Legal Clips, [March 2008]The Bush administration, acknowledging that the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is diagnosing too many public schools as failing, says that it will relax the law’s provisions for some states, allowing them to distinguish schools with a few problems from those that need major surgery. In a speech in St. Paul, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said she would use her executive powers to allow potentially far-reaching changes to the way some states carried out the law this year, at a time when efforts by Congress to rewrite the law have stalled. Under the new program, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) will give up to 10 states permission to focus reform efforts on schools that are drastically underperforming and intervene less forcefully in schools that are raising the test scores of most students but struggling with one group, like the disabled, for instance. In six years NCLB has identified 9,000 of the nation’s 90,000 public schools as “in need of improvement,” the law’s term for failing, and experts predict that those numbers could multiply in coming years. The rising number of failing schools is overwhelming states’ capacities to turn them around, and states have complained that the law imposes the same set of sanctions, which can escalate to a school’s closing, on the nation’s worst schools as well as those doing a reasonable job despite some problems. According to Secretary Spellings, among states that apply to participate in the program, priority will be given to those in which at least 20 percent of public schools receiving federal aid to poor children have been labeled as in need of improvement.
The nation’s largest teachers union as well as some research groups who study the law welcomed Ms. Spellings’s announcement. “This is something good, something we’ve been advocating,” said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union. But another national teachers union and a group that has supported the law’s goals of holding schools accountable for student progress criticized the proposal. Antonia Cortese, a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, said: “N.C.L.B. is in need of a dramatic overhaul and cannot be patched up with Band-Aids and pilot programs.” Michael Petrilli, a former Bush administration official who is vice president of the conservative Thomas Fordham Foundation, said Ms. Spellings’s proposal was similar to one put forward by Democrats seeking to rewrite the law in Congress last year, which he derided at the time as “the Suburban Schools Relief Act.” “This policy change is likely to let affluent suburban and rural schools off the hook,” he said. Last year Democrats in Congress proposed that schools that missed testing targets for many groups still face drastic interventions, but schools that missed targets for only one group would no longer have to offer students transfers or free tutoring. Ms. Spellings’s plan, in contrast, leaves it to states to outline how they would differentiate the treatment given to schools. She suggested that states might propose to “send their most experienced and effective teachers to work in the neediest schools,” close others, and work with business and nonprofit groups to restructure still others. But she had no suggestions about how states might treat schools that were considered less urgent. That provoked criticism from the Council of Great City Schools, a group that represents the nation’s 60 largest urban districts. Jeff Simering, the council’s legislative director, said city districts were more diverse than suburban schools and thus had more groups of students that could miss testing targets. A result of the plan, Mr. Simering said, would be that “central city schools could wind up with the most serious consequences and that the suburban and rural schools would get the flexibility.”
Source: New York Times, 3/19/08, By Sam Dillon
[Editor’s Note: The press release with the text of the speech announcing the “Differentiated Accountability” pilot program, with a link to additional details, is below. The program would increase interventions in the most struggling schools. To be eligible, states must, among other things, commit to “build their capacity for school reform; [and] take the most significant actions for the lowest-performing schools, including addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness.” A state proposal must address how the state clearly defines its system of interventions and its interventions for the lowest-performing schools, and priority also will be given to states that “combine innovation with a rigorous approach to reform, and states that propose to take the most significant and comprehensive interventions for the lowest-performing schools earlier in the improvement timeline.” NSBA’s BoardBuzz blog asks at the second link what justification there is, if this welcome proposal is sound, for limiting it to just 10 states. As noted in the short statement at the next link, the reauthorization legislation proposed by NSBA “would limit the use of restructuring that calls for drastic governance changes to schools and districts to instances where the number of students belonging to subgroups that failed to meet their [Adequate Yearly Progress] targets and who themselves scored nonproficient totaled at least 35 percent of the entire student population.” Secretary Spellings had signaled her intent to use her executive authority in January, noting the lack of Congressional progress. See the last link.]
ED press release
BoardBuzz on announcement
NSBA Advocacy “Why Report” on Aligning Sanctions with Needs
NSBA School Law pages on Spellings statements