Fear of Failure

Fear is pulsing through the country's public schools, an unintended consequence of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the law setting performance targets based on standardized tests. Principals and teachers fear the stigma attached to schools when test scores fall short. Students fear not knowing the answers on the new exams. Parents worry they might lose schools they believe are effective.

The law sets a specific, aggressive goal for public schools, and ties high stakes to test scores. Children in grades three to eight must be tested each year, and high school students at least once, in reading and math. By 2014, 100 percent of students tested must demonstrate grade-level proficiency. Schools also must meet interim targets for "adequate yearly progress" toward that goal, and ensure that 95 percent of students take the exam. Schools that receive federal funds for educating low-income children-roughly half of all public schools-will lose control of some of that money if they don't meet all the requirements. More than a quarter of schools nationwide failed to make adequate progress last year, according to the nonpartisan Center for Education Policy.

"There's a fear among some teachers and principals that the ultimate goal of No Child Left Behind cannot be reached," says Raymond Simon, the Education Department's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. He is Education's go-to guy for implementing the law. "Sometimes that fear of not being able to meet this goal turns into anger." Brian Flynn, principal of Rowlett Elementary School in southwest Florida's Manatee County, is more worried than angry. He hasn't seen the numbers yet, but he's fairly sure his school will not meet the standards this year, for the second year in a row. Because 65 percent of Rowlett students come from low-income families, the school received about $400,000 in federal funds this year. But the Manatee County district has warned him to expect about $70,000 less next year if Rowlett and other district schools are labeled "in need of improvement."

The money isn't exactly a penalty. It will go to pay for interventions required by the law. If Rowlett misses its targets for proficiency this year, it will have to send letters to parents offering their children transportation to a better-performing school. The district will use a portion of Rowlett's federal funds-no one knows yet how much-to cover transportation for each child whose parents request it.

From where Flynn sits, it's hard to see a way to get back on target and safeguard Rowlett's federal funds. The bar rises next year from 38 percent of students passing the math exam to 53 percent, and from 31 percent passing in reading to 48 percent. The sanctions for missing those targets increase, too. If Rowlett doesn't meet next year's goals, it will have to give students the option of using federal money to pay for after-school tutoring. If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for five years, the law says the state must restructure it, which could include bringing in an entirely new staff, closing the school, converting it to a charter school, or some other major overhaul.

UNITS OF MEASUREMENT

"One thing that has been horribly misunderstood about No Child Left Behind is that while it's revolutionary, it's also evolutionary," says Laurie Rich, Education's assistant secretary for intergovernmental and interagency affairs. The law is the latest reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal guidelines for education. Title I of the law provides funding for schools in high poverty areas. Under the previous version, President Clinton's 1994 Improving America's Schools Act, states were supposed to design systems by which they would hold schools accountable for student performance, but Education did not enforce that measure, and by 2000 only 11 states had accountability systems in place.

Never before has the Education Department had so much responsibility for making sure children learn. Critics say the law takes away too much local control. "This is the most intrusive federal law in terms of what actually goes on in classrooms that we've ever had," says Daniel Kaufman, a spokesman for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. On a more practical level, it poses logistical challenges. The department can't conduct a qualitative review of each child's learning. That's far too messy. It needs data-crunchable numbers, measurements, benchmarks. Under the new law, statisticians have become some of the most important people in education policy. They help predict the numeric outcomes of seemingly endless variables, such as subgroup sizes and confidence intervals.

Numbers tell important truths. Thanks to the new law, they tell us not just how well a school's entire student body performs on a state assessment, but also the scores of subgroups such as low-income children, kids with learning disabilities, those with limited English proficiency, and minority children. The law requires states to isolate the scores for each subgroup to ensure they meet the same targets as the overall student population. Another provision says districts and schools must release report cards on how they measured up on the test. "The beauty of No Child Left Behind is its transparency," says Education's Rich. "Parents and taxpayers and business folks and community leaders, they ought to know what's going on in their schools and in their classrooms because you can't fix anything if you don't know."

But statistics don't always present the whole picture. "Hard data is an illusion when you talk about the lives of kids," says Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen. "When we're measuring math and assuming that it's a proxy for that kid and who that kid is, what their potential is, how they feel about themselves, what they understand about the world-that is just crazy."

The law isn't aimed directly at students. Its standards apply to schools and school districts. The law sets a minimum standard and measures schools by the percentage of students meeting that standard. It gives no incentives for high-achieving students or penalties for children who haven't learned their lessons. It only offers sanctions for schools that don't meet the minimum requirement. "As long as you keep [students] one inch above proficient, then you can ignore them," says Patricia Sullivan, deputy executive director of the division of advocacy and strategic alliances for the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Neither does the law measure student progress. Instead, it measures what percentage of students can pass an exam on a certain date, and doesn't track what happens to individual kids over time. It doesn't matter if a great teacher has helped a student go from not reading at all to reading just below grade level. What matters is whether the student passes the test.

"I think the biggest fear teachers have is that they're going to be judged based on which students they have in their class that year. We're seeing more and more reluctance to have students with difficulties placed into a teacher's class," says Raymond Timothy, an assistant secretary of education in Utah who nevertheless is optimistic about the law. A group of 14 state superintendents sent a proposal to Education Secretary Rod Paige in March suggesting a "growth model," which would give schools credit for improving each student's performance, as an alternative for measuring school performance.

The goals that Rowlett Elementary struggled to reach this year sound easy. Shouldn't schools get at least a third of their students to perform at grade level? If a school can't do that, then shouldn't it be shut down? But Rowlett is in good company; 84 percent of Florida schools fell short of the goals last year, in part because the state chose to set high standards to mesh with the accountability plan it already had in place. "We have no plans to lower our standards just to look better under No Child Left Behind," says Frances Marine, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education.

Rowlett has many low-income youth, children with learning disabilities and minority children. In all, it had two dozen targets to meet-scores in reading and math and participation rates for seven subgroups plus the majority-and failing to meet just one standard has the same consequences as missing all 24. Rowlett students whose disabilities put them in the category of "educable mentally handicapped" (those with IQs between 55 and 70) had to take the same test as their nonhandicapped peers. Many cried. Some tore, threw or balled up their exams. One boy misunderstood, and filled in nearly every answer bubble. It's fair to ask how much their scores reveal about Rowlett's performance. What's more, Rowlett is a magnet school. "Two-thirds of our parents are here because they've chosen to be here," Flynn says. "My parents are saying there's no way they're going to take their children out of the school because this is exactly the kind of education they want."

School administrators not only fear the law's consequences, they fear misinterpreting it. Flynn, for example, isn't sure whether, should Rowlett again miss its performance targets this year, he will have to offer transportation to better-performing schools to students whose families are not considered low-income, since the money for transportation is supposed to come out of federal funds intended for disadvantaged children. And what about students who chose to attend Rowlett? Should they get the offer to go elsewhere? "This is a really bad game of telephone," says Mary Kusler, a senior legislative specialist with the American Association of School Administrators. "The feds will not necessarily talk to the districts. They want to talk to the states. Then the states talk to the locals. By the time the locals hear what the feds had intended, it's completely different. What you get is a totally different interpretation of a ruling state by state by state."

The law has posed countless challenges for the Education Department, but "the biggest challenge is misinformation," says Education's Rich. "I've had principals call and say, 'We're being told we have to fire all our paraprofessionals,' " she says, though that is not one of the law's requirements. Critics blame the department for misinformation. Some states soon may have to restructure schools, but the department has yet to issue guidelines on what restructuring means. Many administrators remain uncertain about which students with learning disabilities can be tested on alternate standards.

The department continues to work on making the law easier to understand. After realizing that superintendents had questions that state offices couldn't always answer, Education officials set up a hot line. They also have brought groups of superintendents, teachers and principals to Washington to help clarify and disseminate information on policies. Teams of Education officials practically live on the road, explaining the law and listening to the concerns of state and local stakeholders. But the questions keep coming. Almost every school has some special problem-a child who doesn't quite fit into the categories or a teacher they'd like to hire whose credentials may not match up with federal requirements-and state officials don't always know whether they have the authority to interpret the law.

WORKING TOGETHER

Perhaps the most significant difference between the 1994 law and No Child Left Behind Act is that the latter puts strings on Title I funds, which are doled out based on census data and poverty indicators. Specific as it is, No Child Left Behind does not lay out all of the details that states must use to determine which schools need intervention. Instead, it established a framework that would make some allowances for existing accountability plans, local laws and culture, and other state-by-state variations. Each state plays by a different set of rules-some so different they're hard to recognize as interpretations of the same law. Education acts as the referee. The law says, for example, that schools must administer grade-level exams. But states set their own grade levels, choose their own tests and decide which skills match up with each grade level.

In setting up new No Child Left Behind accountability plans, states negotiated the fine print with Education officials. The result was 52 sets of regulations, one for each state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, created between January and June in 2003. Nebraska has the most unusual approach. It uses portfolio-based assessments-in which student progress is measured in numerous ways over the course of the school year-rather than a standardized test, and Nebraska Education Commissioner Christensen has become a minor hero in education policy circles for convincing Education to approve the plan.

Most differences among accountability plans are more technical-but the details can determine the number of schools that don't make adequate yearly progress. Take subgroup size, for example. In Maryland, schools need only five children in any of the subgroup categories in order to count their test scores separately as one of the performance targets. The smaller the subgroup, the more targets a school must meet to make adequate yearly progress. Other states have minimum subgroup sizes of 50 or more. The degree of flexibility each state negotiated depended on the order in which it appeared before the Education Department. The first states got the least wriggle room, and the last benefited from the deals struck by those that preceded them. "It almost started to look like there was a race to be last," says Sullivan of the state school officers council. Degrees of flexibility also depended on how much data states could provide.

Now that states have seen how many schools made adequate progress in the first year, some are adjusting-increasing the number of children that constitutes a subgroup or averaging participation rates over three years-and running the numbers to see which and how many schools would pass in the latest scenarios. The department also has made adjustments. Since December, it has issued four new guidelines that give states added flexibility, for example, allowing more severely disabled students to have proficiency measured by an alternative set of standards and relaxing the rules for testing students with limited English. "I admire them for trying to figure out areas of flexibility in the law," Sullivan says. While it likes to tout the flexibility it gives to states, though, Education denies some states' requests for changes it says soften the law too much. Some state officials are frustrated by Education's new enforcement role. "This is not a partnership," Nebraska's Christensen says. "We sling arrows back and forth at each other through the media."

PASS OR FAIL

About 28 percent of schools nationwide failed to make adequate progress last year, according to research conducted by the Center on Education Policy, a group in Washington that advocates strong public education. Among them were schools named in recent years as Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence by the Education Department. Some of these surely will buckle down and get more children to pass tests next year. Others will benefit from changes to state plans. As the targets climb higher and higher, though, more schools likely will fail to reach them.

Nevertheless, Education's Simon wants teachers and principals to stop being afraid. "It can be done," he says. "Let's find teachers that are doing this now. We can go all over the country and find instances of teachers who have narrowed the achievement gap that some say can't be narrowed. Students are being taught that some schools say can't be taught."

Education launched an initiative to bring teachers to workshops where they can learn from teachers who have had success in meeting the act's goals. Simon wants to strengthen professional development. "Teachers should not fear that the mission can't be accomplished," he says. "We need to relieve that and give them whatever support they need to make that happen."

But the mandate to get 100 percent of students to grade level looms, casting its shadow longest across schools that have many subgroups. A survey conducted by Public Agenda, a research group in Washington, found that 31 percent of superintendents call the law "a disguised effort to attack and destroy public education." One resp0ndent wrote: "I'm a Republican, but I tell you, I see No Child Left Behind as a way to render public schools almost at an impossible expectation to perform so that you can get vouchers into the system." Kory Holdaway, a special education teacher and a Utah state legislator, would like to believe Simon. "I would love to be able to tell you, 'Yes, if we had enough money we could bring all students up to grade level,' " he says. "Unfortunately, their physical abilities are going to impede that."