NCLB and PI background
Volume 12, Issue 6 - March 2008
In 2001, recently elected President George W. Bush kicked off the honeymoon phase of his administration with a plea for bipartisan cooperation. One of his first actions was calling for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), legislation created by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s to help struggling schools by giving them federal money. ESEA is regularly “tweaked” or reauthorized every few years, and Bush retooled the act and called it No Child Left Behind. The law was enacted in January 2002.
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| Leti Gutierrez, president of the Alum Rock Educators Association, led the fight against reconstitution in San Jose. |
CTA warned that this flawed legislation would hurt schools, and that under NCLB all Title I, low-income schools in the state would ultimately be declared failures and punished.
Now, six years later, a total of 2,208 schools and 96 districts and one county office in California are in Program Improve ment (PI) — or declared “failing” and subject to escalating sanctions — due to consecutive years of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Sanctions for schools in PI include restructuring, school closure, reconstitution (making staff reapply for their jobs), conversion to charter schools, takeovers by the state and ultimately a loss of all federal funding.
All significant subgroups of students based on race and income — including English learners and special education students — must be “proficient” and make AYP, based on standardized test scores. Under the law, the percentage of students that qualify as proficient is increased each year, and by 2014 all students must be proficient for a school to make AYP. This is interpreted by most educators as an impossible goal.
California’s test scores have been steadily improving, but NCLB only rewards proficiency, not growth. This is true even with astronomical growth, such as with a student who may be three grade levels behind at the beginning of the year and only one grade level behind in June. PI has hit California much harder than many other states, and not just because it has a high percentage of English learners and students living in poverty. California adopted “world-class standards” that were at the time the highest in the country, as opposed to other states that lowered their standards.
Under NCLB, each state was allowed to set its own standards of proficiency. Most states had not done so prior to NCLB passage, but California had already set the bar sky-high and couldn’t change its status.
According to the study The Proficiency Illusion by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, California’s standards are so high that tests aligned to those standards are harder to pass than tests in almost any other state. For this reason, more schools in California are subject to harsh sanctions under PI than in most other states.
To make matters worse, California has also experienced earlier sanctions than other states. The Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II/USP), with state rewards and sanctions, was enacted in 1999 and was in the process of being replaced in 2001 by the CTA-sponsored High Priority Schools Grant Program (HPSGP). HPSGP provided additional funds to schools in the lowest deciles of the state’s Academic Performance
Index (API), a growth model measuring achievement based on standardized testing.
Schools that accepted II/USP funds that failed to reach API targets were assigned a School Assistance and Intervention Team (SAIT), and were subject to sanctions based on the SAIT report, which are similar to PI sanctions and also include state takeover, school closure, charter conversion or reconstitution.
To date, the state has never taken over a school for reasons unrelated to fiscal mismanagement, and the federal government has not taken away Title I funding from any schools in California under NCLB — even schools in year 6 or more of PI. State and federal systems operate on different tracks, and there are no hard and fast rules for which system can enact sanctions first. But by virtue of having a statewide accountability system before NCLB was enacted, schools enter PI earlier in California than elsewhere.
For the 96 school districts and one county office currently in PI and subject to sanctions including state takeover, state officials are considering sending District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs) under NCLB to provide intervention and recommend improvements. A few DAIT programs are now operating in a few school districts as pilot projects.
Even though the federal government has never fully funded NCLB — in fact, the gap between what was promised and what’s been sent to states from 2002 to 2009 is $65.4 billion, $8.6 billion of it for California alone — the state is “currently looking for financial support from federal funds to contract with DAIT teams,” says Fred Balcom, one of the California Department of Education’s interim directors for accountability. “Money will be needed to contract with appropriate DAIT providers. All of this is on the table, and meetings are happening every day.”
When asked whether the state could afford to actually take over low-performing school districts — and what it would cost to do so — Balcom replied, “I think a lot of work needs to be done before the state would even consider a takeover. And there have certainly not been any discussions of what it would cost to take over a school district.”
Before the budget deficit was realized, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared 2008 to be the “Year of Education.” In his State of the State speech in early January he announced, “California will be the first state to use the powers given to us under No Child Left Behind to turn these [PI] districts around,” adding hat he would work with schools chief Jack O’Connell to help them improve. However, the governor is also threatening to cut $4.8 billion from education next year — which could seriously jeopardize academic progress that schools have already achieved.
Now ESEA is up for reauthorization once again, and CTA is working to change the law in a way that helps rather than hurts schools. Some U.S. representatives — including Nancy Pelosi and the law’s co-author George Miller — were pushing for changes that would have made the law worse instead of better, such as linking teacher pay to test scores. But thanks to the efforts of CTA and NEA members who tirelessly phoned legislators to oppose these measures under the slogan “Erase, Rewrite, Reauthorize,” reauthorization won’t happen until a new president is elected.
“Ultimately, we need to change this law so that it helps rather than punishes schools,” says Sanchez. “It’s obvious through its implementation that NCLB was really created with the goal of setting schools up to fail.”
