 AM
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Lisa Snell paints a very optimistic portrait of the willingness of states to provide accurate and accessible information to parents about school performance. Yes, we’ve seen big strides in the past decade on standards and accountability, and that was happening in some states before NCLB came into being. But, in many states it wasn’t. And the attention in states was on improving overall averages, not on ensuring that all students were meeting state standards. NCLB’s requirement that states disaggregate data is critical to bringing public attention to the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students. The special education community’s robust response in support of NCLB and its data reporting requirements is a powerful example of one group of students that was short-changed before NCLB and is now finally getting the attention it needs.In light of the efforts in many states to water down the meaning of proficiency and to use statistical maneuvering to hide the performance of some groups of students, I am highly skeptical that these states, without federal pressure, would continue to report accurate data disaggregated by student group. It is difficult to at once blame states for avoiding NCLB’s requirements to improve school quality and provide good information to the public, and also expect that they will suddenly do both of these things once the federal pressure is removed.
I agree that school choice could be used to push for both of these things—better information and higher school quality. But before we’re able to implement school choice on a broad scale, we need to build our supply of quality schools. If we don’t, many students will be left with no real choices available. Lessons from the charter sector tell us that it’s difficult and expensive to locate schools in urban and in rural areas—two places we know need better schooling options. The risk is that, because of the limited supply of quality options in some areas, existing education disparities will only be exacerbated. And Detroit is an excellent example. While hundreds of students might benefit from the open-enrollment program, that still leaves thousands in the existing Detroit schools. These students have no real choices available, and the quickest way to remedy that is to improve on the existing public schools. When we do that, those students will have an actual marketplace in which to exercise their choice.
Comment by: Erin Dillon at December 14, 2007 02:46 PM
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The sad truth of government programs is that they seldom disappear. That being the reality, the productive debate is to find the best face-saving (=feasible) way to transform NCLB to best utilize federal involvement once it becomes a fact of life.NCLB can/should mean ignore no child; that is collect data, conduct studies, and publicize the heck out of malfeasance (states with low standards) and brilliance; i.e. use the bully pulpit.
Charles Barone? How can anyone with access to a search engine make a statement like :"Public schools are by necessity a government function." If Barone means that schooling is by necessity a government function, which seems to be the intended meaning, that statement is false at several levels. We can subsidize schooling without involving government (=politics) in operating schools. It wasn't long ago that people widely feared what Barone says is a necessity; political control of what children should be taught. Intelligent people disagree on whether politics should be involved in deciding what children should be taught, but it is not a "necessity." That quality education is in the public interest may be the best reason to keep the government (politics) out of it.
Professor Barone, please read E.G. West's Education and the State, or some of Coulson's work that explains how we can support schooling without involving government money. And or James Tooley's Reclaiming Education.
Comment by: John Merrifield at December 17, 2007 01:39 PM
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Erin Dillon writes that "before we’re able to implement school choice on a broad scale, we need to build our supply of quality schools." This is precisely backwards. Growth in supply follows growth in demand, not the other way around. Eliminate the enormous funding advantage currently enjoyed by government monopoly schools, and demand for private schooling will rise. Supply of private schools will rise to meet that new demand. This is not simply economic theory. As I explain below, there is ample evidence of this happening around the world.Ms. Dillon then goes on (inadvertently, I’m sure) to misrepresent the position of school choice advocates, saying that: “Some choice proponents suggest that a quick solution to the supply problem is to allow students to attend existing private schools through a voucher program instead of building supply among public schools.” But this, she laments, “is unrealistic: The capacity simply doesn't exist in the private sector to absorb enough students from low-performing schools—private schools currently enroll only slightly more than 10 percent of all students.”
In reality, no serious school choice advocate suggests that vouchers or any other strong private school choice reform would simply fill seats in existing schools. On the contrary, choice advocates point to the natural supply response described above, in which the increased ability to afford private schooling would increase demand for private schooling, and thereby spur the creation of new schools.
And this is indeed what happens in practice. As I previously pointed out to one Ms. Dillon’s erstwhile Ed Sector colleagues, school choice programs in the Netherlands and Chile, for-profit tutoring chains across Asia and increasingly in the United States, and ubiquitous private parent-funded schools in the slums and villages of Africa and India all demonstrate how supply of private schooling rises to meet demand. The only reason that supply of private schools is low in the United States today is that the government has seized for itself a 90 percent monopoly by taxing the public and spending roughly $13,000/year per pupil on district schools. Eliminate that funding discrimination against private supply, and private supply will return – as it has returned where the funding discrimination has been reduced by school choice policies (or was largely absent to begin with, as in the tutoring sector).
This debate serves to bolster my conclusion that most U.S. education pundits have only the most limited familiarity with the international evidence on market and non-market provision of education. Because of this empirical parochialism, they are unaware that markets work as well in the field of education as in every other field. American children would be well served if the nation’s education thinkers would all sit down with a few international literature reviews of the scores of public/private sector education studies that have been compiled over the past quarter century, or the historical evidence going back thousands of years. As a starting point, my own reviews of that evidence are available here: http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/How_Markets_Affect_Quality.pdf and here: http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philosophy/dp/0765804964.
And, turning back to NCLB, there is new evidence from the PISA and PIRLS international tests that U.S. student performance has either stagnated or declined across grades and subjects since NCLB was passed. I summarize those results here: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121007E
We know markets work in education. We know that NCLB doesn’t.
Comment by: Andrew Coulson at December 17, 2007 04:12 PM
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