NCLB

The 111^th Congress will have numerous opportunities to enact policies that improve access, quality, efficiency, and alignment in early education, including the economic stimulus package currently being debated in Congress and the scheduled reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). A new issue brief from New America's Early Education Initiative proposes 10 new policy ideas to improve access, quality, and alignment in early education from preschool through the early elementary school years:

A new report from the Center for Education Policy looks at how 5 states are dealing with NCLB's requirements to "restructure" chronically low-performing schools. Under NCLB, schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress for at least five consecutive years are subject to restructuring. School districts must implement at least one of a menu of restructuring interventions in these schools. But the results of these interventions have been decidedly mixed. This year a record number of 3,500 schools nationally--about 7 percent of all Title I schools--are identified for restructuring. Based on in-depth analysis of what districts and schools are doing in these 5 states, CEP concludes that restructuring itself needs to be restructured.

CEP offers five recommendations for how restructuring should be restructured in the law:

Via David Hoff, my New America colleague Michael Dannenberg offers a useful insight: The politics of NLCB are more "top-down" than "left-right," meaning that the real divide of opinion on these policies is between federal- and state-level officials and policymakers who've led the charge in calling for increased standards and accountability, and local level educators (and the groups that represent them) who have to actually translate those demands into improve performance for kids.

It's an important point. NCLB often gets a bad rap for being a top-down reform, but the reality is that there's a real and important role for top-down reform in education--No one is very good is very good at holding themselves accountable, and educators are no exception. The legacy of different expectations, different resources, and different results for different populations of children bears this out. Pushing local level educators and policymakers to raise their expectations and to behave in ways that are more effective in producing results is an important part of what federal and state education policy reforms must do.

This week I'm participating in an online debate about the future of the No Child Left Behind Act at www.newtalk.org. Other participants include Chris Cerf, Checker Finn, Rick Hess, Ryan Hill, Philip Howard, Charles Kolb, Arthur Levine, Diane Ravitch, Thomas Rogers, Sol Stern, Gerald Tirrozi, Deborah Wadsworth, Jerry Wartgow, Randi Weingarten, and Deb White. Readers can also comment on the discussion, so come and check it out!