As the Senate prepared to vote on the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) back in 2001, Sen. Ted Kennedy, the iconic Massachusetts Democrat, told the assembled chamber, 鈥淭his is a defining issue about the future of our Nation and about the future of democracy, the future of liberty, and the future of the United States in leading the free world.鈥� President George W. Bush and a long list of Republican and Democratic luminaries offered similarly enthusiastic endorsements.
Yet, 20 years on, many would prefer to forget that NCLB and the era of high-stakes testing it brought about ever happened, as NCLB slowly morphed into a bumper sticker for federal overreach and overtesting. It would be easy now just to move on to the next generation of assessments and retooled accountability systems and leave NCLB in the rearview mirror. But that impulse is, I fear, why education improvement tends to devolve into us making the .
On that score, I鈥檝e been taken with a recent by University of Oklahoma professor Deven Carlson on what policymakers should learn from the NCLB experience. (Full disclosure: He penned it for my AEI Education series on the future of educational accountability.) A few of his takeaways seemed well worth sharing鈥攑articularly as policymakers and leaders consider implementing new accountability measures to help schooling recover from the pandemic鈥檚 effects.
For starters, Carlson argues that NCLB ran into trouble because lawmakers baked unrealistic expectations into the law itself. As he puts it, 鈥淪etting a goal of universal reading and math proficiency by 2014 effectively ensured we would end up judging accountability, and NCLB more broadly, a failure.鈥� If they had left 100 percent proficiency as an aspiration rather than a mandated accountability target, he writes, 鈥渋t鈥檚 conceivable that NCLB could have survived politicians鈥� aspirational rhetoric and impossible promises.鈥�
I鈥檓 reminded of what Checker Finn and I regarding NCLB鈥檚 100 percent mandate back in 2007: 鈥淣oble, yes, but also naive, misleading, and in some respects dysfunctional. NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a shaky basis for policymaking, rather as if Congress asserted in the name of energy reform that America will no longer need to import oil after 2014.鈥�
Carlson鈥檚 takeaway from this is a useful one: Set realistic, achievable goals. That might leave politicians with less room for bombast, Carlson observes, but the frustrating truth is that 鈥渞eality doesn鈥檛 always fit into nice, neat sound bites.鈥�
Carlson also indicts NCLB鈥檚 inflexible, Washington-centric approach to accountability. He observes, 鈥淓very consequential aspect of NCLB鈥檚 accountability system鈥攖esting requirements, AYP鈥檚 definition, the series of sanctions鈥攚as designed in DC and dictated to the states, which were given no meaningful freedom to adapt the system to their realities.鈥� In states where it might make more sense to employ a different approach to judging schools or designing interventions, leaders had little freedom to do so.
Carlson argues that future accountability efforts should be built upon 鈥渋ncreased state control of school accountability systems.鈥� He suggests the record makes the case for state systems in which metrics like test scores and graduation rates are not used in isolation but serve to trigger more in-depth performance audits. As Carlson puts it, 鈥淗igh-level numbers can tell you only so much, and it often takes setting foot inside a school to get a sense of what鈥檚 going well and what isn鈥檛 and to make productive recommendations about how the school might go about any improvement process.鈥�
At the same time, Carlson notes the importance of NCLB shifting the focus of measurement from inputs to outcomes鈥攁 shift that he urges policymakers to retain. In the decades that followed the 1965 passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, he writes, 鈥淓xpenditures were about the only aspect of education that were consistently measured and thus drove policy discussions.鈥� That didn鈥檛 really change in any meaningful way until NCLB. While Carlson says this change has brought its own challenges, he argues that it has been broadly positive: 鈥淚nstead of focusing exclusively on inputs鈥攗sing dollars as a proxy for quality鈥攚e are now much more likely to start policy discussions by asking how well schools are serving students.鈥�
Too often in education, we race from one frustrating episode to the next鈥攄ismissing talk of where we鈥檝e been with the impatient insistence that we鈥檝e learned our lesson, or that 鈥渢his is different,鈥� or that this is a 鈥渘ew data-driven approach.鈥� Well, as we ponder what comes next for accountability and assessment, we鈥檇 benefit from checking the rearview mirror more attentively and more often. I think Carlson鈥檚 take can help us do just that.
