American Enterprise Institute

October 16, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

9:15 a.m.	Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:30	Introduction:	Frederick M. Hess, AEI
		Chester E. Finn Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
	Discussants:	Dianne Piché, Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights
		Michael Casserly, Council of the Great City Schools
		Jack Dale, Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Schools
11:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

 Frederick M. Hess:  I would like to welcome you here today for this conversation on “No Child Left Behind’s Remedy Provisions: In Need of Improvement?”  Chester Finn and I recently published a volume in which much of the research and thinking was done by a variety of talented individuals, including our own Mike Casserly.  So we’ll begin with a few remarks on what we found interesting or constructive from this research, just running you through what we see as the key findings in the book, though both Chester and I are known for having our own points of view on these issues.  You should feel free to take a look at the book and see whether or not you think we have characterized the takeaways accurately.

 I will speak for 10 minutes.  Then Chester is going to speak for 10 to 12 minutes, just trying to give you some insight into our general recommendations, both fine-grained and bigger picture.  And then we have with us today three discussants who are eminently suited to share with us their take on how the remedy provisions of the law are working and what this implies both for reauthorization and for implementation. 

The first speaker will be Mike Casserly.  Mike has served as executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools since 1992.  As head of the Council, Mike has launched aggressive research programs on trends in urban education and has unified big-city school districts nationwide around a vision of reform and improvement.  Prior to his current position, Mike served as the organization’s director of legislation and research for 15 years.

Speaking second will be Jack Dale.  Jack joined Fairfax County Public Schools, the nation’s twelfth-largest school district, as superintendent in 2004.  Prior to taking over in Fairfax, Jack served for eight years as superintendent of Frederick County (Maryland) Public Schools, where he was named the Maryland Superintendent of the Year.  In the past, Dr. Dale has been a teacher of mathematics and assistant principal, a director of instruction, a director of personnel, and associate superintendent for school administration.  He is a guy who understands what districts look like from the inside.

Speaking third will be Dianne Piché.  Dianne is executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.  Prior to assuming that position, Dianne directed the Commission’s Title I Monitoring Project, which examined the impact of education reforms on disadvantaged children and documented violations of federal requirements.  Diane has also served as a civil rights litigator representing plaintiff schoolchildren in desegregation cases, and served as an adviser to numerous education and advocacy groups and congressional committees.

And speaking first, as my co-author on the project, is Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and chairman of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and prior incarnations.  Chester has served as a professor of Education and Public Policy, legislative director in the Senate, and assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Improvement.  Before we get started, I would like to thank the Koret Foundation and the National Research Initiative, housed here at AEI, for their support in making the volume and this research possible.

With that, let’s go ahead and get started.

First, as I mentioned, the book we will be referring to intermittently throughout the day is titled No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB.  The focus of this book is not on the entirety of NCLB; it is on one part, but one important part of NCLB, which has generally attracted less notice, less research, and less attention than the testing and accountability and teacher quality provisions.  This one part is the law’s innovative remedy cascade.  Most of you in this room -- unlike most people who live more than 6 miles outside the capital -- are familiar with this; the remedy cascade specifies what will happen to schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress. 

In the first year missed, nothing happens immediately.  If the school fails to make AYP a second year, it is required to offer public school choice.  In the third year it is still required to offer public choice but it is also required to offer eligible students supplemental educational services -- after-school tutoring, as it is more familiarly known.  In the fourth year missed, schools are required to undergo corrective action. 

After a fifth year, schools are required to create a plan for restructuring, and after the sixth year, they are required to implement the restructuring plan.  Restructuring is conducted off a menu of options, which range from turning the school into a public charter, to contracting with an external management organization, to state takeover, to the famous ‘kind of anything else’ -- Option Five -- that involves some reshuffling of the school. 

What does the data look like in terms of the number of schools that are actually in this cascade?  You are all familiar with this data; it is pretty straightforward.  For the last couple of years, we have been in the range of about 9 to 10,000 schools nationally that are in some iteration of the remedy cascade; that is about 95,000 public schools across the country.  As you see, the number of schools in restructuring and in corrective action is growing at a relatively steady and relatively substantial rate.

If we look specifically at the Year One and Year Two remedies -- public school choice -- most accounts suggest that we are still well under 5 percent participation, probably in the 1-2 percent range.  Many of you are familiar with the fact that public school choice has not been widely utilized. 

In ’03 - ‘04, we had about 4 million students eligible; about 40,000 actually participated in NCLB choice.  That is about 1 percent of the population.  As far as supplemental services, we have seen much more substantial growth in the take-up rate in ’04 - ’05.  The numbers were actually substantially north of 300,000.  We are at about 18 or 19 percent; the best estimates in terms of the eligible students.  How one interprets that number is obviously subject to judgment.  On the one hand, this is a substantial increase from ‘02 - ’03; on the other hand, 4 out of 5 students who were eligible for supplemental services still are not receiving them. 
As far as corrective action and restructuring -- here is a table from Mike Casserly’s chapter in the book.  We do not have great state-by-state data on this.  However, with his pioneering big-district survey, Mike gives us a good look at how districts are going about this business internally.  What we see is that the most common remedies employed tend to be those that are less intrusive, not surprisingly -- professional development, technical assistance, notification of parents.  If you look at the more radical interventions -- turning schools over to the state, contracting with private entities, reopening schools as public charter schools -- these tend to be much less widely utilized.

With that, let me speak briefly about what Chester and I take to be 10 of the key findings from this volume.  The backdrop for thinking about the findings is recognizing that the NCLB remedy cascade was in every sense a political compromise.  As we all know, NCLB passed with enormous bipartisan support in 2001; it was hailed in early 2002 by leaders on both sides of the aisle as well as the President.  In many of its design features and, particularly, in its remedies, that effort to find a way to split the difference is evident.  The problem, of course, with the remedy provisions is that they require a theory of change in schools -- but the same kind of compromise which marks the law generally can make it difficult to find a coherent or necessarily straightforward theory of action.

First, with the gift of hindsight, educational accountability under NCLB appears to be less about any conventional notion of school improvement or reinventing government and more about fealty to a noble, even millennial, aspiration. 

Rather than simply seeking to ensure that schools and school districts serve their students effectively, NCLB’s authors set the extraordinarily ambitious goal that every single American child will be proficient in Reading and Math by 2014.  In so doing, they took the language and mechanics of standards-based education reform and married them with a policy agenda that owes more to the civil rights initiatives of the ’60s than to any contemporary vision of disciplined educational governance. 

The political calculus and compromises that produced NCLB meant that its soaring aspirations were coupled with outdated machinery, weak sanctions, and uncertain interventions.  Effective behavior-changing regimes are rooted in realistic expectations.  Pragmatism leads self-interested adults to take goals seriously, to focus relentlessly on outcomes, and to employ the leverage at their disposal to produce desirable outcomes. 

When goals are patently unreachable, the logic of accountability changes in important ways.  If workers and managers know they are unlikely to reach the target, their primary motivation becomes avoiding trouble when they fail.  Since unrealistic goals make failure inevitable, they have the perverse effect of focusing employees on obeying rules and following the remedy provision procedures rather than on finding ways to make them work.

Second, almost everywhere, compliance-style activity is underway as state and local official’s attempt -- sometimes cynically and sometimes not -- to fulfill NCLB’s formal requirements, fill out the forms, and keep the machinery operating.  Frequently, there is a general misperception that NCLB remedy provisions require schools to make progress; that, of course, is not the case.  In fact, NCLB requires only that states and districts comply with the guidelines regarding the reporting of data, spending, planning, and adoption of interventions.  So long as they do those things, they are actually okay. 

Federal officials bear much responsibility for the lack of activity here.  Lawmakers assemble their bipartisan majority by agreeing to vague statutory language, and the executive branch has generally been unwilling to stand firm on implementation.  For example, after strong initial promises that a lack of capacity would not be an acceptable excuse for failing to provide school choice, the Department of Education backed away from those fights with states or districts.  Some of this may be due to the particular challenges of NCLB and the political calculations, but much of it can simply be attributed to decades of inertia in a bureaucracy that was built around regulatory compliance rather than problem-solving.

Third, a related problem is the lack of creativity and proactive solution design at the state and local level.  The promise of NCLB -- the notion that we are going to take schools that are persistently low-performing and cause them to operate profoundly differently -- requires more than districts and states simply complying with federal expectations.  It requires new dynamism, new energy, and new ideas at the state and local level; these have not been overly evident in progress to date.

Fourth, NCLB’s remedies, notably school choice and SES, are not in fact being much used or are being deployed generally in their mildest forms.

Fifth, in one of the more happy developments of NCLB, there are places where it has created political cover for state, district, or local officials to take bolder actions than they would otherwise be inclined.  In the volume, David Plank and Chris Dunbar suggested that the imagined, although scarcely evident threat, of restructuring in Michigan has fostered a sense of urgency in low-performing schools.  In some locales and schools, it has brought an urgency and a focus that were previously lacking. 

It is possible that despite the actual design and operation of the remedies, the mythology that envelops them is sufficient to kick schools and districts into taking actions that have been too long overdue.  We may be witnessing, in other words, a Wizard of Oz phenomena in which NCLB matters not as much because of what it actually does in terms of interventions, but because it creates a frightening presence behind the curtain that can be used to prompt otherwise painful changes and that can be blamed for painful decisions. 

The question is whether such an illusion can last.  If the NCLB Wizard is revealed to wield little real power, the political cover that he supplies may fade.  If this becomes apparent -- if these schools and districts cease to believe that the remedies are real and meaningful -- it will become a question of how effective these remedies will prove to be.

Sixth, not surprisingly, NCLB works very differently from state-to-state.  It was designed that way.  In some states, its prescriptiveness impedes the state’s own approach to standards-based reform, however, as is the case in Florida or California.  Some schools that simultaneously earn honors under the state system -- from the state’s own accountability system -- are being flagged as “Needs Improvement” by NCLB.  In particular, the crude pass-fail grading system and mandated restructuring cascade are complicating homegrown improvement strategies in leading reform states like Florida and Massachusetts. 

On the other hand, less is known about NCLB’s potential stimulus effect in states such as Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Idaho that had done little by way of accountability-style reform as of 2002.  One argument on behalf of NCLB -- but which has not been investigated in much depth -- is the degree to which it has prompted movement forward in those states that had not already indicated some inclination to get on the accountability bandwagon.

Seventh, SES poses a particular challenge.  Districts do not like losing money, which happens when parents opt for outside providers, but they do not mind their teachers earning extra dollars on the side.  Providers of tutoring are loath to be regulated by hostile state authorities and may not want to teach in ways aligned to district curricula or state tests, but they want to maximize their enrolments.  Parents get information through the school -- which has little reason to steer them energetically to outside providers. 

Across the land, evaluation and quality control have received scant attention, parental outreach has been half hearted, and the SES machinery has proven bulky.  This development is not simply a consequence of lackluster implementation and perverse incentives; it is also a result of the hodgepodge of theories and compromises baked into SES itself.  In the end, there has not been competition, demonstrable effect of mediation, or much evidence of innovation.  We conclude that the SES program, as it currently stands, requires substantial rethinking.

Eighth, parts of NCLB are providing a wealth of school district and state-level performance data.  In the long run, NCLB’s greatest accomplishment may be the school-level performance data it furnishes to parents, educators, and state and local officials.  We are not blind to the irony that in this, NCLB is simply trying to cover the same turf that was supposedly already addressed in ’94.  In fact, one may reasonably argue that NCLB-style overkill was necessary, if only to get states to comply with the initial goals of the ’94 reauthorization and companion legislation.

Ninth, even as it generates reams of information on pupil achievement and school performance, NCLB does a woeful job of gathering data pertaining to its own implementation, the deployment of its remedies and their effectiveness.  This was a significant handicap for the contributors of this volume, for instance, in that the data that is needed to actually figure out how these remedies are working and whether they are effective is simply not available in any systematic fashion.  In other words, NCLB is good at telling America how students and schools are faring today in Math and in Reading, but bad at telling anyone what schools are doing, how they are changing, what remedies are being used in which ways where, and what difference, if any, any of those remedies are making. 

Finally, the challenges that I have mentioned require us to ask whether the machinery of ESEA -- this architecture that made sense in 1965, that is reliant on state education agencies and local school districts for implementation -- is suitable for a reform regimen where it is the behavior of those very agencies that is to be altered. 

Such change-forcing steps require somebody to drop the hammer.  Today, that somebody is the district in the case of schools and the state in the case of districts.  Yet, neither hammer wielder has thus far shown much inclination to take politically unpopular steps.  In the private sector, outmoded competitors can ultimately be bypassed, bankrupted, restructured, bought out, or otherwise rendered irrelevant.  In the public sector, this is a far different preposition.  Yet NCLB’s remedies seem to take for granted that this can and will happen.  This is a strategic error that threatens to undo the promise of the restructuring provision. 

With that, let me turn the conversation over to Chester, who is going to talk about our recommendations that come out of this analysis.

Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  You can probably see why it is fun to work with Rick on projects of this kind.  It also occurred to me that in giving away free books today, we are violating a central tenet of the American Enterprise Institute.  And we hope you will value them even though you have not had to engage in a capitalistic act in order to obtain them. 

The book has been a long time in coming but the issues that the book deals with are, quite literally, as current as this morning’s newspaper.  I do not know how many of you have picked up and looked at the New York Times yet today, but Diana Jean Schemo has a pretty interesting article in today’s paper about these issues.  I am going to read you a couple of paragraphs from her article in today’s paper before getting into our recommendations. 
The headline: “Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard.”  More than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing.  Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,000 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014.  All 6000.  

“What are we supposed to do?” asked Ms. Paramo, the head of the high schools in part of Los Angeles.  “Shut down every school?”  With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands. 

As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change, leaving angry parents demanding redress.  California’s citizens groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.  “They’re so busy fighting No Child Left Behind,” said the president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group.  “If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther.”

It is not super-surprising that it is not working perfectly.  I have come to view NCLB, as we have it today, as a kind of a first draft actually.  And you can argue a bit - it is the seventh or so iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but you could also say it is the first draft of a law attempting in a serious way to make these kinds of changes occur.  First drafts almost always need revision and editing and correction.  It is not surprising that this one does too. 

We are going to get to know it better probably over the next couple of years because most people seem to think it is going to take at least a couple more years before there is anything resembling real legislative action on this front.  So this may be the most thoroughly studied first draft in the history of the universe by the time editing comes around.  And recommendations are coming from all sides, and during the next couple of years I think you can fairly predict that lots more recommendations will be forthcoming about how to fix NCLB.  And indeed, if things stay on this pace, maybe Rick and I will have some more recommendations on how to fix NCLB.  I mean, 10 is just the beginning.

Frederick M. Hess:  Maybe it will change our minds -- or at least half of them.

Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  Change half of them, right.  And if you want, you could think of our book as a first draft.  Anyway, so what we are giving you now is current thinking about how the remedies part of this law and some other parts, let me be honest, might usefully be changed in the second draft of this law.  We have blended here incremental and non-incremental changes in the law.  We assume that Congress is going to incline toward the incremental; we actually incline more toward the radical, but you will hear elements of both.  And the shorthand in the slides, let me be honest, does not do justice to the eloquence or brilliance of the recommendations and, therefore, you really need to read, at least, the last chapter of the book, and, of course, Mike Casserly’s chapter, which is equally brilliant.

Okay, 10 recommendations.  First, let’s get real.  Policymakers in Washington ought to be more realistic regarding what the federal government can accomplish in K-12 education.  The federal government is not good at calibrated escalating sanctions such as NCLB currently expects of states and districts.  Uncle Sam is much better with a simpler model that leaves more room to state and local policy entrepreneurs to try creative solutions. 

In our view, rather than imposing an incremental cascade of interventions and remedies, Washington should insist essentially on a three-step process.  First, that states label schools that need help; second, that they act to strengthen such schools; and, third, that they shut, replace, or turn inside out those schools that resist improvement.  The key is to make clear that states working with districts, if they wish, assist schools that they identify as low performing and help to clear away the barriers that block those kinds of changes.  But after a certain trigger point is reached, that is when schools that have gone several years without improving, the interventions that follow should be draconian; such schools should quite simply be closed.  I agree with the woman in the New York Times article that it does not mean kids are left with no schools.  It means bad schools need to be essentially closed, cleaned out, replaced, reopened, and restarted.

Second, though Washington should trust states to turn around their own schools, all schools in the country should be measured against a single set of national standards and uniform national tests at least in the core subjects of Math and Reading.  I know this is a contentious topic; we think it is an essential step.  It, of course, presupposes that such standards and tests can be competently and coherently designed, and not by Congress.  But this is an important step if we are going to get this straightened out. 

It is really important to distinguish what Washington is good at doing well from things that need to be entrusted to others.  It is good at setting standards and administering tests; it is not good at telling people exactly how to fix their schools.  The people who fix schools - Rick has already foreshadowed this - do not necessarily have to be state and local education agencies; it may be that a different architecture is needed to engage in the remedy phase of this process, rather than just entrusting the very entities that gave birth to the schools we have today.  Maybe we need new architecture; maybe governors, mayors, non-profit organizations, sororities.  Other kinds of entities are better suited to handle the task of school reform than our districts and state education agencies themselves.  Maybe we need a contracting and multiple-provider regime in which a whole variety of nontraditional players are empowered to provide and monitor and intervene in schooling.

Third, because states differ so dramatically in their approaches and their commitment here, Washington should adopt what we call an alpha state model in which the federal government provides escalating freedom for states that earn it by putting into operation a high-quality accountability regime.  At least in those states, and preferably everywhere in our view, instead of this one-step per year over seven years cascade, NCLB should afford states and districts the option of corrective action spanning several years. 

If the school fails to make AYP, it should go into corrective action and its students should have immediate access to SES and they should have the right to leave for other schools.  But that phase, that corrective action phase, should last four or five years -- during which the intervener can do pretty much whatever it likes to improve the school’s effectiveness.  And any and all federal rules, mandates, and spending restrictions that get in the way should be waived. 
If, however, school fails to make AYP during that four or five year corrective action period, then the hammer comes down; the failing school gets turned over to someone else or closed or/and its students re-accommodated elsewhere.  The key point is that if districts’ efforts to strengthen their schools fail, the district should lose ownership of the schools that they are unable to fix.  And somebody else should be made the de facto owner of the schools that the districts themselves are unable to fix over a prolonged period of time.

Fourth, AYP needs work if parents and educators are going to have more confidence in it.  As the New York Times article points out today, the law is identifying actually far too many schools as failing, including schools that are almost successful but get thrown into the same basket of failure as schools that are doing a disastrous job for just about everybody in them.  AYP determinations in reporting have to be more refined; they have to be better attuned to schools’ effectiveness.  We tend toward liking these growth models and value-added models as well as absolute performance.  And AYP needs to be better at distinguishing between schools and districts in serious trouble and those that are succeeding with most of their kids.  The identification of schools also needs to happen a lot faster than it is happening in many states today.  We need to alter the testing and data management processes so that the whole thing occurs in weeks rather than months -- in the spring and early summer, not in August, September, and October, as is currently happening.  This, incidentally, may be another argument for high quality national tests.

Fifth, parents especially need better, faster and clearer information regarding their options.  It also makes sense to provide SES and school choice simultaneously to kids if their school needs improvement.  A longstanding concern is the conflicted role that districts play as both SES providers and SES gatekeepers for other providers.  This needs fixing; it asks districts to do completely unnatural things.  The cleanest solution in our view is for the districts to cease controlling access to SES and for states to devise other mechanisms for allowing other public and private entities to assume SES-provider responsibilities.

Sixth, forget about SES as a source of competition.  Think of it as a provider of extended learning time for kids who need it.  If the district itself is making AYP, it can provide SES directly.  If not, it should lose control of SES and SES dollars and other providers should be invited by the state or by entities chosen by the state to shoulder this responsibility.  That should, of course, include the evaluation of those providers and de-listing any that do not actually boost student achievement.

Seventh, a long topic, and I will be short.  If choice is to be serious in NCLB, more options are needed, including inter-district choice, the creation of greater capacity via a flood of high-performing charter schools, and we would say the inclusion of academically effective private schools among the choice options for kids otherwise stuck in schools that are in need of improvement.

Eighth, we either change the architecture of who is responsible for repairing schools or we recognize that a lot of states and districts do not have the capacity to fix their own troubled schools and are going to need expert help.  This expert help needs to come from an industry that barely exists in the United States today, and needs to be invented; call it school turnaround specialists, school turnaround experts.  Do not assume that the district knows how to do this; it has been running those broken schools for a long time.  Do not assume that the state knows how to do this as it were McKinsey & Company or the nonprofit equivalents who come in and actually assist with the design and implementation of a very different approach.  Federal government can help generate the existence of such an industry in a variety of ways, but it does not exist today and it is going to be needed.

Ninth, Congress should introduce real consequences for failure and incentives for success.  In spite of the cascade of remedies and all the appearance of draconian action as Rick indicated, NCLB’s current rewards and sanctions actually create very little urgency for individual educators or school or district leaders.  Collective bargaining agreements still protect everybody’s jobs; failure to comply with the law or improve your school has no clear consequences for anybody’s job security or pay; the threat of federal dollars being withheld is all but toothless, mostly because Congress restricted this penalty to “administrative dollars” and actually did not apply it, as Rick indicated, to weak academic performance. 
You do not get your money cut off because your kids are not learning.  You only get your money cut off if you fail to engage in various compliance actions.  The sanctions and incentive process is working wrong if you only get sanctioned for not complying, and nothing happens if the kids do not learn.  In our view, superintendents and principals should be held responsible for their schools’ outcomes and should be rewarded when those outcomes are good and penalized when they are not; the managers, again, need skin in the game.

And finally -- last -- boring but you got to expect it from people like us.  We need better information about NCLB implementation, including the uses of these various remedies.  It should not actually be necessary for the New York Times to report on how many schools are in one stage or another of restructure; it should be a national database that anybody could tap into at a moment’s notice that contains that kind of information, all the operational information - how many kids are in SES, how many kids are exercising choice, which kinds of remedies are being applied to which schools in which places - all of that information. 

It is astonishing in 2007 that a great, big modern country puts into operation this incredibly elaborate reform regime without the information system needed to support it.  And that needs big-time change, boring as it may be, if we are to come back here seven years from now and throw up our hands again and say, “Gee, it does not look like it is working, but nobody is really sure.”  Thank you very much.

Frederick M. Hess:  Thank you, Chester.  And you could see why it is always a pleasure to work with Chester.  Mike, please go ahead.

Michael Casserly:  All right, thank you very much.  I am Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.  I want to thank you for the invitation to be here.  Rick, I have to say I like your Wizard of Oz analogy; you did not indicate, however, who the wicked witch was and I do not necessarily want to be in your crosshairs here. 

Also, I want to congratulate you and Chester on your new book.  I am very pleased to have played at least a minor role in writing one of your chapters.  I want to say that your narrative this morning is starting to make more and more sense to me as we are going through the reauthorization process, and I suspect it will also to anybody else caught in that web of reauthorization.  I am going to be brief this morning.  I am going to try not to use my whole 10 minutes, and it is probably not all that prudent for me to say everything I know anyway.
As you know, the Council of the Great City Schools supported NCLB back in 2001 and we did so because we thought its grand intent trumped its clumsy operating gears.  We would take the same position if we had to do it all over again, but I have to wonder now if the clumsy operating gears are now getting in the way of the grand intent.  When we were here last November to address this set of issues, I laid out a considerable amount of data on how the law was working in major cities and concluded with a number of observations that I would like to revisit this morning.

The first thing that we concluded was that the sanctions were probably leading to more pain avoidance than actual better instruction in that there were actually too many loopholes in the law to have caused much pain.  The second thing that we concluded was that the law, in general, was becoming an exercise in compliance rather than a motivator of good instruction; I think you basically concluded the same thing.  I am still convinced that you can be in substantial compliance with the law and not improve student achievement, although you would bring down the sanctions on your head as mild as they may be.  And, conversely, I think you can be out of compliance and be able to raise student achievement rather nicely.

The annually cascading sanctions are a third observation.  The annually cascading sanctions have school districts basically chasing an ever changing series of strategies before any of them have time to work.  SES in particular, I think, has suffered from its identity crisis of not ever really knowing whether it is a true sanction or an instructional intervention.  In this way I think the sanctions have actually become counter-productive.

The fourth observation that we made last year was that the AYP system does not work at all as in a system where all have differing standards and tests.  It pretends to work, but it does not.  I think we have both reached exactly the same conclusions on that and it is way past time for a set of national standards and tests to override the 50-state hodgepodge that we have currently.
The fifth thing that we concluded last year was that the legislation was woefully weak in helping states and locals build the capacity to actually implement the law. 

And then, finally, we concluded that many of the other components of the law were probably so poorly grounded in the research that it made it really hard for even the proponents of the law to argue convincingly that the law itself was what was responsible for the rising test scores in the cities.  Maybe it is.  Maybe it is not.  Who knows?

As I sit here this year, I have to say that I am hard-pressed to come up with another set of plausible conclusions based on the data that we have so far.  I know that there is strong opinion reflected partly by some of the authors in your book that the law does not work because school people do not want it to work; that you cannot require people to do what they do not want to do.  That may be true, but I would argue that it is also hard to get people to do what they think is pointless.  And much of what people are asked to do under the law is pointless because it has almost nothing to do with what they are being held accountable for, and that is raising student achievement.  This fundamental disconnect is really, I think, at the heart of the bill’s flaws.

At this point, I think the most significant issues regarding the remedy cascades is whether to continue them.  The emerging research at the national state and local level indicates that neither the choice nor the supplemental services provision of the law has much effect on student achievement, nor do they really act as true sanctions as such.  The effects of the corrective action and restructuring of provisions to the extent that they are implemented at all are not much better.

The current house draft, as you know, attempts to solve some of these problems but it has become a jumble of too many requirements, too many provisions, and too many remedies as the title of your book implies.  The house draft retains the cascading sanctions but it stretches it over a longer period of time, and it softens the toughest sanctions that few people did anyway. 
It also bifurcates the sanctioned school’s failures.  To its credit, the draft does couple the sanctions with a series of instructional activities, and it does make the accountability system somewhat less punitive at the beginning.  It also makes the system less prone to the vagaries of the year-to-year swings and the test score data and to the effects of getting late data. 
But there are also problems with a proposed system, at least as we have seen so far, starting with how the sanctions are split between high priority and priority silos.  No one has the foggiest idea yet what the effects of this proposal are, or who it applies to.  Yet, we are now talking about making this the law of the land.  A quick look at some random states suggests that this bifurcation may, in fact, affect differing states differently depending on the state testing system, and it would lift up to half of the nation to at-risk kids out of the sanction system entirely.

Second, the draft never does quite reconcile what SES is supposed to be or what it is supposed to apply to, who it is supposed to apply to, or to what degree across the silos [sounds like].  I think it is going ultimately to undercut the potential effectiveness of SES and further question whether or not SES ought to be in the law.

Finally, I do not think the listing of instructional activities in the proposed draft really add up to a strategy per se, although they do help refocus some of the bill’s sanctions.  We have serious visions, as you know, to streamline some of the sanctions actually similar to some of the proposals that you have made here.  But our proposals have been turned into something of a rat’s nest that I am not even sure that we can support.  We would like to support the next iteration of No Child Left Behind, but it is not clear that after all the pulling and tugging on the legislation that will be able to bail itself or will have anything coherent in it, or whether or not it will be worth supporting.

It is also not clear, as everybody knows at this point, that the bill is even going to get off the floor of the House.  It may be that all of us are going to have to take another step back, take a deep breath, and rethink a lot of this.  If the bill falls apart, they may actually be looking - Chester and Rick - at your proposal.  It is the simplest way out of the corner in which this bill currently is in.  It is actually, to my mind, a solid and intelligent addition to the debate anyway.  But I suspect that if Congress accepts that, you would not recognize it after they finish with it and you might not be able to support it either.  Thank you.

Frederick M. Hess:  Jack?

Jack Dale:  I want to also thank you for putting together the book and I should have grabbed your speech as I was addressing Congress because I think many of the points in there are ones that I agree with.  What is interesting is one of your comments that this is the next generation from earlier versions of ESEA.  And you have to ask the question had this not been in place, would we have been somewhat in the same circumstances?  That is an interesting question.
I think we are in the middle of two major policy debates, but we do not debate very much, although I think with your recommendations, we will begin to debate one of those.  And that is, should we have national standards?  There are two components in the national standards.  One is what is the content that is expected, whether it be Reading and Math and limit it there or expand in other content areas?

But even within there, the Reading and the Math have different kinds of content that you would expect at different grade levels, and I think we need to have that debate.  And then the second part that would go with that would be some kind of a national assessment.  Right now, No Child Left Behind has absolutely zero sanctions, zero incentives, zero motivation for states to have equivalent standards.  There is nothing in the law that requires, compels, suggests this; it is just in the popular public press with NAEP comparisons recently that we -- and others -- that there is some kind of a public pressure for states to have equivalent, if you will, standards.  I think we need to address that.

The second fundamental piece in policy that this is about is moving out of the Great Society Era where we are looking at equal access for all kids.  Now, we focus on equal outcomes for all kids.  And I think we ought to suggest that that is what this is about.

Now, as we do want equal outcomes for all kids, by nature you end up at a floor, not necessarily aspirational standards.  So I think we have to wrestle with the floor, the minimum competencies for 100 percent of our kids.  National standards was what I would argue versus aspirational standards. 

We continue to walk away from answering this question affirmatively, and that is should a high school diploma be equivalent to college admissions?  When I was up in Maryland, I tried to have our high school diploma equal to college admissions and people just backed away from it.  But in essence, that is part of the standards that you are wrestling with on this one.  On the ground level, when I work with parents now, parents say, “Well, that is stupid.  How can you expect 100 percent of all kids to meet these standards?” 

In our case, where I have somewhere around 60 percent of our English language learners coming in from foreign countries, to expect them to be at grade-level performance within one year is naïve, if not stupid.  And so people look at the AYP, or failure to make AYP designation now, and they look at it as laughable.  So there is no meaning in the label for parents who get into the minutiae of how the details may look at their schools. 

In the first year, I had one school for which we had offered choice.  About over the course of a couple of year period of time, out of the 900 students, 200 left; 95-plus percent of them were the ones who passed the test.  It was only a small percentage of the children who went to another school who had actually not passed the test.  It does not help the school; it does not help the kids. 

What I see in supplemental educational services -- and we provide it; we are very aggressive in allowing kids to have supplemental educational services in three schools for which we have that provision.  What I’m finding is we have the kids who are passing the test going out and getting supplemental education services so they can get into the advanced placement curriculum.  It has nothing to do with the kids who are failing, which is really too bad.  I mean, it is neat for them but that is where our resources are going; we are plowing resources into really supporting children and families who are wise enough to know how to access, which tend to be those kids who are performing at or above grade level to begin with. 

The other piece that I want to move to -- as you look at this law, as they pointed out, there are no carrots; there are only sticks, only labels, only sanctions.  It is kind of the negative side of things.  There are no incentives for innovation.  And I would agree that this is probably one of the major shortcomings of this law.  I would argue that when I try to ask the federal government to take a look at a different way of testing English language learners here a year ago, the response was, “Hell, no.  Do it our way.  And if you don’t, we will take away your Title I funds.” 

So, my innovation attempts were not met with a lot of enthusiasm by the federal government.  And we could have had a discussion and discourse about what in my approach or somebody else’s approaches would have been better, but we could not even get to that stage.  It was, “No, follow the law, be compliant or we will take away your Title I funds.” 

Another thing that I think it is naive is that in any of the restructuring or any kind of external intervention, I think we are naive to believe that somebody has got the magic bullet.  If somebody had the magic bullet, they would be out there doing it right now all across the nation, whether it be in charter schools, takeover schools.  Whatever it is, there is no magic bullet. 
What we need is constructive discourse on what, in fact, will turn around failing school systems or failing sets of schools.  We have got to get out of the mentality that there is one magic person riding in on a white horse called the principal who somehow magically reforms a particular school.  We have examples of those but we do not have system-wide examples of those; they are very isolated examples.  We have to move from isolated individual examples to system interventions that actually make significant change in how kids perform. 

I will close by saying one thing I’m working on is restructuring our schools, so we have virtually all of our teachers working fulltime.  I’m working on data analysis and working on school improvement, and those schools where I have that now in place, those are the schools who are now making significant improvements in academic performance. 

We do not have collective bargaining in Virginia, but I have three different teacher groups; we have to work through those kinds of issues.  I have had to work through communities who are not used to change - school board members not used to change, principals not used to change.  It is quite a change process that everybody has to go through.  We need some incentives for people to support that kind of a change.  Why, again, if you will?  Because that is the only way I think we are going to make a significant change on our nation.  Thanks for your book.

Frederick M. Hess:  Thank you, Jack.  And, Dianne?

Dianne Piché:  Well, thank you, Chester and Rick for inviting me, a civil rights advocate, to speak here at AEI.  This is a rare event.  But I’m happy to share with you in the brief time that I have my perspective and that of other colleagues of mine in the civil rights movement about this law, and to reflect a little bit on this very substantive book on NCLB’s remedies, and then to offer some of the recommendations that we have made.  Some of them are not likely to see the light of day anytime soon but, certainly, are the recommendations we think would go toward leveling the playing field a little bit more for the kids who have been short-changed in our educational system. 

First, I was intrigued by this notion that somehow NCLB is a non-workable hodgepodge because it is based on a hodgepodge of theories of action and approaches that somehow can’t all play nicely together in the sandbox and get along.  In fact, there are key places in this law where we have some very promising provisions for parents and kids that are actually based on not one but two, three, four, five theories of action, some of which are really mutually exclusive on a theoretical level but come together politically to help bring about some change. 

For example, the right to transfer provision and the SES provisions.  We have theories behind these, things that range from a Milton Friedman’s free-market approach to education -- some folks would argue a notion of privatizing more of public education.  We also have the idea that we believe very strongly that the remedies in No Child Left Behind really need to be bifurcated.  You have individual remedies for parents whose kids are stuck in failing schools and then we have systemic remedies, and these are very important to us.  The individual remedies this law provides to parents who really cannot and should not be required to wait on their districts or schools or states or feds to get around to improving their schools. 

On a practical level, there is a real function here for these remedies, particularly SES, which is that they can really help schools to improve by helping kids get the extra time to catch up to grade level.  In fact, this can actually help schools and AYPs where we have seen SES embraced strongly by principals.  They are very much aware that kids who get this very intensive tutoring can really help their schools and help their schools look better. 

From a civil rights and equity perspective, these remedies are just bedrock, particularly the right to transfer to a better school, because we know that these options are available.  I would argue to virtually anybody in this room who has, has had, or will have school-age children, that the middle class, the upper classes, the wealthy always have the option to enroll their child in a better school if the current school to which they are assigned is not working.  So it is a real bedrock equity factor for us that parents should have the right to something better when a school is not working for their child. 

We talked a little bit about the remedies.  I was intrigued by this use of the word “cascade” because I often think of these remedies as just a slow drip.  They are on the ground; there is not a lot to them, quite frankly, in many, many places, although we are starting to see a little bit of an uptake in some efforts toward more serious action to reconstitute schools, to maybe do something more than, say, put in a new curriculum, or even, you know, the radical move of changing the principal. 

I like the Wizard of Oz analogy.  Before I heard that, I had said and have said, in many cases, that the remedies here are like the proverbial emperor with no clothes.  Although in this case, I would say the emperor is scantily clad; maybe he is wearing not much when it comes down to it.  Very few schools are going through a sanction process, a process of a very radical change that really does need to happen in a fair number of our nation’s lowest performing schools; these also happen to be schools that tend to be segregated by both class and race. 

More often than not, there is lip service to this.  The worst thing that happened under the predecessor of NCLB, for the most part, is that you got put on the list of schools that were not making the grade.  And now, the worse, it seems to happen - and it is not a bad thing from our perspective - is that parents may have some options they did not have before.  Occasionally, there may be some real attention to the systemic changes that we need to take place to turn the schools around.

One of the chapters that I found most interesting in this book was Bryan Hassel’s chapter wherein he describes different approaches on the ground to turning around schools.  I think this reality of how it happens needs to inform federal policy.  Like my colleagues here on the panel, I would submit to you that the individual remedies in No Child Left Behind are probably much more appropriate for the federal government to prescribe, and we have serious recommendations for fixing, tweaking, amending the right to choose and the right to SES. 
But the mandating of specific sequences of actions, instructional strategies -- take a look at Miller and McKeon draft.  There are pages and pages and pages of what schools ought to pay attention to, what they ought to analyze.  For those of you who are students out here, take a look because it really reads like a graduate school paper on all the things you might want to do.  Educators like Superintendent Dale, like Superintendent Klein in New York City, like the best teachers we have, do not need this long laundry list of what to do; they need to be empowered to do it. 

What we know sitting here right now is that there is no one way.  There are instances where teachers coming together can make changes at the school level.  We just did a report -- small plug here -- “Fresh Ideas in Collective Bargaining.”  It is fashionable to bash the unions but there are many places around the country where the teachers are coming together at the building level with the administration and crafting school improvement plans that work.  They are agreeing voluntarily to change the terms of their collective bargaining agreement so that kids can learn better, so that extended time can be provided.  They agreed to things like pay for performance.  So we know that this kind of change can work. 

In Bryan’s chapter, you will find examples of improvement plans that are showing some real promise.  They are not mandated by even the district.  They are the organic change process that we hear so much about.  Now, can we trust that process in every single school that is not performing?  Absolutely not, so there are other instances where the district needs to come in, or where there are barriers that exist at the district level, whether they are in collective bargaining agreements, whether they are in the allocation of resources.  So it seems to me the law needs to make some allowance for that, an accommodation for that. 

Then there are instances where it is appropriate for the state to intervene as the constitutional entity responsible ultimately for public education.  We do not know enough to say that one school improvement process is going to work better than another.  So my focus on this law in the remedy section has been much more in the nature of preserving those individual options for parents, strengthening them -- and by the way, we do agree very much with Chester and others that the right to transfer needs to be an absolute right.  It needs to be available on an inter-district basis in places where there is limited capacity. 

But we also think it is very important that Congress allow for some differentiation of consequences or status of schools.  And there is a fair amount of consensus on that; the devil, of course, is in the details but it certainly does not make sense to treat schools that, as they say, miss AYP by a little, the same as the schools that miss AYP by a lot. 

In fact, we think that kind of approach makes a mockery of the whole idea that the schools that miss AYP by a lot either need a lot more help and intervention, or at some point they do need to be closed.  But we need to focus a lot more on those schools.  The schools that are missing by a little, including many suburban districts like the one I live in, Montgomery County or Fairfax or others, cannot be allowed to continue to perpetuate achievement gaps. 

We want to make sure that for African-American students and low-income students in those districts, achievement improves and they get to proficiency.  But they, realistically, probably do not need the same kind of technical assistance, the same kinds of resources, perhaps even the same kind of attention on a large scale to teacher quality that urban districts may need.  So we think there needs to be kind of a re-altering of that scheme. 

I’m being told that I have not a whole lot of time, so let me just talk to one final issue.  This is one where I do not think we are going to succeed.  I proposed in a blog with your colleague, Mike Petrilli, last winter that Congress shift Title I, in particular, from what has largely been an entitlement program -- and, subtext, a job’s program -- to a competitive grant program that is a combination of formula-based programs so that the resources are being targeted largely to schools and districts on the basis of poverty.  But you do not automatically get the money just for existing and enrolling poor kids; you get the money because you are going to use it to do something that works for kids. 

The Feds do not need to prescribe exactly what you do just like they do not have to prescribe the teaching of phonics or whole language or balanced literacy.  You know, just give me the results in Reading.  Do what works for you on the ground.  I actually proposed that this could be phased in, so that we are not just ripping money out from under districts that have come to count on it for their payroll and other kinds of support. 

Let me just make one analogy, and I realize it may be not completely appropriate to education.  I have three boys and they are all jocks and they love to play soccer and other sports.  When you play in the more competitive youth soccer leagues, they have divisions.  What happens is to get into these competitive soccer leagues, you have to have a track record of success on some other level of play.  But at the end of the year, which is the period that the youth soccer league considers an ample period of time for evaluation, the teams that are doing better get moved up and the teams that are not doing so well get the boot.  They are out of the highly competitive prestigious league and other schools or other teams get to move up. 

So if we were to take this approach on a very limited scale in public education, in Title I, we would give all of our schools with low-income kids adequate resources; we would give them time to use those resources to improve or we would say, “Sorry.  We have a more worthy school that is getting results,” and that may be a charter school.  Many of our charter schools are getting outstanding results for kids.  It might be a magnet school, it might be a regular public school, but we are no longer going to reward failure at the bottom.  Right now, it is a myth out there that if you do not improve, you lose your funds.  No, schools and districts continually have gotten this stream of money based on the formulas since 1965. 

So that is my parting idea.  It did not sit very well with the NEA and the folks who were drafting in the majority party, but I do think at some point it is worth considering.  Thank you.
 Frederick M. Hess:  Thanks, Dianne.  And, Dianne, if folks are interested in the “Fresh Ideas” report, where can they find it?

 Dianne Piché:  www.cccr.org 

Frederick M. Hess:  Excellent.  With that, let’s go ahead and open it up for questions.  Please do everybody the favor of just letting them know who you are by name and affiliation.  And as always, I will request the people to actually ask questions rather than make speeches from the floor.  Bill, why don’t you take the first question?

 Bill:  I would like to address this to Mr. Dale and possibly have Mike comment on it.  In a recent article by Jay Matthews in the Washington Post, there was discussion of bringing NAEP down to the district level -- and NAEP is a matrix sample test in which individual students do not have the test scores and in which tests are not the same.  They are re-circulating among a lot of different students.  Was it your intention in proposing this to have a matrix sample test of the sort brought down to the district level -- or school level for accountability purposes?  Could you go into that idea and what you think of that idea?

 Jack Dale:  When we do testing, I think we have to ask -- what is the purpose of the test?  If you want to do a sampling, which is what NAEP does to get a profile -- they do have sampling to get state profiles, but not enough sampling to get district profiles.  If we want a sampling to get profiles, then NAEP or something equivalent can be done.  If we want to use assessments to drive instruction and have teachers understand how kids are performing, that is a different kind of test and you have to do 100 percent sampling.

What I was talking about in Jay Matthews’ article was the notion that we need to get to some kind of a national standard and a national sampling, at least, in a dipstick method.  But then, states and localities could actually backward-map the results from that and create more informative assessments if they wanted to.  So, I guess I was arguing both, but in that particular article I think Jay was really talking about the national sampling and getting down to a richer level for a particularly large system like that.  

 Bill:  I think Mike should explain what the Council of the Great City Schools does.

 Michael Casserly:  Yeah.  I think a lot of people in the room probably know, but the Council a couple of years ago actually initiated the process by which the largest cities could be over-sampled as part of NAEP and get their individual district results in Reading and Math in fourth and eighth grades.  Now, so far the money for it has been restricted, so we have not been able to grow this out very much, although the new appropriation cycles have a little bit more money to expand the participation. 

But even at the participation level that we have right now, the sample at the district level does not, as you have indicated, provide student-by-student results.  In fact, they cannot even provide school-by-school results because some of the sampling is nested within schools.  So if we were really looking at a national test to provide student-by-student results as the individual state data does, we will either have to completely restructure and rewrite NAEP because it is not currently adapted to produce student-by-student results, or we are going to have to turn the state exams into a national test that can go all the way to the student level and use NAEP simply as a sampling device.

 Jack Dale:  Let me jump in.  I would say if we get to that day, we have to wrestle with how we want to use the test data because one of our problems in this nation is we are taking a single test, at times, and expecting it to fulfill a variety of purposes.  That is not helpful.

 Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  NAEP would not be my first choice for the mechanism for a national test.  I think it should remain the reliable external audit in the country, no matter what test they use.  I would far rather work from something like the American Diploma Project and build a new set of tests that states could embrace if they want to.  And whether they embrace it or not, NAEP still applies to that, so that their performance will still be visible on NAEP but, maybe, 25 or 30 of them would start using the -- let’s call it the ‘unified test’ or ‘multi-state test’.

 Fritz Edelstein:  Fritz Edelstein, Public-Private Action.  On your listing of key findings, the last one had to do with the 1965 ESEA architecture.  Is it outdated?  I was reading it a little bit differently.  Could it be that the architecture of the statute is outdated and we are not now dealing with the original purposes of what the ESEA was doing in 1965 rather than thinking through the architecture of what the schools are doing and what the solutions are?

 Frederick M. Hess:  I will speak to that briefly and then Chester can speak to that.  I think that is exactly right.  To say that the architecture of the ESEA -- LEAs and SEAs -- is inappropriate for a performance-driven regime is not to cast any aspersions upon what was designed in ’65.  If the idea was to provide resources to localities that needed them to educate specific populations of students, using the ESEA machinery made a lot of sense.  It was machinery that was designed to figure out how to get buckets of money from Washington out to places where it was going to be used to educate the targeted students. 

The challenge comes as you try to move to an accountability-driven framework or performance-driven framework because you are raising a new set of expectations and requirements.  And I think your point is precisely right -- everything is easier on hindsight: we did not get it right in the first draft but we should think about it for the second draft.  We did not spend enough time thinking, “Is this architecture -- these SEAs and LEAs -- do they have the resources, the personnel, the motivation and incentives to handle these new challenges?”  And I think what Chester and I are arguing here is that it has become clear to us, at least, that the answer is “Probably not.” 

 Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  If there were not 42 years of history here, and if you were starting from scratch with an education reform regimen designed to create alternatives for kids and intervene in failing schools, it is unlikely, it seems to me, that you would rely primarily on district and state education agencies for that regimen.  You would not set it up that way because it would not be a rational way to approach reform.  What they did in 1965 was they built a truck to deliver dollars, and it made sense because delivering dollars was the goal. 
Today, we need something -- I don’t know -- a little bit more like a fighter plane to launch missiles.  And, you know, trucks do not launch missiles; we need a different kind of thing entirely.  But what nobody thought about in 2001 was whether the old truck could not be trusted or needed to be replaced by another kind of a vehicle in order to accomplish a very different purpose than the truck was accustomed to accomplishing.  It is not at all surprising that the truck is not good at launching missiles.

 Brian Jennings:  Brian Jennings.  I’m a student at American University.  You were mentioning a New York Times article where they talked about a thousand failing schools in California that are going to be closed down.  And I know you were saying that is way too many, but in your suggestions for strengthening the hammer that can be wielded against failing schools, it does imply there are going to be a lot of schools closed down.  Do you see the government playing a role in helping quickly establish other schools for students to go to?  I mean, there is not a lot of excess capacity for those students to go to – what in No Child Left Behind is addressing where students are going to go after school is closed down?

 Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  I would be interested in other panelists’ comments on this, too.  Closing a school does not mean that you throw everybody out, lock the door, turn the lights out, and leave the building empty.  It does not mean that.  You can keep using the building.  You could even keep using the building for the same kids or a different population of kids that might want to come to that school.  But everything about what occurs in that building changes.  It is like you throw out all the grown-ups and the textbooks and the curriculum, and you bring in a new set of grown-ups and textbooks and curriculum and leadership.  Then you turn the lights back on and invite the kids back in.  It does not mean there is no place for the kids.

 Dianne Piché:  I think there is -- again, there are these issues of reality on the ground.  I mean the state of California is not going to close down a thousand schools and dump the kids in the streets because organizations like mine would be the first to be in court to sue them because they have a duty under their state constitution to educate all kids -- notwithstanding that something like this did happen in New Orleans, post-Katrina, and schools actually did turn kids away; we had some evidence of that and there was some legal action taken.  But there are these huge capacity problems out there.  And what is going to make sense in the reauthorization is to allow districts to prioritize or triage, if you will, how they go about fixing these low performing schools. 

It is not realistic for a large urban district to tackle every single school that is not making AYP -- even every single school that is really doing poorly -- at the same time.  It just simply cannot be done.  There are not enough good or new teachers out there that you can just move into that many schools all at once.  I mean we do not have time to go about this whole compendium of kinds of things that needs to be done to make sure we are getting and keeping good teachers in these schools.  But I think it makes sense and I think the House and Senate drafts are going in this direction to say, “While we may identify a lot of schools as needing improvement, not making the standards in Reading and Math, we want to be able to do this in a way that is thoughtful and systematic.”  So there is a tension there, but at the end of the day I do not see students just being set out in the streets.

 Nelson Smith:  Nelson Smith, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.  The goal of having every child proficient by 2014 has been the cornerstone of the Act.  I would say until very, very recently it looked completely non-negotiable.  And now some groups, including some who were sympathetic to No Child Left Behind, are proposing various configurations and alterations on that.  Is there an alternate standard -- that if we do not have a bill this year and we are getting closer and closer to 2014 -- that makes sense without losing the goal of No Child Left Behind?

 Michael Casserly:  I do not know what kind of Congress ultimately is going to do with the ’13, ’14 deadline.  I think there is some discussion about maybe backing off of it a little bit, but I think there is a lot of political tension on whether or not that is politically viable to do.  This is going to be another shameful plug for national standards but one way that you could solve this problem would be if you set up national standards and either national tests or have the states’ test tethered to the national standards, then reset the clock based on a new set of national standards, presumably put that at some later date.  So you would have raised the bar and given people a little more time in order to meet the deadline -- that could be one way to do it.  But right now, the discussion has really been over whether to keep the deadline or not to keep the deadline, and it has not been used to further a broader, more interesting conversation about whether or not there is some other alternative.

 Dianne Piché:  I had a meeting with a prominent school superintendent about six months ago with the Secretary of Education and we discussed the deadline.  And his response was, “Let’s keep it.  It helps me and empowers me to do what I need to do.  It keeps the pressure on the system.  It helps me keep the pressure on my system.  And let’s talk when we get to 80 percent proficient.”  And that was the way he looked at it. 

The idea of a hundred percent proficiency is a mythology, actually, under the law.  There are a number of loopholes in that.  For example, you only have to have 95 percent of your kids showing up and taking the tests, so you can take 5 percent right off the top -- freebies.  The rules for testing children with disabilities and English language learners are in flux and are likely to change with some -- even more give than we have now.  But you can take up to 1 percent of your kids with severe cognitive disabilities pretty much right out of the system with very low level of standards and assessments.  You get this area of gap kids -- 2 percent.  So you get another 3 percent freebies.  They are not freebies completely but we are talking about a hundred percent proficiency on the state Reading and Math assessments. 

Then we have these statistical devices called confidence intervals and N sizes.  We have states with -- if you do not have 100 kids or 40 kids, these are huge numbers.  In a subgroup, those kids are not counted for the purpose of AYP at the school level.  They bump up to the district level but as my colleague, Joe Williams, wrote about here, district accountability is sort of a huge fiction in this country.  You also have kids who move from school to school.  They are not counted at the school level if they move during the school-year.  Again, they get bumped up to the district level where they have to be tested.  And their scores will be reported, but they do not really count.

 Jack Dale:  They count at the district level.

 Dianne Piché:  They count at the district level but, again, there has not been a whole lot of -- we do not see states taking over school districts very frequently.  There is a whole bunch of reasons that we do not have time to go into, but district accountability is probably the weakest link in the whole accountability chain.  So, from our perspective it is very important to keep the 2014 deadline.  I mean, you would think there are other ways of accomplishing the laudable goal of lifting standards and doing some real credible measurement toward college-ready standards, but extending that deadline does not seem to us to be the way to go.

 Jack Dale:  Besides wrestling with that very issue, one notion that I have come to is a potential as well; we wrestle with the national standard issue, as Mike was talking about.  I think that is where we need to have a tremendous amount of conversation.  You know, right now, the states have to, every year, basically, move up closer and closer to a hundred percent proficiency level, and that is what the standard is.  So my advocacy would potentially be freezing people where they are right now while we go through that debate. 

Right now, we have enough schools identified.  There are the needy schools; we probably have picked off the most egregious kinds of circumstances.  We need to devote our time and energy in working with those as opposed to getting to the state where virtually a hundred percent of our schools are identified as failing to make adequate yearly progress.  If we allow that to continue, we will have a revolt in the nation and it will just be gone because that is where parents are as you talk to them -- they look at it and look at it and say “That is unrealistic, naïve” -- and they’re getting worse with their adjectives.  And so maybe it is a suspension of where we are right now in working on the national standards.

 Michael Casserly:  To Dianne’s point about the conversation that she had with one of the superintendents about keeping the ’13, ’14 dates: our board actually voted last October when we put the issue before them about whether or not they wanted to advocate going off the date or sticking with it.  It was roundly argued by the superintendent and board members of my group that the ’13 and ’14 date was actually a useful pressure point for them and it did, in fact, as Dianne indicated, help them spur and leverage reform in the districts where they were otherwise having trouble.

 Jerry Dances [phonetic]:  Jerry Dances.  I’m a Math professor emeritus at the University of Maryland.  But first, a point of information because as a Math professor, I looked at the NAEP Grade Eight Math test.  It is basically grade four and five questions, so NAEP Grade Eight Math proficiency really means proficiency at Grades Four or Five.  My concern is that there is too much emphasis on form and not enough emphasis on substance, which is a line I saw in a report by Rick and Chester from five years ago.  To what extent are the remedies heavy on form and light on substance?

 Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  Very.  I think we are all on accord on that.

 Gary Ratner:  Gary Ratner, Citizens for Effective Schools and Formal Education Accountability.  I think we have heard this morning that the test sanctions, AYP -- that is basically what NCLB has given us.  But there seems to be agreement that there have not been major improvements in teaching and in learning.  I think we have also heard that to make major improvements, the reforms need to be helpful and perceived as helpful to the key stakeholders -- to the teachers, to the principals, to the parents -- in accomplishing the goal, which is improving achievement for the students. 

So my question for Rick and Chester is, how would your simplified sanctions scheme address what I think many of us would see as the fundamental need to enhance the knowledge and skills of the teachers -- of the principals, of the parents, the level of the curriculum, the quality of the teaching -- so that we could actually approach the NCLB goal?

 Chester E. Finn, Jr.:  The last thing you want on this planet is for the federal government to try to enhance the quality of teaching.  It would be a catastrophe.  They are lucky if the NAEP results are accurately reported and the checks arrive in the right places, and the statistics are correct.  It would be an act of enormous hubris to think that from Washington we are going to drive professional development, teacher improvement, curricular improvement, pedagogical improvement.  It is not going to happen.  What we need is a policy regimen in which people who know how to do these things -- people who do not reside at U.S. Department of Education -- are actually both incentivized, rewarded, and disincentivized, if need be.  

 Frederick M. Hess:  I think the one thing that I would probably add is that Chester and I do make the point that there is a role for the Feds to play in terms of creating some of the know-how that does not currently exist.  Specifically, in the case of turnarounds, exactly what the recipe is, I believe, is going to vary from school to school and district to district.  I think Chester probably concurs with me on that.  And the last thing we need to do is try to come up with one or multiple cookie cutter models that we are going to be administering from Washington. 
On the other hand, right now, there is not a lot of this infrastructure, there is not a lot of entities out there that are going to help schools or districts with some of the components that you are talking about with these challenges.  So we are really in a situation where we are asking districts one by one to reinvent this and to figure this out.  I think Chester and I suggested there is absolutely a role for the Feds to play in terms of nurturing and encouraging and seeding some of these efforts to find new models of organizations who can step in and play this role.  Mike?

 Michael Casserly:  I think the federal government also has an important role to play in research.  I think you mentioned it some place in your presentation, but the quality of research and the amount of research really devoted to raising student achievement particularly in low-performing schools is really not as good as it needs to be.  And the federal government also has an important role to play, I think, in capacity building and some technical assistance.  Now, whether or not that means actually dictating instructional strategy, I think, is a different matter.  But they can help build the capacity even if they did not have the capacity themselves to do the work. 

I would parse your question in one way, however, and that is while there may not have been substantial improvements in instruction because of NCLB, I think there have been substantial improvements in instruction independent of NCLB.  There have actually been pretty significant improvements, particularly in major city schools, in instructional quality and academic results over the last several years.  It is not as fast as everybody wants it to be; we obviously need to accelerate those gains.  But there are reforms that are going on that are really quite disconnected from the law that are having an effect.

 Dianne Piché:  I just want to say that from our perspective and actually, some of us civil rights movement people met with the president last week and he agrees with us that education is a basic civil right that children have.  The corollary of that is that all children should have and have the right to have a good teacher; you cannot get an education without a good teacher.  It seems to me that the federal government does have a very important role to play in leveling the playing field with respect to what we would call the teacher quality gap. 

And there are a variety of ways to do this.  One step that Congress could take is to require that when the Title I federal dollars come into a district, those dollars come in on top of a level playing field with respect to resources.  Those resources, as you calculate them at the school level are devoted to personnel;  mostly, personnel are the classroom teachers.  And what we know is that within districts and between and among districts in a state, the teachers are inequitably distributed in terms of how much they cost.  More experienced teachers cost more; less experienced teachers cost less.  So some kind of equalization of the existing resources would be an important step forward. 

I think there are other initiatives that could be taken and that Congress could seed those initiatives without prescribing them.  But allowable uses of funds under Title II could include pay for performance, could include other kinds of differential pay, incentive pay to attract teachers to the hardest staff positions in the neediest schools.  Frankly, I would not mind if we took a couple of days or a couple of weeks out of the Iraq budget to see these kinds of improvements because we do not know what is going to work.  I do not think that Congress should mandate these things necessarily, but Congress can certainly play a role in making sure that high-poverty schools in districts have the resources that they need to hire and retain the best teachers for the students.

 Michael Casserly:  I know we are starting to run out of time, so I will make this quick.  I think Dianne is referring to the proposal on comparability in Title I and to my mind the proposal is really nonsense; it will not result in the kinds of effects that its proponents argue.  I certainly agree with its underlying intent, which is to put the better, more experienced teachers in the lowest performing schools where the kids need it most, but it is not clear to me that the proposal as currently written will come any place close to that.  Anybody who would like to see a more intelligent explication of that, I would refer to Kate Walsh’s excellent article in The Gadfly a couple of weeks ago.

 Frederick M. Hess:  And what better time for Jack as the practitioner up here -- why don’t you give the last word?

 Jack Dale:  I would agree with Mike -- over and over, there is not a correlation between dollars spent on teachers and performance, so I think you have to get into much more robust examination.  I’m going to close my last comment with going back to reforming in the schools.  I mentioned there are 24 schools for which we have a significant number of teachers working fulltime, but I want to share with you a comment from a teacher that I think is at the core of a transformed school. 

And the teacher said, “I’ve learned that 50 percent of my job is to provide the best instruction possible for my kids in my classroom.”  Fifty percent.  And I was like, “Wait a minute.”  She said, “The other 50 percent of my job is to make sure my colleagues and I have the best set of instructional skills in this school.”  That to me was a fundamental shift in that teacher’s view of his or her role of a school.  And I think that is where we need to have the pedal meet the road in those kinds of transformations.

 Frederick M. Hess:  Thank you.  This is a great note to close on.  I would like to thank the panelists for joining us today.  I appreciate your being here.  We will see you all very soon.

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