With NCLB action on hold, focus shifts to ‘common standards’ and assessments
Published: June 1, 2009
The No Child Left Behind Act remains the backbone of much of the federal government’s education policy, and all too often it is a punitive stick rather than a helpful resource. With no action on NCLB’s reauthorization expected this year, though, much of the related discussion at this year’s Federal Issues Council broadened to a wider overview of calls for “common” academic standards.
The shift reflected a number of developments, including promising signs of needed policy changes coming from both the Obama administration and Congress, as well as billions of new education dollars becoming available under the federal economic stimulus program.
Mike Smith, senior counselor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, set the new tone in the very first meeting on the FIC agenda. Smith, a former dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, said only “four or five percent of schools across the country … are really failing,” and that they will benefit from federal economic stimulus money dedicated to turning around low-achieving schools.
(“In the previous administration, they would have said that every school in Program Improvement [under NCLB] was failing,” CSBA Assistant Executive Director Holly Jacobson observed after the meeting.)
Two days later, FIC’s whirlwind round of meetings drew to a close with staffers on both the House and Senate committees primarily responsible for NCLB also signaling that fundamental changes are coming even before NCLB is reauthorized.
NCLB’s inflexible measures of adequate yearly progress will be replaced by rubrics that reflect growth in student achievement and recognize that schools falling short in their advancement “shouldn’t all be in the same boat as to consequences,” House Education and Labor Committee education adviser Lloyd Horwich predicted. “Everybody is talking about growth models.”
A Democratic staffer on the Senate Committee on Health, Education Labor and Pensions, assured FIC members that problems with NCLB will be addressed in reauthorization. However, the staffer said that health care reform will have to come first; the general consensus around Washington appears to be that action on NCLB won’t happen until 2010.
“We believe in high standards, and we believe in being assessed and being accountable,” Kerry Clegg, a Pacific Region director of the National School Boards Association, explained of CSBA's position. “It’s not the spirit of the law, it’s the heavy hand and the heavy stick that come with it.”
The staff member said that was one of the great regrets of committee chairman Sen. Edward Kennedy, one of NCLB’s chief authors.
‘Common standards’
FIC members learned of new challenges to local control of public education emerging from a move toward “common standards”—a euphemism, some say, for national academic standards.
Proponents say such standards could be developed through voluntary agreements among states and that they would help ensure the value of high school diplomas issued anywhere in the country and make the U.S. more competitive in a global economy. Others are wary of how states with vastly different student populations, education funding levels and other factors can agree on common standards, what effect they would have on states such as California that already have high standards, and how they would be measured.
Bob Wise, executive director of the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, strongly supported common standards in a meeting with FIC members. He said shared grade-appropriate standards could begin to be developed around desired levels of reading and math skills.
“We’re very supportive of having high standards,” CSBA Assistant Executive Director Rick Pratt told Wise, and California’s are among the highest in the nation. But a preoccupation with standards too often narrows the curriculum, forcing schools to focus scarce resources on core subjects and high-stakes testing at the expense of a well-rounded educational experience.
“We’ve spent the last 10 years watching the standards movement, assessments and accountability sort of run amok,” CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin noted.
State officials eye standards
The drive for common standards was buoyed by a meeting on the subject led by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association in Chicago shortly before FIC’s trip to Washington. Glen Thomas, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recently appointed secretary of education, attended the meeting, the governor’s federal education adviser told an FIC delegation that met with her in the governor’s Washington office.
“Glen felt it was a good idea to be there” to monitor the discussion, Karen Quarles told FIC members who met with her in the governor’s Washington office. However, Quarles stressed that the Schwarzenegger administration has not taken a stand on common standards or assessments.
“We have grave reservations” about the issue, CSBA President Paula S. Campbell told Quarles. “It’s just more NCLB all day, every day, and it would just be a waste of time and effort.”
Campbell made a similar point the following day in a meeting with Jim Shelton, an assistant deputy secretary in the Department of Education. “[Backers] don’t appear to include a lot of educators, they include a lot of governors and business people,” Campbell said.
“We are wholly dependent on you at the local level to do what’s in the best interests of kids,” Shelton acknowledged. However, he also pointed to the “dramatically different levels” of standards that different states have adopted and noted the nation’s need to face global competition.
Four principles have been detailed to guide the distribution and use of all ARRA funds:
- Spend funds quickly to save and create jobs
- Improve student achievement through school improvement and reform
- Ensure transparency, reporting and accountability
- Invest one-time ARRA funds thoughtfully to minimize the “funding cliff”
—from CSBA’s 2009 Federal Issues Council issue brief on ARRA, available (along with other FIC and ARRA resources) by clicking on CSBA analysis of the 2009 federal stimulus act under the Spotlight section of www.csba.org