academic proficiency for all students, the central purpose of No Child Left Behind.
Unfortunately, more challenges and troubling implications of the educational revolution beyond public opinion have emerged as No Child Left Behind has been implemented across the country.
Data, Dropouts, and Funding
“There is no denying that NCLB has brought some long overdue attention to the problem of educational inequality…. The problem is that what NCLB proposes to do about this inequality is woefully inadequate to the task and, in some cases, will make things worse.”
—Stan Karp (Meier & Wood, 2004, p. 64)
Attaining reliable data on the number of students who drop out of school, especially the number of poor and minority students, is a persistent challenge with No Child Left Behind. A recent report by the Urban Institute found that contrary to published reports of a national graduation rate of 85%, minority students (many of whom are poor) have little more than a 50/50 chance of earning a diploma (Swanson, 2004). The Institute also reported that nearly one-third of all students fail to graduate. “Beleaguered school officials might feel so pressured to raise test scores that pushing low-performing students out of school would seem like the best way to boost their numbers,” explained Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute. Unfortunately, he goes on to say, “the reasons that dropouts go uncounted range from deliberate falsification of data to the genuine difficulties in tracking a student who leaves a school” (Swanson, 2004, p. 36).
Arguably one of the most insidious actions of school districts is encouraging students to drop out or altering school dropout data and reports. Suddenly, large groups of students are “transferring” to other school districts or choosing home-schooling. In some school districts, low-achieving students have been pushed to enroll in GED programs, charter schools, or other programs in an effort to remove these students from the assessment pool. Some states and school districts have established barrier tests at the fifth-, ninth-, and eleventh-grade levels. Students who fail these tests are held back. In one urban district, some students have failed the fifth-grade test three times and have consequently been retained in elementary school. Since the district’s policy prevents teenagers from attending elementary school, after 3 years in the fifth grade, the students are reassigned to the eighth grade. Inevitably, almost all of these students drop out of school. It has been estimated that as of 2004 in one of the nation’s largest urban districts, more than 50,000 students have been retained because of barrier testing policies. Most of these students will likely drop out of school and join the growing numbers of uneducated, hopeless urban American youth.
There also seems to be a growing conviction among many that if educators cannot defeat the policies of No Child Left Behind, they can obscure and distort data to protect their districts’ reputations. There have been news reports throughout the country chronicling district employees who have reputedly “massaged” data on standardized tests or employed relaxed test security to make assessment results look better. Copies of standardized tests have been secretly distributed to teachers and students, some students have been encouraged to stay home on test days, and test participation and results have been tampered with. Some leading critics of the act have actually called upon teachers and educators to practice civil disobedience and refuse to participate in the state assessments (Kohn, 2000). There have been isolated incidents where high school students have done just that.
The requirements of No Child Left Behind have significantly changed the way school districts report data, especially data regarding student achievement. For many districts that have used aggregate achievement data in the past to hide the failings of poor and minority students, the disaggregation requirements of No Child Left Behind (for various subgroups of poor, minority, and exceptional students) have shocked communities that thought their schools were the very best. “Suburban school districts didn’t expect to have schools on the watch list,” says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy in Washington, DC. “[No Child Left Behind] made them realize they are accountable for all groups” (Chaddock, 2004, p. 2). In Illinois, over 694 schools, more than half of them in affluent suburban communities, were facing No Child Left Behind sanctions in 2004, underscoring the changing economic and racial demographics throughout the United States (Chaddock, 2004).
Top Suburban Schools Hit by No Child Left Behind Sanctions
A 2004 article in the Chicago Tribune reported that many suburban schools found themselves labeled as failures for the first time when they were judged not only on school-wide scores, but also on the performance of different racial, economic, and special-education subgroups. Those schools that had one or more subgroups fail to meet state standards would be subject to penalties. Many of the suburban schools identified were associated with affluent bedroom communities, which educators say underscores the growing economic and racial diversity of their student bodies (Cohen & Banchero, 2004).
Another significant concern about No Child Left Behind is its potential to punish the nation’s weakest and most vulnerable students. Writing with emotion in Many Children Left Behind, Deborah Meier and George Wood (2004) raise serious concerns regarding the long-range impact of No Child Left Behind on poor and minority students. The authors, joined by Linda Darling-Hammond and Ted Sizer, raise legitimate concerns over historical challenges that continue to exist today: the level of funding between poor and affluent school districts, the quality of teachers in poor and affluent school districts, the lack of federal funding to support the mandates of No Child Left Behind, and the legion of complex technicalities that create obstacles to learning instead of support for improvement.
Other educators argue that without No Child Left Behind, in schools and school districts where racism and class prejudice are still rampant, no one would really care whether or not poor and minority students learned. It can be argued that the intent of No Child Left Behind—to close achievement gaps between “high- and low-performing children, especially … between minority and non-minority students … and disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers” (No Child Left Behind Act, 2002)—has drawn widespread support. Like most public policies, increased attention and refinement will undoubtedly improve the legislation over time. Key issues that must be addressed in the immediate future include:
The equitable funding of public schools. The No Child Left Behind legislation did nothing to equalize funding between school districts or between schools in a district. Funding inequalities have led to a growing number of court cases and legislation that have transformed funding formulas in some states. Unfortunately, the problem continues to exist in far too many states.
Fiscal support for new requirements. No Child Left Behind is an underfunded federal mandate that has caused many school districts to divert their already stretched resources in order to meet the new requirements of the law.
Accountability methods and balanced assessment. Almost everyone worries about using a single standardized test to determine the success or failure of K–12 students. Fortunately, a growing number of states are supplementing standardized testing with an array of more authentic assessments.
Differing state expectations and discrepant scores. While each state has implemented its own accountability plan and assessments, comparisons with National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) annual results reveals significant discrepancies between individual state results and NAEP state data, as well as performance discrepancies among states.
High school graduation requirements. In order to achieve the goals of No Child Left Behind, many states have had to upgrade their high school graduation requirements to include a stronger emphasis on science, math, and language arts.
The pushing-out of students. No Child Left Behind has little or no accountability or standard reporting requirements regarding the number of dropouts in a school or school district. This has led to both overt and subtle
