Jorge Werthein

United States

Schools reform

The next test

Barack Obama’s plan to

overhaul No Child Left Behind

Mar 18th 2010 | CHICAGO | From The Economist print edition

Obama wants to evaluate you

HEALTH reform was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Barack Obama’s first year as president. Instead it has riled Republicans, alienated leftists and exhausted everyone else. However, on March 15th Mr Obama presented Congress with a plan that ought to have a greater chance of support: reforming No Child Left Behind (NCLB), America’s main federal education programme. Everyone agrees that America’s public schools are floundering, and NCLB is widely considered to have failed.

NCLB, enacted in 2002, transformed education policy. It gave the federal government a crucial role in education, forcing states to set standards and hold their schools accountable for meeting them. Schools that failed to make progress would face financial sanctions. All students were to be proficient in reading and maths by 2014. George Bush championed the law; Congress supported it wholeheartedly.

The deadline for proficiency now looks comical. The broad support for NCLB has shattered. Parents and teachers complain that the law encourages “teaching to the test”. Perfectly decent schools have been labelled failures. Students in bad schools supposedly may transfer elsewhere; few have. Most important, many states have set alarmingly low standards. Now some dissenters even doubt the reform movement’s guiding principles of accountability and choice. Diane Ravitch, an influential and prominent scholar who once praised NCLB, says that it has produced no real gains. The emphasis on maths and reading has crowded out other subjects. An accompanying push for charter (independent, government-funded) schools has had mixed results at best. One study found that 83% deliver results that are either the same as, or worse than, those of the public schools.

Arne Duncan, Mr Obama’s education secretary, likes to say that the new plan is about “getting accountability right”. This is easier said than done, but Messrs Obama and Duncan are forging ahead. Most important, the federal government would have a strong role in some areas and a much lighter touch in others.

A state could no longer set a low bar for achievement. By 2015 states would be required to adopt stringent new standards and tests for English and maths, with a goal of being “college- and career-ready” by 2020. (In a boost for the president, the National Governors Association presented a draft of standards last week.) Schools would be judged not by snapshots of performance but by whether students progress over time. Mr Obama would reward schools that show the most improvement and require intervention for those that show the least. For the vast majority of schools, however, states and districts would be left alone to meet their targets. On top of these main reforms Mr Obama offers a thick layer of grants for favoured initiatives, such as merit pay and expanding the school year.

Chester Finn of the conservative Fordham Institute, praises the plan as “tight about the ends and loose on the means”, helping to set goals but giving states more flexibility to meet them. Even so the path to reauthorisation remains treacherous. Some states have already come out against the push for new standards. John Kline, the top Republican on the House education committee, worries about too much federal intrusion. Tim Knowles, of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, worries about too little, leaving mediocre schools with not enough incentive to improve. The American Federation of Teachers lambasts the plan to use test scores, among other factors, to judge teachers. The education law is already overdue for reauthorisation. It may have to wait a bit longer.