August 1, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Leaving No Child Left Behind
States charged with implementing Bush’s national education
plan balk at the cost of compliance.
By W. James Antle III
George W. Bush may go down in history as a war president, but like his
father he also envisions himself as an education president. Conservative
columnist George Will, pointing out that under Bush the Department of
Education’s budget has grown faster than defense expenditures, recently
wrote, “Had 9/11 not happened, Bush’s administration might be defined
primarily by its education policy, particularly the No Child Left Behind
law.” And as state educators increasingly revolt, the Republican Party’s
education policy ceases to be defined primarily by its commitment to
local control.
When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) first passed, it appeared to be a
political masterstroke. It stands as one of Bush’s few genuinely
bipartisan domestic-policy achievements, clearing the House by a 381 to
41 margin with more Democratic than Republican votes. Sen. Ted Kennedy
(D-Mass.) partnered with the White House to steer it through the Senate.
The measure promised liberals increased spending and focus on
minority-student achievement; it offered conservatives enhanced school
choice and tougher standards. By the 2002 midterm elections, some polls
found that Republicans had virtually erased the Democrats’ traditional
advantage on education issues.
It was the political equivalent of the lion lying down with the lamb,
but it didn’t last for long. Conservatives soon balked at NCLB’s
exorbitant price tag and federal meddling. Far from being a “universal
voucherization program,” as one popular Republican blogger described it,
the measure offered only very limited public-school choice. Liberals
were outraged that it did not cost more, accusing the Bush
administration of failing to live up to its commitment to fund the law
fully. Senator Kennedy complained, “The tragedy is that these long
overdue reforms are finally in place, but the funds are not.”
But the biggest challenge to NCLB comes from outside Washington, as
state legislatures and education officials resist federal requirements
they say they cannot afford. The issue doesn’t fit neatly into the
normal red-blue lines. Utah gave Bush 72 percent of its vote in 2004,
his highest margin in any state. In April, the Republican-controlled
legislature voted to assign a higher priority to the state’s
accountability laws than NCLB; the Republican governor signed the bill,
putting at risk Utah’s $76 million in federal education funding. The
lower house of the New Jersey legislature recently passed a similar bill.
Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg was an early and
vocal opponent of NCLB, arguing that its testing requirements are too
expensive and that taxpayers “won’t learn anything new about our schools
by giving these extra tests.” Many parents seem to agree. According to
the Washington Post, “You go, girl,” is a representative response.
One of Sternberg’s supporters is Connecticut Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal, who is moving toward a lawsuit challenging the federal
requirement that students be tested annually between grades three and
eight and also in 10th grade. State auditors claim this is an unfunded
mandate that will cost Connecticut $8 million more than it is receiving
from Washington. Many local school boards have passed resolutions in
favor of the potential suit. The Connecticut Association of School
Superintendents also backs the attorney general. In late June, the state
legislature closed ranks behind Blumenthal, voting to authorize him to
sue. At this writing, Republican Gov. Jodi Rell was undecided about the
legislature’s action.
In all, officials in more than 40 states have proposed significant
changes to the implementation of NCLB. The National Education
Association (NEA) and three states are already fighting it in court. A
standard complaint against the federal Education Department has long
been that it makes some 50 percent of the rules but provides less than 7
percent of national education spending. NCLB was intended to use that 7
percent as leverage to get the states to abide by more rules still. The
law creates new proficiency goals and requires regular testing to show
results. Schools that are judged to be failing—i.e., leaving children
behind—first receive additional funding but then are subjected to
progressively stiffer penalties if they continue to miss their legal
targets.
Not only must states strive toward the proficiency of all students by
2014, they must also provide data showing that designated subgroups of
students—mainly minorities, students from low-income families, and the
disabled—are making adequate progress. This subgroup category has
contributed heavily to the controversy.
In Utah, for instance, Hispanic students test three years behind whites
in the same grades. NCLB requires the state to work toward closing this
achievement gap or be found leaving Utah’s Hispanics behind.
Standardized test scores revealed comparable discrepancies between
Connecticut’s black and white students.
But Connecticut education officials retort that the law doesn’t take
into consideration the state’s demographics. Connecticut is a mainly
affluent state dotted with troubled urban areas. Sternberg and others
point out that the predominantly white suburban school districts perform
above the national average, inflating the state’s black-white
performance gap.
The rebellion against NCLB has created some unlikely voices for states’
rights. As early as the 2004 presidential campaign, Howard Dean was
deploring the idea of distant bureaucrats—along with politicians like
Bush and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas)—dictating how states
run their schools. The debates in the Connecticut and New Jersey
legislatures saw Democrats railing against unfunded mandates and federal
encroachments, while many Republicans rose to defend their president’s
program.
The Bush administration has deployed Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings, a former White House aide close to the president, to quell
the grassroots revolt. Yet her strenuous defense of NCLB has often
inflamed angry feelings rather than calmed them. She has compared
recalcitrant education officials to children who need to be disciplined.
In an interview with PBS’s “NewsHour,” Spellings said it was
“un-American” for Connecticut to tolerate its achievement gaps between
white and minority students.
The Department of Education’s motion to have the NEA’s lawsuit dismissed
also contains some strong wording. The response says the suit is “no
more than the use of a federal forum to proclaim an advocacy group’s
belief that states and school districts should be receiving more federal
funds” and argues that “[s]uch advocacy is not an appropriate use of the
federal courts.”
But Spellings’s angry comments belie her department’s strategy of
co-opting and accommodating NCLB critics through waivers and other
inducements. Illinois was granted a waiver that allowed it to count
fewer students’ test scores toward its goals. School districts in the
state will now have to have 45 special-education students in order for
the federal government to monitor them as a subgroup under the law; last
year it was just 40. This seemingly minor change cut the number of
special-needs subgroups in Illinois from 535 to 394, relaxing standards
for many districts.
This means that state resistance may elicit greater federal flexibility,
but not seriously jeopardize NCLB. Marie Gryphon, an education policy
analyst for the Cato Institute, worries “that the state rebellion
against NCLB will end with a whimper, not a bang.”
“In Utah and elsewhere, waivers and backroom deals will replace the
letter of the law and defuse the crisis,” Gryphon says. “In the end, I
think No Child Left Behind will become just one more expensive federal
program that does not do what it was supposed to do.”
Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, points out
that state legislation opting out of NCLB is still largely symbolic.
Only when local principals and superintendents act under these laws by
specifically refusing to do things mandated by NCLB will there be an
impact—and this will likely be followed by bureaucratic negotiations and
court wrangling. This takes time, and NCLB will be up for
reauthorization in 2007.
Much will depend on the endurance and intensity of public opposition to
NCLB. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration tried to head off
congressional Republicans’ welfare-reform bills by having the Department
of Health and Human Services grant waivers to reform-minded governors.
This approach ultimately failed because the public was willing to go
further.
It’s not clear that NCLB is as unpopular as unreformed welfare was in
the 1990s, but in some quarters it has become a lightning rod for
complaints about everything that is wrong with education—even things
that have little to do with the policies it mandates. Educators cite
anecdotes of parents who falsely believed it mandated social promotion.
After all, they reasoned, students must be promoted to the next grade
level regardless of performance if the law says they can’t be “left behind.”
More informed observers say much of the opposition comes from educators
themselves. Jennings notes that NCLB didn’t originate within the
teaching profession and major educational organizations like the NEA had
little role in its formulation. Thus, educators don’t feel they have a
stake in the reform measure.
But they could have a role in the approaching reauthorization debate.
What might they ask for? “The basic problem with the law is that the
accountability provisions aren’t subtle,” says Jennings. “It doesn’t
recognize relative problems.” Education-policy experts say the challenge
is to preserve accountability while offering flexibility.
For some who object to an expanded federal role in education, this is
little cause for optimism. “When NCLB comes up for reauthorization, it
will be amended to legitimize the Department of Education’s new
‘flexible’ approach to accountability,” argues Gryphon. “This will mean
that federal regulators will have a lot of discretion to set and revise
standards.”
As state policymakers ponder their options—comply with the Bush
administration’s education dictates, strike a deal with Margaret
Spellings, or sue—grumbling about NCLB is sure to continue. Only time
will tell whether it actually leads states to leave behind their
dependence on federal funds.
August 1, 2005 Issue
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