Learning from No Child Left Behind by Chubb John E.;

Author:Chubb, John E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press

If after all of these measures are employed to improve a school and it continues to fail schoolwide, as defined above, the school truly ought to be closed or changed fundamentally. There appears to be widespread agreement among policymakers that some schools are just too ineffective to ask students to attend them. When NCLB was passed, there was consensus that if, after all reasonable efforts to improve a school and raise achievement have been exhausted, a school is still not going in the right direction, a fundamentally new direction is needed.

The original law called this new direction restructuring and tried to specify reforms that would amount to fundamental change. Some of the approaches specified, such as converting a school to a charter and removing its governance from the school district, were and remain potentially fundamental. A new governing arrangement would likely yield very different decisions about how a school is staffed, what its education program should be, and how it should be run. If it were a charter, it would also have to worry about how to attract students and keep them enrolled, which might further encourage the school's improvement. Another NCLB restructuring option was contracting a school's management to a private company. This too has obvious potential to promote fundamental change. Like a charter board, a private manager would have latitude and incentive to make tough decisions and work aggressively for improvement.

Other restructuring options were vaguer, calling for unspecified program changes, staff changes, and measures tougher sounding than corrective action but little more. There is little formal research or data on the success of restructuring. But Department of Education oversight has identified restructuring compliance as a major area of concern. Clearly, some states have asked for relatively little of schools in restructuring while others have demanded more. The Department has recently sought to improve restructuring with regulations requiring states to demonstrate that their restructuring requirements are materially different from and tougher than their corrective action requirements. We applaud the Department for recognizing the problem, but we think this regulatory approach comes up short. It keeps the Department in the business of judging the adequacy of school improvement plans, for which it inherently has little capacity. These are local matters. It also imposes restructuring requirements on schools that may not be failing enough to warrant it.

Our solution is twofold. First, NCLB should be amended to incorporate differentiated consequences, as described above. Only schools failing to make AYP schoolwide for six consecutive years would face the ultimate sanction. This is a very long time to tolerate abject failure. There should be little dispute that such schools need fundamental reform.

Second, the restructuring reforms should leave little discretion as to what type of change NCLB requires. Restructuring is for those schools that have been unable to make the changes necessary, given a long period of time, to become schools worthy of students attending. Restructuring should do everything possible to ensure those difficult and long overdue changes get made. This is best accomplished by putting different people in charge of the schools or changing completely the people in the schools.

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