The “No Child Left Behind” act that President Bush signed last week isn’t going to improve Cheney’s name-recognition numbers any time soon. It won’t immediately get rid of third-rate principals or make sure your first grader knows how to read. But the $26 billion law, the most extensive education reform in more than three decades, is by almost all accounts a major step in the right direction. It’s also a big W on the scoreboard for Dubya, and a win for bipartisanship, too. “I told the folks in the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas, that Ted Kennedy is all right,” Bush said in Boston, with a beaming Kennedy at his side. “They almost fell out.” Don’t hold your breath waiting to see that quote in the Republican National Committee’s next direct-mail campaign.
I have no idea how much the politics of the education bill will help Bush politically; the Enron story certainly stepped on his victory parade. But the final bill does say something good about the ability of both parties to set aside a poisonous education debate and actually get something done. The shorthand for how that happened is “Only Nixon could go to China.” (History lesson for the 49 percent who can’t identify Cheney: in 1972 only an anti-communist like President Nixon could get away with opening relations with communist China.) Only a Democrat like Bill Clinton could get relativist liberal “educrats” to accept the idea of clearly defined standards, which he did in important 1994 legislation. And only a Republican like Bush could get conservatives to drop their demand for vouchers and sign off on a bill that will lead to 25 percent to 30 percent increases in federal aid to poor schools.
The focus of the bill is accountability, especially for reading. Instead of being tested haphazardly, every public-school student in grades three through eight will be tested every year by the state in reading and math. If a failing school doesn’t show improvement after two years, the system will force management changes and offer parents federal money for private tutoring. One essential reform goes by the clunky name “disaggregation.” It means that schools will have to separate out how various minority groups perform, instead of hiding their lagging test scores in larger averages. This will force even successful suburban districts to focus more on minority achievement, which should increase pressure to improve remedial classes across the board.
The huge bill is full of these information-is-power provisions, all for use as cudgels by parents and reform-minded educators. High schools, for instance, will be required to notify parents if a teacher is “out of field.” That means that you’ll be told if the gym coach assigned to teach your kid math doesn’t even have a bachelor’s degree in math or science.
Does the new law mean that schools will be teaching to the test? It’s a legitimate fear. Richard Riley, Clinton’s secretary of Education, supports the thrust of the bill, but favors a “midcourse correction” in the rush to assessment: “You have to leave room for teachers to be creative.” But by narrowing the range of assessments, the new law could actually subject many elementary schools to fewer standardized tests. “This may drive out the bad tests and replace them with better tests,” says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust.
Schools that flunk will no doubt seek waivers to evade the consequences of failure. This leaves state and federal officials who will implement the new law facing their own critical test: they must grant waivers where appropriate (for experi-mentation and local flexibility) and deny them for laggards just trying to buy some time.
The long and bitter “reading war” still rages, but it looks like there’s a victor. The bill effectively promotes “phonics” (sounding out words) and discredits “whole language” (absorbing good books by ear) as early reading-instruction techniques. This tilt is merited by the evidence. “There is only one set of proven reading programs, and they are phonics-based,” says Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform.
But even here there’s a sense of compromise afoot. Many teachers unions, long opposed to phonics, now acknowledge that it works best in the earliest grades and for getting problem readers started; phonics fanatics agree that all students must eventually learn to read for meaning and hear good books read aloud. Teachers themselves know that some combo works best. The danger is that the curiosity of early readers will be crushed under the new “phonic boom.” Then there’s the problem of tutors: the America Reads program has fewer than a third of the 100,000 volunteers it needs.
Now the action moves more to the state level. The Supreme Court will weigh in this spring when it reviews the constitutionality of an Ohio voucher plan. On funding, some states may move more toward the innovative Michigan model, which weans education off the property tax that traditionally funds most of it. Provisions to fire bad teachers–still the impossible dream in many states–should get a boost from the new bill, which is designed to make it easier to prove instructional incompetence. Meanwhile, the nation’s 2,500 charter schools (still less than 1 percent) remain too often hampered by regulations they were chartered to avoid. But they are providing competition to regular schools in many areas, spurring reform.
Does that make me a Pollyanna? (Good word for the kids to look up before bedtime.) Congress has more work to do, like helping states with money to reduce class size, fund pre-K, encourage “service learning” that gets kids helping others, fix the special-ed mess and repair crumbling buildings. But after all the grief we heap on them, let’s give the politicians an A-minus for effort and real improvement.
