Louis Freedberg

Louis Freedberg

Nearly a dozen years after President George Due west. Bush signed the No Kid Left Behind law, its deepest imprint may be its labeling of 90 percent of California's schools serving poor children as failures.

That is the depressing determination to be drawn from the latest scorecard of how California schools have done on the impossibly high bar set up by the law on a range of accountability measures.

Information technology is by at present well known that the law, whose purpose was to close the achievement gap, has failed to practise so. While there have been some improvements in some states, the achievement gap, on average, between white and Asian students, on the one mitt, and black and Latino students, on the other, remains far too high — between 20 and 30 percentage points on state tests.

What seems clear is that not just have many children been left behind, just and then have many schools.

The 2002 law, now in its twilight years, imposed a set of rewards and sanctions intended to nudge, prod and shove schools and districts to do ameliorate, fifty-fifty if it meant removing staff, closing schools, or having the state take over schools and districts.

Instead, NCLB has deteriorated into an elaborate accountability system whose stop result is to label more than and more schools as failures, without giving them the resources to improve.

The law did force schools to go on rails of student operation based on their racial or indigenous backgrounds and other characteristics. Just the latest results released by the California Department of Instruction underscore the ineffectiveness of the constabulary in achieving its primary goal. Simply 8 percent of uncomplicated schools, 4 percent of heart schools and 24 percent of high schools covered by the law — schools receiving federal Title I funds intended for poor children — made the necessary "annual yearly progress" or AYP equally prescribed by NCLB.

In a bizarre result, instead of having more schools succeed in response to the law's numerous sanctions, many more than have ended up being labeled as "in need of programme improvement, which means that they (and numerous student subgroups) accept failed to make "almanac yearly progress" for ii years in a row.

In 2002, ane,200 California schools were labeled as beingness "in demand of plan comeback," or PI schools, in the colloquial of the law. By this year, the number has risen to 4,996 (out of vi,135 and so-called Title I schools). What'due south more, unabridged school districts – 566 of them – have too received the aforementioned "program improvement" label, the equivalent of a failing school under the law.

This spiral of failure occurred exactly as the number of schools deemed to exist succeeding nether California's own accountability law – those with an Academic Functioning Index of more than 800 – increased steadily each year, from 21 percent of schools in 2001-02 to 51 per centum of schools this twelvemonth.

Further proof of the law's ineffectiveness has been the nearly impossibility of schools shedding the "program improvement" label one time information technology has been imposed. As the new figures from California show, of the nearly 5,000 schools in plan comeback, just 28 were able to "exit" from "program comeback" last year, to use the disruptive terminology of the law.

1 reason for this has to do with one of the police's virtually basic deficiencies: the unattainable requirement that 100 percent of children be "adept" in reading and math past the cease of the current school year, as measured past their performance on standardized land tests.

Each twelvemonth, the bar has been raised, requiring e'er-higher percentages of students to be "practiced" on country tests – and and so but on two subjects (reading and math). Considering California has relatively loftier standards compared to many other states, and, unlike some others, has refused to lower them, increasing numbers of schools have been unable to escape existence labeled as underperforming.

What has fabricated "improvement" under the law even more elusive is that students at a school could actually practice improve on country tests from one twelvemonth to the next, and however the school would even so exist chastised for failing to make "adequate yearly progress" considering the comeback wouldn't be sufficient to meet the ever-rise per centum of students that must score at a proficient level.

Requiring every 1 of numerous student subgroups to meet the prescribed proficiency levels each twelvemonth has added to the challenge. Last yr 89 percent of students in every subgroup had to perform at a expert level — or the school would exist be labeled as declining to improve.   Come testing time this leap, the target will leap to 100 percent.

Another flaw in the law is that California, like most states, has non had the resources to intervene in schools that ran afoul of NCLB's standards. Peculiarly as a result of the state's budget crisis over the terminal 5 years, intervention became a near impossibility every bit the number of "failing" schools soared to stratospheric levels.

And none of this touches on the fact that the police only measured how students — and schools — performed on two subjects, then only narrowly measured how much they had learned based on mostly multiple-choice answers on tests, not the "deeper learning" that is required for students to leave schools fix for college or careers.

Just last week U.Due south. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan condemned the NCLB law as "outmoded and broken. "Its inflexible accountability provisions have become an obstacle to progress and have focused schools too much on a single examination score," Duncan wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

Duncan has granted waivers to 41 states – and eight districts in California – which relieves them of the most counterproductive requirements of the law, including those that result in schools existence labeled as failures, demoralizing staff at a time when they are expected to enthusiastically implement some other ambitous multi-state initiative, the Common Core state standards. However, Gov. Jerry Chocolate-brown and the State Board of Education have balked at agreeing to the many new requirements demanded by the Obama administration in return for an NCLB waiver.

Thus, other than those schools in districts with waivers, California schools must yet comply with a constabulary that volition likely soon effect in 100 percent of schools serving low-income students existence labeled as failures, as prescribed past a law that even the Obama administration derides as an anachronism.

Louis Freedberg is the executive director of EdSource.

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