Don’t Leave School Law Behind

As the election season swings into full gear, voters can expect to hear a lot about the No Child Left Behind Act, the sweeping overhaul of federal education financing passed in 2002.

President Bush often touts the law as one of the hallmarks of his administration, but his opponents are quick to charge that the law has not yet done much to improve the quality of the nation’s public schools. While politicians, educators, parents, and others argue over the merits and weaknesses of the law, an important force in education has been strangely quiet as the law has gone into effect. Although grant makers in recent decades have poured billions of dollars every year into school-overhaul efforts, they have been unusually unwilling to support projects to ensure that No Child Left Behind is doing all it can to help struggling schools.

It is understandable why many people involved in education are taking a cautious approach in responding to the law. The law relies heavily on standardized testing to measure whether students are making progress. However, the tests and measures can be used in ways that are anything but standard. Under the law, states have flexibility to choose the test and to define success, so what might serve as a passing score in one state could be a failing grade in another.

Some critics also have genuine concerns that states will play with the numbers to hide important factors — like graduation and dropout rates — that are critical to grading schools fairly and accurately. A school that drives a significant number of low-achieving students to drop out so that its test scores will look better cannot be considered a success.

The law’s remedies for helping children in failing schools also are the subject of much debate. Critics worry that No Child Left Behind is really a veiled attempt to encourage states to offer school vouchers and expand the number of students in charter schools, which some educators believe will end up harming large numbers of schools. The U.S. Department of Education has fueled the fear that the law is really a Trojan horse for vouchers by putting its No Child Left Behind money into organizations with precisely that agenda. Additionally, the new penalties that No Child Left Behind levies on failing schools — including reorganization and takeover by the state — are viewed by many as punitive and not helpful.

Those concerns are compounded by the federal government’s failure to provide enough money to carry out the law, which has a price tag of $8-billion. Without the money to make needed improvements, some educators fear the law will penalize large numbers of minority youngsters who have greater needs and fewer outside resources. Charging that the law is an “unfunded mandate,” many states have made clear their opposition to No Child Left Behind.

Perhaps the most important part of No Child Left Behind is that it requires school officials to disaggregate test scores, breaking down their reports by race, income, and other factors. No longer can a school that is failing children of color and those from low-income families pretend to be serving everyone equally. Schools must be judged by how well they do for all of their kids. That is why No Child Left Behind could be one of the most significant civil-rights laws in decades.

No Child Left Behind also requires schools to get parents involved. Schools must send home report cards — both for their students and for the school itself. Schools must let parents know how its students fared on tests, whether the children are being taught by qualified teachers, and what rights parents have to change the situation. In addition, each state must develop a plan to involve parents, each school must have a written policy for getting parents engaged, and states must spend at least 1 percent of the money they receive under Title I, the major federal education finance program, to involve parents.

While education trends come and go, one thing remains constant — parent involvement is one of the most critical factors in schoolchildren’s success.

No Child Left Behind aims to give parents the information and support to help their kids — and their schools — do better. That is a vitally important goal.

As a parent of two children in public school, I received one of the mandatory report cards on school performance in June. It was slightly less complicated than my life-insurance policy, but just barely. No information was included about the performance of my children’s school, but the report had countless pages of technical information that left me totally confused. And I’m a lawyer!

The fact that a majority of parents fail to take advantage of any of the law’s remedies — including seeking to send their children to better schools or obtaining supplemental services such as tutoring — proves that it is not only me who is confused or unaware about the intricacies of No Child Left Behind.

The complicated nature of the law is hardly the only reason it is not meeting its full potential.

Parents can be powerful advocates for school improvement. After all, they know their kids best and have the most at stake. Some schools have developed creative ways to reach out to parents. However, too many schools have made it far too difficult for parents to get involved. They hold parent meetings during work hours or make parents who ask questions or raise concerns feel like unruly children.

Just because the law does not make it easy to take a clear position is no reason for foundations to sit this one out. Instead, it makes it more important for foundations to support evaluation and advocacy to make this law work for the kids who need it most.

Foundations could support nonprofit efforts to develop models for how schools can effectively engage parents and how they can best inform the public about student achievement in accurate, easy-to-understand formats. They can help advocacy groups organize parents to put pressure on schools to enforce the law fairly and effectively and to lobby for more funds. They can pay for school-improvement experts to spend time in states and municipalities that need help figuring out how to carry out the law fully and fairly. And they can finance watchdog and research efforts that will provide in-depth, unvarnished information about the law’s strengths and weaknesses to policy makers as they decide how to tinker with the law and how to enforce it so that all children benefit. Perhaps most important, foundations can play a vital role monitoring state plans and comparing and contrasting how different locales are measuring and achieving success and failure.

Foundations must realize that No Child Left Behind is the 800-pound gorilla in the education world and it will drive how money is allocated and decisions are made on practically every aspect of public schooling in the United States as long as it is in force.

Whether foundations support after-school programs or the arts or curriculum change or improvements in teacher quality, the No Child Left Behind Act will affect such efforts. The charged rhetoric over the No Child Left Behind Act should not lead foundations to sit on the sidelines. They need to be in the fray to make sure that, in the end, it’s the kids — not the political partisans on either side — who win.

Linda Singer is executive director of the Appleseed Foundation, in Washington. The organization has 16 state and local centers that mobilize pro bono help to provide legal and analytical services on issues such as public education, access to justice, and economic opportunity.