Earl Hadley is education coordinator for the Campaign for America's Future .
Last week, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings gathered together state education chiefs from across the country and announced changes to the No Child Left Behind Act. The Department of Education will now allow more flexibility on NCLB regulations for states showing a "committed effort" to raising the achievement of all students. The first example of this flexibility is allowing schools to offer more special education students tests that are designed for their ability level.
For a major speech hinting at big changes, lots of questions remained—and maybe this was the point of the exercise. In the midst of trying to figure out the modifications to NCLB accountability that Secretary Spellings was proposing, no one stopped to ask whether NCLB accountability is all that’s needed to educate all of America’s children.
Spellings compared NCLB to a child, saying:
The law has successfully come through what parents fondly call the "terrible twos"—that time when they and their youngsters learn a lot about themselves and each other, even if they don't want to. Now, NCLB is entering preschool where we as the adopted parents…continue to lay a foundation for continuous improvement and success down the road.
Sticking with this metaphor, Spellings failed to mention the neglected stepsister of NCLB: school readiness. She ignored how poorly the nation is doing at making sure that disadvantaged children enter school on equal footing with their more advantaged peers.
Neither Spellings—nor the press covering the changes to NCLB—addressed the significant challenges facing disadvantaged students outside of the classroom that imperil their education. Secretary Spellings did say that “the law was a national endorsement of the president's conviction that ‘every child matters’ and ‘every child can learn.’” This may be true, but over the past three years, NCLB has become an indictment of the president’s failure to act upon his conviction. While Bush may believe that every child can learn, he's refused to give those in most need the resources necessary to do well in school. A new study by the Afterschool Alliance showed that 40 percent of working families have children coming home to empty households every day, and that nearly 10 million children from these families would attend after-school programs if they were available. But instead of increasing funding for after-school programs—and the academic and social support they provide—Bush proposed freezing spending on these initiatives in his most recent budget, leaving funding lower than 2004 levels.
Similarly, a recent study by the Rand Corporation documented the high financial returns from investing in early childhood education in California, echoing research results from across the country. Rand showed returns of nearly three dollars for every one dollar invested—money saved from lower spending on special education classes, not holding kids back in school and reduced crime. It seems like a logical investment for someone convinced that “every child matters,” but Bush’s 2006 budget freezes funding for Head Start—the effective early education program for low-income families. As it is, Head Start is only serving 60 percent of eligible children. While it’s great that Spellings has decided to loosen the testing requirements NCLB places on children in special ed, it’s more important to take action that reduces the number of children in special ed. The administration’s policies just don’t match their reported conviction.
Given the Bush administration’s practice of doublespeak, when Secretary Spellings says that states “looking for loopholes to simply take the federal funds, ignore the intent of the law, and have minimal results to show for their millions of federal dollars” will be disappointed by the new flexibility in NCLB, it’s hard to know what to make of the statement. I hope Secretary Spellings was drawing a line in the sand for Republican legislators in Utah who want to stop collecting data on race, as NCLB requires. As The New York Times points out, “the white-Hispanic gap in Utah is among the widest in the nation—a grim disparity, given that the state's white fourth-graders also lag behind the national average in reading. If any state needs federal prodding to achieve better results, Utah does.” But with this administration, you never know. Because there are no clear rules on the application of this new NCLB flexibility, Spellings is probably planning to keep the faithful happy by letting Utah off the hook, while aiming her tough language at Connecticut’s Democratic attorney general, who is threatening a lawsuit if NCLB isn’t fully funded.
There was one thing Secretary Spellings said that was clear and right on the money: “It is the results that truly matter, not the bureaucratic way that you get there. That's just common sense, sometimes lost in the halls of the government.” Until the Bush administration looks beyond NCLB as the silver bullet for our education system’s struggles and provides the non-academic resources needed to make sure all children succeed, common sense and our children's futures will continue to be lost in the White House.
