For all the criticism it has faced, former President George W. Bush's landmark education law, No Child Left Behind, forced the nation to come to grips with the idea that schools should be held accountable for success and failure, that bad schools should not be allowed to continue operating as if nothing was wrong, that achievement gaps between racial or socioeconomic groups are unacceptable and that quality teachers are crucial to academic success.
The problem with the law was not its basic concept or goals but the unintended consequences of its methods. We wound up with dumbed-down standards as states sought to maximize the number of students who met them; an obsessive focus on teaching to reading and math tests to the exclusion of other subjects; over-reliance on what kind of academic degrees teachers have rather than on their actual effectiveness; and an oversimplifed pass-fail system of measuring schools that failed to give parents or policymakers a good idea of which schools are working and which aren't.
President Barack Obama's approach to fixing the law rightly appears focused on retaining the goals of NCLB but refining the methods.
Under the president's plan, which has been developed in months of bipartisan discussions, a small fraction of schools at the top would get rewards and incentives. A small percentage of schools at the bottom would get intense federal intervention, such as a requirement that they close, replace most of their staffs or reconstitute themselves under independent management or replace the principal. But the vast majority of reasonably well-functioning schools in the middle would see greater flexibility for figuring out how to make progress.
The concept of simply measuring whether students are performing at grade level would be replaced with a measure of how much progress individual students are making. That way, a school that takes poorly performing students and brings their achievement up would look better than a school that takes great students and treads water. Teachers' effectiveness would be judged not by their qualifications but on the progress their students make. Standardized tests would still be important, but schools could add more subjects besides math and reading to the mix.
And in what may be the biggest change, the billions in federal Title I grants that now go automatically to schools with large populations of poor students would instead by apportioned based on schools' wilingness to adopt reforms.
The effort ties in with a movement by 48 states, of which Maryland is a leader, to develop a common set of curriculum standards. The idea flies in the face of the long tradition of local control of education but recognizes the increasingly interconnected world in which we live and the difficulty of competing in a global marketplace.
Teachers unions are already blasting the idea, but their focus remains primarily on protecting the adults in the school system, not ensuring the best outcomes for the children. And Republicans in Congress have criticized the proposal for retaining too heavy a federal hand in education.
But here in Baltimore, we have seen the progress that can be made by demanding accountability, embracing reform and providing flexibility in how to achieve our educational goals. The same has been true in New Orleans, where the school system was rebuilt from scratch after Hurricane Katrina. It is only by encouraging those kinds of efforts that we can assure that no child will be left behind.