Debate in Congress stalls; future of NCLB still up for grabs

by Christopher Compton

Adopted in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act was due for reauthorization by Congress this year. But Washington has been so divided about the controversial law that the debate there stalled out this fall – pushing the likelihood of passage of a revised law beyond next year's election and possibly into the second year of the new president's term.

However, discussion of the act will not rest, as more schools every year fall short of Adequate Yearly Progress and face consequences.

Debate this fall centered on a House draft bill, and President Bush's response that he would veto any bill not to his liking. Meanwhile Democrats continued to express frustration that his administration has never fully funded the law.

Here are some fiery points of contention.

How will schools be assessed?

President Bush sees the straightforward, high-stakes nature of standardized math and reading tests as one of the greatest strengths of NCLB. Many others in Congress and elsewhere see the tests as restrictive, strangling the curriculum and forcing children into alienating, high-pressure situations.

The House draft bill wants to abandon the exclusive focus on standardized tests and add other measures of school quality. It also wants to judge schools based on how the same students progress over time – the so-called “growth model” – rather than comparing the scores of one cohort of students with the next.

The “growth model” has wide support in Congress, in state houses, and among teacher unions, and the Bush administration is willing to consider it. Using measures other than reading and math tests to judge schools is more controversial, however.

These proposed alternative assessments include graduation rates, dropout rates, college enrollment rates, end-of-course exam results, improvements among the lowest and highest achieving students, and secondary tests in history, science, civics, and writing.

Many Republicans, including the Bush administration, view these proposals as creating “loopholes” that will make evaluating school quality more complex and less transparent. Education Trust, an advocacy group concerned about closing the racial “achievement gap,” and a strong supporter of the original NCLB act, supports the administration's position.

Most Democrats and many educators, however, responded favorably to the suggested reforms, arguing a more fair and comprehensive understanding of student and school performance is needed.

“Suburban parents don't like the way the testing emphasis has narrowed the curriculum, and urban parents are not seeing the real progress they were promised,” said Monty Neill, co-director of The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, in the Capital Times.

Neill chairs the Forum on Educational Accountability, a working group of some of the 140 organizations that signed a joint statement of concerns about NCLB's accountability system. The statement criticizes the law for “over-emphasizing standardized testing” and “narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning.”