NCLB letter

A letter I sent off a few days ago:

With the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) looming, I’m wretched to report we’re doing our part here in Tennessee to subvert the good intentions—to hold states and schools accountable for student performance–of the No Child Left Behind Act. Ever since its enactment in 2002, Tennessee schools, as well as other schools throughout the nation, have engaged in a race to lower educational standards.

One key flaw with NCLB was to require “improvement” in high school graduation rates without defining specific, minimum, reasonable requirements for graduation. One particularly disheartening result of this omission: high schools are setting lower requirements for students to graduate, in order to obtain yearly progress in reaching the ultimate 2013-2014 school-year goal of 90 percent graduation.

In the high school at which I teach, we are currently graduating 80.1% of our students, which is well below the 90 percent 2013-2014 goal. So, for the school district to demonstrate yearly progress and ultimately reach this goal, we must either become better instructors, find or develop more motivated students, or find a loophole. Since the first two options are difficult, and would require significant effort to actually improve student achievement, which is the intent of NCLB, we have decided to go with option three: find a loophole, which happens to be the option opted for in school districts throughout the country, and it is a perfectly legitimate practice under NCLB.

Before NCLB, for instance, the high schools in our local school district required 28 credits to graduate. This school year, after failing to meet yearly progress in our graduation rate, our school board, only reacting to poorly-designed legislation, decided to offer the Tennessee High School Diploma, a 21-credit diploma that counts in calculating our graduation rate; this is occurring statewide in Tennessee. So next year, having adopted this lower standard, we will certainly show significant yearly progress in our graduation rate. Only in government are lower standards and lower student achievement regarded and reported as progress.

Some elements of NCLB, such as the graduation requirement of 90 percent nationwide, are not based on reality; instead they’re based on political visions, which are often well intentioned and intended to warm the hearts of voting constituents on the campaign trail. Do a significant number of political leaders really care if NCLB is resulting in lower educational standards and lower student achievement as long as there is an illusion of improvement? After all, politicians don’t really make educational decisions; they make political decisions.

I for one prefer to confront realty, not to continue a façade that is leaving our children behind on the worldwide educational stage. The graduation rate requirement of 90% is a noble, lofty objective; it is, however, also based on hope, not reality. And as Thomas Sowell has said, “Reality is not optional.”

Any time a goal is predicated on hopes rather than reality, perverse incentives are created. Consider that graduation rates reflect the percentage of people willing and capable of meeting some minimum standard, and by definition of the Bell Curve, 50 percent are below average, so it seems reasonable that graduation rate requirements of 90% are unattainable, unless standards are low. Therefore, the incentive created is to lower standards, since reality does not permit 90 percent of students to be at or above a reasonable average.

NCLB, which seeks to hold schools accountable for student performance, has done the opposite and created perverse incentives, which have undermined student achievement. Unfortunately, real reform that could work, such as a well-designed voucher program, is politically dead considering the influence of the teacher’s unions, so let us all encourage Congress to change NCLB to reflect reality and establish some minimum nationwide standard for graduation.

This entry was posted on November 30, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under General post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.