November 2006

Fixing Failing Schools: Is the NCLB Toolkit Working?

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has fundamentally reshaped debates about American schooling by mandating that students in each district school make “adequate yearly progress.” Schools and districts that fail to improve are subjected to a five-year “cascade” of remedies and sanctions. These detailed prescriptions are intended to force low-performing schools and districts to improve and provide new options for their students.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of NCLB, AEI director of education policy Frederick M. Hess and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn Jr. presented the very first comprehensive five-year assessment of the implementation of all NCLB remedy provisions. Until now, NCLB as a whole has attracted extensive analysis and even more opinion, but complete and rigorous examinations of its remedy provisions have been sparse--especially when compared to the attention lavished upon the law’s testing and reporting sections. This assessment was conducted at a November 30 conference by a wide-ranging group of renowned education scholars and analysts.

Frederick M. Hess
AEI

This conference builds upon a similar conference conducted by AEI and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation three years ago which examined the remedy provisions of NCLB as they were being implemented at the time. Similarly, this project is not intended to provide a comprehensive evaluation of all NCLB’s expansive programs and provisions; rather, contributors were asked to examine only the implementation of the statutory remedies for schools and school districts that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP). In truth, finding empirical data on the implementation of any of these activities is very difficult.

To briefly explain NCLB’s cascading sanctions, when a school first fails to make AYP, as defined by the standards of the state, it is required to offer public-school choice to its students. In the second consecutive year that a school fails to make AYP, it is required to make available supplemental educational services (SES) to its students--most commonly in the form of after-school tutoring. In the third year, a corrective action plan must be created, which can include a number of reforms, including curriculum changes and staff replacement. A school restructuring plan must be created in the fourth year, and in the fifth year, that plan must be implemented. The law does not address what actions are to be taken if a school fails to make AYP for more than five consecutive years.

Panel I: The Big Picture--National Implementation and Capacity

Michael Casserly
Council of the Great City Schools

For this project, the Council of the Great City Schools conducted a new survey of its members--the country’s 66 major urban school districts--to gather data on the implementation of NCLB’s remedy and sanction provisions. To date, 36 districts have responded, and data will continue to be collected. The number of these schools in NCLB sanction status has grown steadily since the law’s creation, from 975 in 2002-03, to approximately 1,500 in 2003-04, to 2,045 in 2004-05, and to 2,200 in 2005-06. Approximately 30 percent of all CGCS member schools are currently in sanction status. Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between the percentage of schools in NCLB sanction status and their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For example, despite similar reading and math NAEP scores, 15 percent of San Diego’s schools are in sanction status and 47 percent of Boston’s schools are.

Contrary to accounts that schools are failing to meet standards because of a single subgroup of students (African American, Hispanic, poor, disabled, etc.), most schools in this survey fail to make AYP because of more than one subgroup of students. Moreover, the data revealed that more students are using choice options unrelated to NCLB than using NCLB-permissible choice, but that those two groups of students combined total approximately 30 percent of urban schoolchildren taking advantage of some form of choice.

Approximately 16 percent of eligible children in these districts receiving SES, and 95 percent of those children are served by private providers, not the school district. Among schools in the corrective action phase of NCLB, the most common reform strategies are technical assistance to the school from its district and professional development for its teachers. This is also true of those schools in the restructuring phase.

While this abundant data is just beginning to be analyzed, overall, the implementation of NCLB in school districts appears to be more focused on compliance with the law’s complicated provisions than on genuine reform of low-performing schools.

Jeffrey R. Henig
Columbia University Teachers College

This paper analyzes the SES requirement of NCLB, one of the law’s least-examined provisions. These out-of-school tutoring services are required to be provided to poor children in schools that have failed to make AYP for three consecutive years. Providers can either be school districts themselves or private for-profit or non-profit organizations approved by the state. In 2004-05, 430,000 schoolchildren nationwide were receiving SES.

The inclusion of SES in the language of NCLB was the result of political bargaining among Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. Republicans could claim that by providing portable aid directly to individuals, SES was similar to vouchers. Democrats could claim support for market principles in education without voting directly for vouchers.

Local districts continue to be the focal point of SES activity, and while some districts have resisted the requirement, some have embraced its provision. But getting parents to actually enroll their children has proven more challenging. This NCLB mandate has created a dual market for service provision, with the majority of providers being local social-service organizations and a smaller percentage being multi-state corporations.

Paul Manna
College of William and Mary

The role of states in the implementation of NCLB cannot be overemphasized, because while the federal government has been the catalyst for the law, state governments remain the entities that actually implement it. This paper discusses the varying ways in which different states have chosen to implement the law and the implications that that diversity has for future education policy.

Most important among this variability is the date when each state releases the results of its achievement exams, revealing whether schools and districts have achieved AYP for the year. Even five years after the law’s passage, most states continue to be tardy in releasing their test results, with a majority releasing them in early fall, after the school year has begun. This hinders parents’ ability to make decisions about using school choice options, since few would change their children’s school during the school year.

Under SES provisions, states are required to create a list of approved providers, disseminate information about those providers, and then hold them accountable for their results. However, a systematic analysis conducted for this paper revealed that states have done a poor job of providing this information to parents.

Michael J. Petrilli
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

It is popular in Washington, D.C. policy circles to support the principles of NCLB while claiming that it has been implemented poorly in states and school districts. However, some provisions of the law, particularly the public-school choice and school restructuring requirements, are simply untenable.

This paper examines three policy paradoxes within NCLB created by the statutory language. First, in order to provide SES and public-school choice, school districts must aggressively provide parents with information about the options available to them. But they have little incentive to do so, since it essentially requires advertising for their competitors. Second, children in schools in need of improvement are to be provided the opportunity to transfer to a better performing school, but in many urban districts, there are simply not enough high-performing schools to accommodate the eligible students. Third, districts are required to restructure persistently poor performing schools, but they typically lack the experience and political will to do so.

Modifying the law itself is unlikely to resolve these tensions because they are inherent in our federal system. While it has proven difficult to get reluctant states and districts to do things they don’t want to do, it is impossible to get them to do those things well.

Chester E. Finn Jr.
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

Examining the implementation of NCLB after only five years may be premature, but it is useful as discussion of scheduled reauthorization next year begins to consider whether the law’s challenges can be addressed through amendment or whether NCLB is simply untenable. These papers reveal the host of challenges created by the law, including variability among states because of the nation’s system of federalism, infrequent use of public-school choice options, and late-released test scores. In truth, the federal government lacks the leverage to implement this law except in schools and districts where officials want to enact these types of reforms.

Panel II: The NCLB Remedies in the States

Julian Betts
University of California, San Diego

As a large state with many students learning English as a second language, California faces particular implementation challenges. Since 1999, there has been a separate statewide accountability system in place--quite different from NCLB--which has led to confusion. Most schools in California deemed failing under both systems have been failing for a long time.

The percent of students enrolled in choice in California is minimal. Initially, people thought timing was the problem. Today, the U.S. Department of Education is focusing on helping California improve its parental-notification letters. Parents are still wary of transferring their children, though; it is difficult to shift students across town and parents worry that new schools lack adequate support for their children, particularly children still learning English.

The implementation of SES in California is somewhat more optimistic, with 7 percent of eligible students participating in SES. Participation should be higher and the U.S. Department of Education is helping California improve its parental-notification process.

Implementation has also been hindered by the fact that one sixth of local education authorities are deemed in need of improvement. Additionally, the communication between the state government and districts should be much smoother. The Sacramento state office is understaffed and needs more well-trained people to help coordinate NCLB. Parental-notification letters should be more accessible and market-savvy; more school districts should be allowed to offer choice instead of SES in year one; the income requirement for SES and choice should be eliminated to allow high-income low-performing students to participate.

Patrick McGuinn
Drew University

The implementation of NCLB in New Jersey thus far has been decidedly mixed. The percentage of schools making AYP in New Jersey has fluctuated over the past three years; most recently, in the 2005-06 school year, it was 73 percent. The state appears to have rectified many of its initial data-collection and data-reporting problems and has better aligned its state assessment and accountability system with NCLB.

New Jersey’s history has affected the implementation of NCLB--in particular the state’s historical attachment to municipal home rule and local control of schools, the enormous disparities in wealth across school districts, and the increasingly active role of the courts in school finance and governance.

NCLB school choice has not increased educational opportunity in New Jersey. The majority of districts in the state are too small for school transfer to be a reality and the state has few charter-school options and no inter-district choice law.

The number of children receiving SES in New Jersey actually declined over the past two years despite a significant increase in the number of eligible students. The state’s department of education has exerted little oversight of district compliance. School districts have failed to notify parents about SES and choice options. Providers complain that the state and districts are unhelpful and felt threatened by the private sector providers.

The state’s department of education has been much more active in assisting restructuring struggling schools. Most schools in the NCLB restructuring phase have adopted the least invasive option, focusing on data analysis, curriculum, and professional development rather than on structural or organizational changes. Some people worry that the department lacks sufficient capacity to assist the growing number of schools entering the restructuring phase.

Alex Medler
Colorado Children’s Campaign

NCLB interventions appear to be powerless in Colorado. Choice is only happening where it was already happening--but at a much smaller scale. Students take advantage of SES somewhat more frequently, but also to a small degree compared to similar alternatives outside NCLB. Restructuring has not occurred on a meaningful scale; district-initiated restructuring happens more often.

The state and individual communities will not tolerate profound change. Too few students receive benefit from NCLB interventions for any incentives to be changed or to generate any real improvement in schools. Additional interventions may help. We should judge proposals for new interventions on their ability to impact student performance; affect large numbers of at-risk students; and change state, district, and local behavior by driving transformations that would not otherwise occur.

We should take a P-16 approach to NCLB, maintaining current interventions but expanding choice to include Post-Secondary Open Enrollment/Dual Enrollment in Higher Education. We should allow inter-district choice, as well as offer and fund preschool and full-day kindergarten to all children in neighborhoods of struggling elementary schools.

We also see a growth in charters and a growing online sector. Colorado had a mandatory state-chartering procedure for unsuccessful schools predating NCLB. After initial difficulties with forced chartering, the legislature chose to align state laws with all five NCLB options.

The Honorable John Winn
Florida Commissioner of Education

NCLB is about outcomes, about changing educators’ hearts and minds, about approaching education in a new way and helping chronically underachieving students. States are not faithfully implementing NCLB--sometimes because of the law itself and sometimes because of basic human behavior.

NCLB has had limited capacity in terms of changing hearts and minds for several reasons. First, NCLB grew out of the bureaucracy of Title I. We should have repealed Title I before enacting NCLB to build new energy in the education establishment.

Second, NCLB’s purported “focus on results” is not structured in a way that is going to change behavior across the states. Under the banner of flexibility, NCLB gave away its greatest potential power: setting uniform standards. Instead, the law created hundreds of process steps.

We have ignored the human dynamics of implementing NCLB. We have asked education leaders to take too many risks at once. We have created a disincentive for states that took risks establishing their own standards systems prior to NCLB. These states invested fifteen years creating their systems, weathering difficult political battles, and ascertaining what worked best there. NCLB has brought these states back to square one, causing much confusion among parents.

Choice has power only when it is private school choice. It is difficult to gain local  educators and state commissioners’ support in this highly charged political battle. Implementing NCLB well will take time, a lot of help, common sense, and understanding the difference between legitimate concerns and illegitimate complaints.

Panel III: The NCLB Remedies in the Districts

Stephen K. Clements
University of Kentucky

This paper uses three case studies to look at NCLB implementation in three rural and remote Kentucky districts--Martin County, Fulton County, and Monroe County. Kentucky had its own accountability system in place for over twelve years, so NCLB has introduced a competing and overlapping accountability system. These three districts represent different geographic and socioeconomic parts of the state, but all of them have faltered somewhat under NCLB; they are neither meeting the achievement goals of the state’s accountability system nor those of NCLB.

The schools and the districts as a whole have responded with a fair amount of intentionality to NCLB and to the state system’s remedies and sanctions. All of these schools and districts have made substantial improvements, including putting new leadership in place, focusing on curriculum alignment, increasing use of formative assessment, and placing reading and math specialists--courtesy of Title I and Title II--into key positions in the school.

Choice provisions, while well-advertised by schools, have been little used. Parents chose not to transfer students, worrying that students would be treated differently at new schools and fearing long commutes. Supplemental services are present in these districts, but it will take time to develop significant participation. Statewide, about 9 percent of eligible students are availing themselves of supplemental services. The logistics of providing both choice and supplemental services in these places is daunting.

Jay P. Greene
University of Arkansas

Everyone knows that there has been very little participation in the NCLB choice provisions. This paper examines the willingness of schools to inform parents of their choice options.

A number of explanations are offered in the literature, though none of them seems entirely sufficient. People suggest that schools wait too long to tell parents about their AYP status, that schools have insufficient capacity for choice, that parents don’t actually want or need choice. But what if parents do not exercise choice under NCLB because schools do not properly inform them?

We wanted to answer this questions. Our idea was to send e-mails to choice-eligible schools, asking for choice information and then measuring our responses. Ultimately, we sent 2,887 e-mails. The biggest finding was that the vast majority (85.2 percent) of schools did not respond at all. Among the 14.8 percent that did respond in some way, half asked, “Who are you? Why are you asking?” but failed to provide anything beyond that. In the end, 94 percent of schools effectively did not answer our question.  

We alternatively tested eight businesses, including three education companies, with similarly-worded emails. The responses were much more helpful. Why do businesses answer inane questions nicely, while choice-eligible schools answer reasonable questions unhelpfully? There are different incentives: the school is uninterested in promoting choice because it will entail students leaving the school.

Jane Hannaway
Urban Institute

This paper considered NCLB in Miami-Dade, the fourth-largest school district in the country in a state with thriving variety of choice programs and a well-established state accountability system that is in many ways similar to NCLB. In Florida, there is an active, data-intensive, competent State Department of Education.

About 22 percent of students in Miami-Dade exercise school choice, a number greater than the total enrollment in many other major U.S. cities. But people are not as involved in NCLB choice as one might expect. This is strange, as there are enough eligible schools to transfer to, the district adequately informs parents of their choices in many languages using different media, and there is a fairly sophisticated transportation system in place that has been accommodating choice for some time.

The two reasons for low involvement may be timing (the information is released with a shorter window than the state accountability system choice program) or the that AYP is just not a good signal of school quality. In Florida, there are conflicting signals of school quality, with over half of schools receiving an A or B in the state accountability system failing AYP. Today, 65 percent of the parents exercising choice are choosing schools that are failing AYP. It seems that parents are relying on the state grades to guide their choices instead of AYP.

David Plank
Michigan State University

Many schools in Michigan have failed to make AYP, but the implementation of sanctions has been weak. NCLB is no longer a political issue in Michigan; the governor, the superintendent and the state board of education are focused on implementation rather than resistance. Michigan had its own state accountability system in place prior to NCLB, but parents take the AYP measurement more seriously. Implementation of sanctions has been hurt by a weak state department of education with limited capacity for enforcement. There is heavy reliance on good faith in the districts.

There is a strong preference at both state and district levels for gentler remedies for schools entering the restructuring phase. People strongly resist closing schools or replacing staff; we have seen no contracts with management companies or state takeovers. Alternative gentle strategies have included aligning instruction with clearly defined learning objectives, administering more frequent assessments of student performance, using assessment data to target instruction better, and employing turnaround specialists or coaches--a particularly popular option.

Under NCLB, the persistent failure in Michigan is now publicly visible. The threat of sanctions has provided leverage for administrators. Effective strategies that are working reasonably well in elementary schools have failed to translate to middle and high schools.

Panel IV: Reconstituting Districts and Schools

Bryan C. Hassel
Public Impact

Proponents of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) see restructuring as a necessity. Others believe that restructuring is unnecessarily punitive and painful and will not yield the results that we desire. Interesting nuances are revealed at the school level. There are five options for ways that schools can restructure, and six hundred that are currently restructuring. In the next few years, 2,000 to 3,000 schools may be in the restructuring phase. Option five under NCLB is the most popular option for “restructuring” and is often a loophole to implement more incremental reforms like extending the school day and obtaining outside expert advice.

The four sample schools were similar in several ways. The student populations were high-need, low-income, high-English language learners and high-minority. However, they pursued different restructuring strategies. Two pursued option five, adopting new instructional methods and extending the school day. One embraced more professional development and reorganized the school week. Another replaced sixty percent of the teachers and the principal. One became a charter school and replaced seventy-five percent of the teachers, and as a charter gained more control over its own budget.

NCLB provides an interesting opportunity to make changes, but offers a wide range of possible changes to make. Even schools making more moderate or incremental changes were still using NCLB restructuring as an opportunity to reevaluate their schools. In some cases, NCLB has empowered leaders to make changes that they may not otherwise have made. This was the case for the staff replacements that took place in most of these schools where most of the reforms were those one would expect to see in the second or third year of NCLB remedies. NCLB puts tools in the hands of local leaders, but how and whether they use it is up to them.

NCLB is just one of many forces acting upon schools. NCLB does make a slight change in the framework of incentives that schools work within. However, there are many other incentives at work in these schools. Enrollment shifts and competition from private and charter schools motivate school leaders to make dramatic changes. Schools also are working within a web of constraints that NCLB does not address. NCLB is just one of myriad forces acting upon schools.

The district is technically responsible for restructuring, but NCLB does not explain how this is to work. Neither district- or school-originated plans make perfect sense--individual schools are different, so tailoring to local schools makes sense, except that individual school leaders have been given a chance to make reforms and have not done so, suggesting that district involvement is necessary.

Finally, in some cases, the restructuring moment provided the school community the opportunity to become engaged in ways it might not have otherwise. As a result of NCLB, parents and communities became more involved in ways they would not have otherwise. Whether that is a force for good or ill is still undetermined, but it is an important part of the picture.

We do not know as much as we would like about what it takes to turn a school around. But we do know that when organizations do turn around, they generally experience success early on, which inspires a cycle of improvement. We have not seen any dramatic gains in the sample schools with one minor exception. Thus, the restructuring mandate may be necessary as part of an overall policy, but it is far from a sufficient way to get the kind of virtual cycle that we need in these schools.

Joe Williams
Education Sector

In approaching the topic of dramatic reforms in schools under NCLB, there is a lack of material to work with. Baltimore is a case study of a state takeover of a persistently low-performing school system. The rationale for state involvement in Baltimore was previous failures by the district to improve. The district had been under state corrective action and had not lived up to its own improvement plans. It is important to note that, regardless of what the law says, these reforms happen within a political context.

In many states, districts themselves are given the first chance to figure out how to make AYP. This could be good, but could also explain why we don’t see more dramatic reform efforts. If a district gets to the point of corrective action, states are required to take one of six actions: defer programmatic or district funds, institute a new curriculum, replace district personnel, remove individual schools from district control, take over an entire district, or abolish or restructure the district. These options are sometimes limited in different states if legislation does not allow for them. For instance, thirty-six states do not allow contracting with third parties to operate schools and twenty-seven states do not allow state takeovers of schools or districts.

Why do we not see more radical reforms for restructuring? It is up to the state to tell the district if their plan is inadequate. If there are good working relationships between districts and states, however, this may prevent anything drastic from being implemented. Once the state begins working with the district in implementing a reform plan, they have a vested interest in seeing that plan through.

Districts are subject to in corrective action because of other factors at the state and local level. Electoral politics with new school boards, new superintendents and new plans can play a significant role. Furthermore, many people involved with the day-to-day work say that imposing the same framework for districts as well as schools ignores the fact that they are completely different entities. The last thing you want to do to a struggling district is take away its money.
 
The Honorable Alan Bersin
California Secretary of Education

We have to put NCLB in the perspective of the relatively short history of public education in the United States. Compared to ten years ago, the conversation is almost entirely different throughout the education world. For those developing policy in Washington or Sacramento, that may not be satisfying for capturing evidence of progress. But it is a sea change in how we are progressing. The conversation is different and the way that social change happens in our country requires that it is given time to play out.

Districts, schools, and state education offices are peculiar candidates to lead revolutions because an individual in charge is not very good at designing reforms to his own system. We should not look to districts or states to act in ways in which they are constitutionally incapable of acting. It should come as no surprise that districts typically do not adopt more than the gentlest reforms of restructuring.

There is much work to be done in terms of fixing NCLB, but the general direction should not be tampered with. NCLB must not be one more in a series of reforms that people within the established school order wait out because they think it will pass. If people stop believing in the law because they see so little enforcement, we will lose some of the benefit of the changed conversation that the law has led to so far.

The main levers of change are accountability, choice, competition, and transparency, and we should not lose those in whatever we do next to fix NCLB.

The research community should do more case studies. Gompers in San Diego stands for a very important proposition: when you actually do what everyone in the education sector knows you need to do for good schools, improvement happens very quickly. When you have a good principal, teachers who choose to be at that school, and parents who are welcomed into the conversation, the change can be dramatic. This is the kind of change that suggests that we really do know how to fix schools. Why can we not do it at a large scale in an accelerated fashion?

It is important to attend to the small successes so that the momentum builds and the culture changes. We need to continue to have these sanctions and to call for restructuring. It is important to maintain standards. But we must be careful because if we pay so little attention to actual enforcement, people will stop believing in the law and the system will lose legitimacy.

Morgan Brown
U.S. Department of Education

There are a number of legitimate questions about the lack of data on public-school choice and SES. Restructuring and SES are the linchpins of the NCLB system. There has been some modest improvement in SES participation (from 12 to 19 percent between 2003-04 and 2004-05), even at the time that the number of eligible students was increasing dramatically. The numbers are still unacceptably low, so it is important to radically increase SES participation rates.

There are two key proposals that may surface during NCLB reauthorization. One suggestion is that SES should be made available during the first year that a school is deemed in need of improvement where public-school choice is now an option. In five states, schools have been allowed to flip SES and public-school choice and there have been some positive results from that experiment. Some have resisted delaying choice until the second year, so providing choice and SES in the first year is a reasonable option. The second proposal addresses the 20 percent set-aside of Title I funds that districts are required to reserve to implement choice and SES. Rather than have the unused funds be available for other Title I expenditures, those funds could retain their earmark for SES and choice and roll over to the following year. Some districts may be dragging their feet on implementation in the hope that these funds might become available to them, but this would provide an incentive to implement SES and choice. The lack of public-school choice capacity poses a longer-term problem.

We need to ensure that actions taken under the restructuring requirement yield real reconstitution or other major governance changes, as the provision intends. One proposal that will be up under reauthorization is that option five be eliminated. Most Title I schools in restructuring status implemented one of the corrective-action options rather than the restructuring options. To the extent that the federal government is providing a school improvement fund, states need to be required to target that funding to schools that are actually restructuring. Schools that do not have the leaders to implement restructuring need the states and districts to work with them.

Many districts and schools have no idea how to plan and implement the requirements of NCLB. It is imperative that we provide practical guidance to schools and districts on how to engage the community, select the right education providers, and establish the right relationships with new schools.

There seems to be little evidence that states have been successful in taking over schools. If we are going to spend political will and effort, we need to look at other options. Takeovers by mayors and the open-sector approach (the opening of new public schools, which allow parents to decide which district schools should be closed) are both options. In addition to top-down efforts, some powerful, grass-roots efforts can help expand school choice.

Panel V: Lessons Learned

Marshall (Mike) Smith
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Should we focus on the toolkit or on children’s learning? These papers show that the implementation of these tools is weak, the frequency of abuse is small, and that there is no discernible achievement gains in effect. What did we expect? These are difficult patchwork interventions including many different parties, private and public.

The toolkit focuses on three tools, each of them piecemeal and not intended to have an isolated significant effect. The emphasis on the toolkit takes the rest of NCLB for granted, including the continued focus on standard-based reforms and the accountability system, as well as an attention to early reading.

During the standards-based movement, there were substantial gains in reading and marginal effects on mathematics. During NCLB, though, there is no effect seen, no evidence of any clear improvement at all on achievements course.

One option is to stay the course with a few minor corrections--up the ante, become tougher on sanctions and misuse, and tell local schools and districts to implement NCLB’s provisions better.

We should not stay the course. Instead, we should aim for effects based on the stronger system of standards-based reform. We need to develop more positive incentives as the best businesses have. We must focus on the analytic use of language and logic. We need to develop motivation to learn, increasing art and music instruction and improving the use of technology.

Diane Ravitch
Brookings Institution

These papers suggest that the NCLB toolkit is not working. Few students are exercising NCLB choice, as there are no real choice options in many rural and urban areas, or there are choice programs already in place. Few students are taking advantage of SES; SES providers are often low quality and there is no evidence they are helpful.

What we really need is better management. There is little evidence that restructuring is making a difference. Few districts opt for radical restructuring or conversion to charter schools; they unsurprisingly do more of what they have done before. 

It is difficult to have a federal mandate based on so little evidence. How do we know these tools are best? How do we know that choice is going to increase achievement? What reason do we have to believe that private-sector tutoring companies are more effective than regular schools?

One hundred percent proficiency is an absurd goal. The section of NCLB that is working best is accountability. We are not going to get accurate information with fifty states, fifty tests, and fifty sets of standards.

What should the proper federal role be? It should be to have national standards and a national test so that we have accurate information. The federal government is unable to shape and enforce specific remedies; that is what the specific states should do.

Kati Haycock
The Education Trust

We should feel a sense of urgency about the need for change and improvement in education. The conversation has changed fundamentally since NCLB. Today, far more people are actually taking more responsibility for what students are learning.

Papers at this conference assume that the NCLB toolkit is full of choice services and restructuring, and that if these tools are being used well, NCLB is a success. These tools are not levers or tools of change; they are tools which indicate that change does not work.

We must focus on the tools of change, the tools the teachers and principals need to make improvements so that we can avoid using these sanctions. Education leaders need rich, coherent curriculum. We have to acknowledge that states are afraid of developing better curriculum because they fear that it will cause teachers to assume less responsibility in the learning process.

State standards are unclear; teachers are teaching in the dark. We need formative benchmark assessments and ongoing professional development to assist teachers. We need extended learning time at schools. There is money available to make these changes, but we do not have enough teachers, and states are unable to fix this.

Chester E. Finn Jr.
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation 

There are roughly three options for NCLB’s future. One of them has been implied by most of today’s discussion, the “fix the toolkit” option. The second one articulated might be called “turn it upside down.” The third one might be called “try a very different approach that has a lot more to do with instruction and curriculum.”

The likeliest thing to happen in Congress is “fix the toolkit,” because that is always the likeliest, or “try to fix the toolkit.” That would include some pretty obvious things that have gotten on the table today: faster data, clearer communications with parents, wider choices, more information about SES providers, better data overall, and closing loopholes on reconstitution. The “upside down” scenario calls for changing the law’s federalism expectations, having national standards and measures, and freeing up the other players to produce those results in the ways they think are best instead of regulating them with ever finer tools. The final option, the instructional or curricular approach, is quite different than the current NCLB toolkit and even quite different than an “upside down” version of the current toolkit.

AEI research assistants Morgan Goatley, Rosemary Kendrick, and Juliet Squire prepared this summary.