NCLB Does Poor Job of Distinguishing Good Schools From Ineffective Ones
STANFORD -- The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has proven to be less than satisfactory in measuring school quality in Florida schools. Florida’s own accountability system, however, which uses a more sophisticated A to F grading scale, is both more accurate and more successful at identifying the schools most in need of improvement, according to a new study published in the fall issue of Hoover Institution’s journal Education Next.
The problem, according to the study’s authors, Paul E. Peterson of HarvardUniversity and Martin R. West of BrownUniversity, is that NCLB makes only crude distinctions between schools achieving performance benchmarks and schools not doing so. Currently, NCLB divides schools into two categories: those that are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) and those that aren’t.
“While the term ‘progress’ would seem to imply that the law considers how much students are learning over time, the federal system, in fact, is based on a series of snapshots that fail to track individual students from one year to the next,” explain Peterson and West.
Florida’s grading system, on the other hand, divides schools into five different categories, using a scale from A to F. And, although NCLB pays only a passing nod to the improvement made by individual students, Florida’s A+ Plan for Education takes into account how much specific students have learned in a given year, using a data warehouse that tracks individual student academic performance. As long as students remain within the state, one can track how well they are doing from one year to the next on the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT), the exam the state uses to comply with NCLB requirements.
The A+ Plan is especially good at distinguishing success and failure when schools are assigned significantly different grades. In 2004, the math learning gap between A and C schools was 11 percent of a standard deviation; between A and D schools, 19 percent; and between A and F schools, 30 percent. In reading, the differences were almost as large. To put it more simply: the one-year difference between A and D schools amounted to more than a full year’s worth of learning—exactly what a parent needs to know.
In contrast, the learning gap between schools making AYP under NCLB and schools that failed to make AYP was just 9 percent of a standard deviation in math and 7 percent of a standard deviation in reading.
The Florida system also does a better job of isolating the seriously defective schools, thereby helping state and local officials identify where attention is needed. In 2004, only 47 of the state’s 2,649 schools were given an F, whereas 184 were given a D. By comparison, 75 percent of schools did not make AYP under NCLB, including more than half of the schools Florida had given an A.
The shortcomings of the federal law’s yardstick have a ready explanation, Peterson and West note. Because NCLB schools are evaluated primarily on the basis of achievement levels, the evaluation cannot readily detect how much growth is taking place within a school.
“Most states could not have used growth scores when NCLB was enacted, simply because they had not constructed the tracking system Florida has put together,” the authors explain. “Since other states are now beginning to build their own warehouses of data that follow the progress of individual students over time, the time has arrived when a legislative fix for NCLB should be feasible.”
Read “Is Your Child’s School Effective?” in the new issue of Education Next, now online at www.EducationNext.org
Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at HarvardUniversity and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Martin R. West is an assistant professor at BrownUniversity. Both serve as editors of Education Next.
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
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