‘No Child Left Behind’ Law Produces Few Gains
Ironically, according to a new study, both critics and supporters of the law are vindicated.
The U.S. Department of Education has just released the latest findings from the “Nation’s Report Card,” the leading nationwide measurement of educational outcomes. The findings contained good news for critics of the 2001 federal education law No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But supporters of the law got good news of their own.
The good news for the critics is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971.
The good news for supporters is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971.
Welcome to the confusing world of education policy!
First, let’s run down the tale of the tape. Since 1971, the Nation’s Report Card has been administered to a large, representative sample of students in two different formats. The standard format is now given every year. (Before NCLB it was given less frequently and was not given in all states; making the Nation’s Report Card an annual 50-state measurement is one of the best reforms we got from NCLB.)
Trouble is, over the years the standard format has changed to keep up with the latest advances in testing practices. That makes it hard to compare 1971 scores to today’s. So the test is periodically administered in a second, “long-term trend” format that allows for direct comparisons across decades.
The 2008 long-term trend results were just released. The results among 17-year-olds are the ones that really matter, because they represent the end result of education. In that group, reading scores are up one point since 1971, the year of the first reading test; math results are up two points since 1973, the year of the first math test.
That’s one point and two points out of a scale of five hundred.
Flat results among 17-year-olds might be a good sign if public school graduation rates had gone up over the same period, since dropouts don’t get tested. If we did a better job of keeping the worst-performing students in the testing pool, but overall results didn’t go down, that would be an improvement. Alas, public school graduation rates are actually somewhat down since 1970. So flat scores really represent backsliding.
To bend over backwards to be fair, let’s note that in 2004 the test started including somewhat more English language learners and students with learning disabilities. A major “bridge” study conducted by the department showed that this change caused scores to go down by two points.
Still, adjusting the apparent gains since 1971 to three points and four points respectively, out of a five-hundred-point scale that’s not a big movement. When you balance that against the drop in graduation rates, which went down by almost four percentage points, it really represents no gain at all.
It’s true that the reading score went upward by three points from 2004 to 2008. Unfortunately, that’s after it had gone downward by three points from 1999 to 2004. Likewise, math scores went up by one point between 2004 and 2008 after going down one point between 1999 and 2004. Scores have been fluctuating up and down within about that range since the test began in 1971. So if NCLB is having any impact, it’s so small you can’t distinguish it from the normal fluctuation of the scores.
It’s also true that in the two other age groups tested, age nine and age 13, scores are somewhat higher now than they were in 1971. Unfortunately, the gains in those groups were realized mostly before 2004. Math scores have been trending slowly upward since the 1980s, and reading scores saw a bump between 1999 and 2004 but not much other movement. Four years ago, I thought the improvements in those younger age levels were a hopeful sign for NCLB. Unfortunately, they slowed down after 2004, so even that good news is getting less relevant.
Obviously, critics of the law can take this as vindication. NCLB doesn’t seem to be producing academic gains on any really substantial level. Certainly the law’s promise to produce 100% student proficiency by 2014, which didn’t pass the laugh test even in 2001, is looking more ridiculous by the day.
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Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
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15 Comments
1. ajacksonian:Even better is that the reading scores haven’t changed from when poor Johnny couldn’t read!
All that money spent for nothing.
Progress!
How strange it is that the States did just a good a job back in the 50’s with zero federal help as they now do with tens of billions of dollars in help per year. Now if America had a national scandal with poor Johnny, then just what is it when hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at a problem and it doesn’t change one bit? I would call it a swindle… or thievery. A scam. A con game.
If you don’t know who the mark is in this, then you are the mark.
May 9, 2009 - 6:15 am 2. dennis:Here in Montana, more effort has been put into avoiding, sabotaging and ridiculing the program than in honestly trying to make it work. All in the name of proving that that nothing that Bush produced could possibly be good. Excusing poor performance, however, has become high art.
Education in this country will never improve until parents actively require their own children to perform. I haven’t seen any studies but will bet that the children of those parents who value education and performance do better in school than those from families that are passive or negative about the value of education.
I’m not sure how you turn that part of the equation around but I am convinced it is the key. Throwing money at it and leaving it to the “professionals” obviously hasn’t had any effect.
May 9, 2009 - 7:34 am 3. Delia:Public School = Free Babysitting = Libtard Teachers = Useful idiots in the making = Future welfare recipients = Democrats
Keeping Americans dumbed down is just one more way for Liberals to hold on to a portion of society who will always be chained to the government teat in a perpetual cycle of stupid.
Throwing money at schools does little to improve them. Something is critically wrong with the public school system as well as with the parents that don’t care if their children know how to read/write/add-subtract.
May 9, 2009 - 10:18 am 4. Delia:Correction: “Something is critically wrong with the public school system as well as with the parents WHO don’t care if their children know how to read/write/add-subtract.
May 9, 2009 - 10:20 am 5. indie:You left out a pretty important piece of the NCLB problem – the one where some the response of some schools to their low test scores is to teach specifically to the test, completely ignoring what’s in the textbook they have assigned for the grade levels, and devoting weeks on end to nothing but test prep, thus completely straying from their curriculum.
How can they applaud better test scores at schools like this when all they have done is teach the kids to take the test? The kids are no better off than they were before NCLB and its the same issue that some higher education has with the SATs. Students take courses and practice tests for the SATs, thus increasing their scores and get to college and are incompetent.
May 9, 2009 - 12:36 pm 6. Wacky Hermit:My favorite is a graph I saw on the official NCLB website when it was first passed. To explain why NCLB was needed, they presented a graph showing flatlined reading scores superimposed over exponentially-growing funding amounts. Evidently they thought this was proof that we needed to keep funding growing exponentially. To me it was proof that we needed to quit growing funding because we could get the exact same result for half the price.
I quit voting for more public school funds when I noticed that every year I did, the schools spent more money on boondoggles like having a computer for every 2 children and redecorating new-ish facilities, but didn’t do a thing to decrease class size or raise teacher pay. My husband had a “friend” like that once– bought himself an expensive video game, then a few days later asked us for an equivalent amount of money to pay his electric bill. When this happens, everyone knows you DON’T lend him the money, because he’s going to blow it all on crap and ask his other “good friend” to lend him the money for his electric bill. And that’s exactly what our schools have been doing with all that exponentially-increasing money we’ve been giving them. Until they show me that they can quit buying duplicate class sets of graphing calculators and spend the money on getting a math teacher instead, they can kiss my fat white Portuguese butt.
May 9, 2009 - 1:36 pm 7. AnAverageAmerican:dennis,
Parents who actively require their children to perform tend to send them to private school. We did. We tried public school in a community that spends somewhere around $15k per student per year. We were so underwhelmed by our public schools in terms of discipline, educational content, administrative apathy (”these children will be your son’s classmates all the way through high school”) and lack of concern about whether the children were learning anything, that we pulled him out after a couple of months and put him in private school … a pretty severe economic sacrifice at the time (about $24k for kindergarten for a family making around $80k per year).
That was in 1996. I now have two privately educated boys who are attending an all scholarship high school, admission to which, as you can imagine, is highly competitive.
So for parents willing to make the sacrifice, and those for whom it is no sacrifice, there are alternatives to the, “let’s make happy citizens (I mean sheeple)”, public indoctrination centers that our public schools have become.
It’s all the more critical to support programs like the, now not accepting new applicants, DC school voucher program. These are not a panacea, but for involved parents who could not otherwise afford private schools, it is a godsend.
An educated youth is America’s best hope for the future, unfortunately our public school system is not doing a very good job of educating our young people, or holding schools and teachers accountable for doing their job.
May 9, 2009 - 4:56 pm 8. drjohn:I know! In Democrat land let’s give all children C’s no matter how much effort they make. After all , it’s fairness we’re after. Then at grade 12 let’s run a standardized test and see how they do against Republican kids who had to work for grades.
May 9, 2009 - 5:25 pm 9. mej:The only thing that is going to break the strangle-hold on failing education is to break the unions. Period, no ifs, no, ands and no buts. Offer incentives directly to the teachers, cash in the account when the students demonstrate knowledge and competency above expectations. Then, and only then will you see improvements. The Union will have no hold over teachers trying to earn an extra $10-20 thousand dollar bonus. Good teachers are rewarded, solid union lackeys will not……..guess what happens. However, as long as Democrats remain in power so will unions and so too will our public school children continue to fall behind.
May 9, 2009 - 6:49 pm 10. Confused in Virginia:IMO, the worst part about NCLB and its proponents is that they cannot, and will not, admit that one of the most important indicators of whether or not a child will do well in school is something that cannot be legislated, and that is parental involvement.
It doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at this problem. The one thing that funding for public schools can’t buy is parental involvement.
May 9, 2009 - 8:32 pm 11. mshatto:NCLB has worked. I began teaching in 2001 and the quality of teachers since has increased dramatically. Teachers are held to higher standards and required to teach common content that was simply not required before. Where NCLB has failed is that the tests mean nothing to the students. They mean absolutely nothing. The tests are not used to decide who passes or stays behind, the tests are not used as finals, they mean absolutely nothing to the students, a bit more to the parents, slightly more to the teachers, and an awful lot to administrators and school boards. Teachers are not graded on scores, maybe we receive a little pressure from the administration but in the face of union contracts there is little they can do. Merit pay is largely an unworkable pipe dream at this point but worth researching. Administrators are usually ex-teachers and some can be manipulative and vindictive as any union boss. We place an awful lot of responsibility in their hands but really don’t provide much education or training for them. Most have zero managagerial background and even less business experience and placing these decisions in there hands is simply a non-starter at this point. Administrators have more responsibilities that the typical corporate leader and walk a legal mind field on a daily basis yet they are not required to take business courses or those on management. In addition the lawyers have really tied their hands and the public schools are required to deal with these kids and their parents even when it is obvious that the students deserve no better than juvenile hall. My daughter goes to private school and the only difference between her class and the public school down the street is her administrators can get rid of undesirable students while the public school is stuck with them. I sent my daughter to Catholic school not because of the superior teachers but because of the superior peer group.
May 9, 2009 - 10:44 pm 12. Pam C.:If we really want school improvement make the tests worth something to all stakeholders. Require students to pass the test before they can move to another grade and then grade teachers, administrators, and school board members on their pass rates, taking into account the type of class and the school setting they’re willing to take on, and require parents to take an active and positive role in their child’s life. This will require more money though, possibly more government involvement in our personal lives, and most Americans are simply not willing to face that fact. School districts have huge bureaucracies but only a small percentage finds its way into teacher salaries or the classrooms and I don’t see NCLB minimizing that. Pay those teachers more who are willing to work longer hours, in difficult settings or hostile environments and who truly make a difference. Let the slackers get by on minimum pay or find another job and overall require students and their families to pass a test that has some meaning. Otherwise we’re stuck with the same old, same old.
The scores are not really telling us if this helps or not. My grandson has been really helped in improving his reading and math by a lot of extra help and tutoring at school as well as at home due to NCLB. The tests are really vague – my daughter in FL were discussing the “test”, her son is the same age as his cousin. Between the two of us we have 10 years of college and could not answer the practice test questions. For example, they read a story about a family going to the grocery store with a narrative of the activity. The question had nothing to do with the story! It was totally off the wall as to why they went to the store. The 2 children and us concluded it was to buy groceries. WRONG! Problem is they just need a straight up test of knowledge not a convoluted test of the subconscious reason they went to the store which is not addressed in the story. It is a great help to the kids, they just need someone with common sense to design the test. There would be little need to “prepare for the test” if the test was not so stupid.
May 10, 2009 - 5:37 am 13. sheesh:7. AnAverageAmerican:. . . Did I hear you right? . . . You spent $24K to send your kid to kindergarten? Is that right? And you call yourself An Average American?
Let me proffer something . . . the value of an education, private or public, is based more on what happens in the home than in the schoolroom. I see kids all the time who are bright, hardworking, over-achievers who went through public school. I know because we raised two of them. Private school is one of the fastest growing scams in America.
May 10, 2009 - 9:28 am 14. Ian Thorpe:Unfortunately we have learned in Britain after twelve years of a Labour governments’ politically correct thinking that “no child left behind” quickly comes to mean “no child allowed to move forward.”
May 10, 2009 - 11:26 am 15. C:I’m a teacher and I find it funny to hear so many of you place all of the blame on the libtards. Need I remind you that nclb was not the fault of the dems soley. The fault Is on both parties. This whole testing thing gets on my nerves & I am one of those libtard teachers you all like to blame. Most of my collegues despise testing and wish we could get back to teaching. The problem with no child is that it was a good concept that got into the hands if politicians who do not listen to educational professionals who know what they are doing
May 11, 2009 - 2:21 pmMy friend was one of the finalists for teacher of the year. Bush had fiftyfive of the best teachers this country has to offer gathered in Washington and all he did was shake their hands. Why not talk with them and see what they have to offer.