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Illinois School Board Journal
January/February 2004

Correcting conclusions about the NCLB Act

by William Schewe

William Schewe is superintendent of School District 45, DuPage County.

The time has come for someone to correct the flaws and the incorrect conclusions drawn by the media and the public regarding the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

NCLB is federal legislation, signed into law in January 2002. One of its basic premises is to protect certain subgroups of the student population who continually score below the "meets" and "exceeds" categories on state assessment tests in reading and math when scores are reported for an entire district rather than by individual schools or by subgroup. The subgroups as defined by NCLB are: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, Low Income, Disabled (Special Education) and Limited English Proficient (LEP).

Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is a performance standard mandated by NCLB. In Illinois, AYP requires that in 2003 and 2004, 40 percent of the students in each subgroup must "meet" or "exceed" the state standards in reading and math for grades 3, 5 and 8 on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT). In subsequent years, that percentage will continue to rise by 7.5 percent per year until 100 percent is reached in 2014.

In the November 5, 2003, issues of the Arlington Heights Daily Herald and Chicago Tribune, the headlines read "Accept low test scores as a challenge" and "44 percent of state schools flunk tests." These headlines show how badly this law is misunderstood and some of the major flaws in the law.

The greatest NCLB flaws are:

• The LEP category is designed to promote failure rather than success. Once non-English speaking students become nearly proficient in English, schools move the students out of this category and into the regular population. As new students move in and English proficient students move out of the category, it is likely this group will continually achieve below the state standards because they don't understand English well enough to comprehend what they are reading.
• IMAGE is a test given in English to LEP students whose ability to understand the language is too low to take the ISAT. However, the students' scores from IMAGE, which was designed to measure how well the students could comprehend English, are now being added to the LEP category. Just to make sure that you understand how ridiculous this is, students who can't read English well enough to take the ISAT take IMAGE in English. Now, is there any doubt that they will not pass this test?
• The Disabled (Special Education) category is designed to promote failure rather than success as well. Although a number of the students in this category achieve at grade level, many students are below grade level and may never catch up. One of the goals of schools is to maximize the best learning environment for each of these students by providing them with opportunities to reach their full potential through an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). For these students, the ISAT is often not the appropriate instrument to measure their achievement, yet most Disabled students take the ISAT.
• The Illinois State Board of Education is spending $10 million to $12 million to develop new, NCLB-required assessment tests for reading and math in grades 3 through 8 beginning in 2006. This is a change from the current schedule, which requires testing in reading and math in grades 3, 5 and 8. Illinois is not alone. The federal law requires every state to test at these grade levels and meet Adequate Yearly Progress at 100 percent of achievement by 2014. Each state developed its own percentages to meet AYP. This results in a terrible waste of money, because no matter how large or small a state is, the cost of developing the tests is the same. In dollars and cents, this means that the 50 states are spending approximately $500 million developing new state tests to comply with NCLB when the U.S. Department of Education could have paid a fraction of that amount to develop one set of tests to be used by all the states. Since every state also develops its own set of standards for achievement, it is impossible to compare the assessment results from one state to another. What is the sense of having a federal law mandating achievement levels when the testing results are not comparable?
• The expectation that school performance will reach 100 percent in the "meets" and "exceeds" categories by 2014 is completely unrealistic. Such expectations can be categorized by the following analogies: All professional baseball players must attain a 300 batting average, and 100 percent of all adults will vote by 2014. We all know that neither of these things will ever happen. The same applies to the unrealistic achievement standard demanded by NCLB.
• The mandates set forth by NCLB are not fully funded by the federal government. Therefore, the financial burden falls on schools to fund additional programs and hire additional staff to support the growing number of second language learners, as well as to extend the school day and school year through after-school tutoring and summer school programs for students who are at risk of academic failure.

Criticism alone is never sufficient without suggestions for improvement. In addition to actively speaking to members of Congress and responding to inaccurate claims made in the press regarding concerns about NCLB, the following suggestions are offered for improvement:

• Eliminate LEP and Disabled from the subgroup categories for NCLB. The purpose of listing subgroups and requiring their scores to meet AYP is based on the supposition that schools don't pay enough attention to these subgroups in terms of dollars spent and extra time. There are no students in our school district who receive more individualized and extra attention than students in these two subgroups.
• Develop one national test and have one set of achievement standards. Then we can compare test results state to state where almost all of the students have taken the test.
• Use improvement gains as the criterion for the percentage of students who "meet" and "exceed" standards instead of a fixed percentage. For example, if a school has 50 percent of students in a subgroup who "meet" and "exceed," and the subgroup improves by 4 or 5 percent per year that would represent a substantial and satisfactory gain.

I am not saying, in principle, that the state testing program and NCLB are not worthwhile. It is necessary and useful to require state testing at some grade levels. But is requiring testing every year in grades 3 through 8 really worth the time and money?

The assessments our district has developed at the local level and used over the years give us far more useful information to improve teaching and learning. The suggestions provided here (and to members of Congress) would considerably improve some of the greatest of the flaws in NCLB and the resulting misinterpretation made by our newspapers, other members of the media and the general public.