NCLB Waivers Should Not Be Unconditional: New Accountability Strategy Needed
As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) “is creating a slow-motion train wreck for children, parents and teachers.” This is due particularly to NCLB’s unrealistic, ineffective, punitive and harmful accountability requirements. States must bring virtually 100% of students to academic “proficiency” by 2014. Schools that fail to reach the increasingly high interim percentage targets for all groups of students are labeled failing. And if they fail for two or more consecutive years, they must implement escalating sanctions such as staff replacement, charter school conversions or state takeovers.
As the number of schools deemed failing skyrockets — already about 38,000 schools in 2009-10, projected to increase to about 85,000 of our 100,000 schools by 2014 — states object to the accountability system and lack the capacity to comply. Thus, absent overdue congressional action, many states support having the Secretary exercise his statutory authority to waive these requirements. He should.
But the waivers should not be unconditional. Our poor, minority, and other public school students, teachers, administrators and parents have already suffered enough from the years of misconceived NCLB-driven “school reform.” While NCLB’s specific accountability strategy has seriously failed to achieve its goal of raising all students to academic proficiency, the executive branch has a legal and moral responsibility to do whatever it lawfully can, through granting waivers or otherwise, to help achieve NCLB’s goals.
What is desperately needed is a new accountability strategy: not one, like NCLB, that continues to demand that schools dramatically raise student achievement and then abandons them to flail on their own. Instead, one that actually helps schools improve and students learn.
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- Will States Accept Duncan-Style Reforms for NCLB Relief?
- Duncan Denies Kansas’ AYP Waiver
- Kline Unhappy With Duncan’s Lack of Details on NCLB Waivers Plan
- Duncan: Federal Advocacy ‘Can Get in the Way’ of Common Standards
- NCLB Foe Releases Slew of Bills
