08/17/11: Leave this law behind

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

“UTOPIAN nonsense.”

That’s what then-chairman of the House of Delegates Education Committee Jim Dillard called No Child Left Behind in 2004, just two years after the law passed.

With the news that only 38 percent of Virginia — and 25 percent of Hampton Roads — schools made adequate progress in the latest round of testing, Dillard, a Republican who retired in 2005 after serving more than 32 years in the House, has proven to be prophetic.

The intent of NCLB is to raise student performance and close the achievement gap between groups of students. Students are to be tested, and each year schools are expected to show progress, with a requirement that an increasing percentage of students pass the tests. By 2014, 100 percent of the students are required to demonstrate proficiency in math and reading.

Virginia implemented NCLB via the Standards of Learning, which tests science and history/social science in addition to math and reading.

For this year, a school was considered successful if 86 percent of tested students passed reading tests and 85 percent passed math.

But this was not an overall score. The federal law requires students in various subgroups, including minorities, low-income and those with disabilities, to pass at the same rate. If a subgroup fails to pass the test, the school is said to have failed to make adequate yearly progress.

Both Norview Elementary in Norfolk and Alanton Elementary in Virginia Beach passed 28 of the 29 AYP elements. In each case, not enough low-income students passed in math. As the result, the schools did not make AYP.

Only in Utopia would meeting more than 96 percent of a goal be considered failing.

“Teachers are not failing. Students are not failing. The law is failing,” said state Sen. Edd Houck, a Democrat from Spotsylvania.

Even some of those who originally supported NCLB agree with him.

One of its harshest critics today is former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, once a staunch advocate of the law. Her book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” details what she sees as its failures. One area in particular is the emphasis on standardized testing. She says it has resulted in cheating and in a lowering of standards because “many states have ‘dumbed down’ their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are.”

Even with that, it is estimated that 50 percent of the nation’s schools will be labeled as failing, prompting U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to announce last week that states will be allowed to request waivers to the sanctions imposed by the law. Virginia has already indicated that it will seek one.

At the root of participation in NCLB is federal funding for education. It was the threat of losing that funding that kept states in the program in the first place: Dillard’s remarks were made after the House of Delegates passed a resolution asking Congress to exempt us from it. Like other states, Virginia did not opt out of the law, because it could not afford to lose the funding.

At a time when Republicans and Democrats can barely agree on the color of the sky, it is telling that opposition to NCLB is virtually universal.

Everyone agrees that we want a well-educated populace. And it seems everyone agrees there should be some way to measure progress toward that goal.

NCLB needs to go. Don’t mend it. End it. We don’t live in Utopia.