Secretary Spelllings Adds Value

There was a landmark event in the history of American education yesterday. Secretary Spellings announced that she is going let North Carolina and Tennessee change the way they rate their schools under NCLB. With that seemingly unremarkable bureaucratic declaration, Spellings set in motion a fundamental shift in education policy that stands, in time, to dramatically improve the nation's public education system.

In their desire to encourage schools to improve by linking sanctions to school performance, NCLB's drafters embraced a crude system of measuring school performance because it was the only system available that could be put in place in every state at the time. It tested students once a year and held schools accountable for having a sufficient percentage of students in various subgroups pass the tests. Unfortunately (and ironically), that snapshot system didn't measure how much schools were teaching students over the course of a school year. It was (and is) a school-performance system that didn't (doesn't) measure school performance. To actually measure how much school were teaching students, schools would need to compare individual students' scores at the beginning and then again at the end of a school year.

That, in effect, is what Spellings has permitted Tennessee and North Carolina to do. The result is that parents, educators, and policymakers alike in those two states stand to get school-rating systems that they can trust and that will give educators stonger incentives to improve the education of all students.

Skeptics of the so-called growth, or value-added, rating systems that Spellings approved yesterday worry that such systems could result in schools getting credit for educating low-achieving students to lower standards. Schools, they reason, could improve test scores but students entering school performing at very low levels could still not meet state standards. Spelling required that students eventually meet state standards uner the newly approved value-added plans. That provision helped win over value-added skeptics and liberal activists like Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and William Taylor of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, who sat on the review panel that Spellings created to vet the states' plans. The panel, and Spellings, rejected over a dozen other applications from states that lacked the infrastructure they needed, or that sought to use very different types of growth models to weaken rather than strengthen NCLB's accountability provisions.

North Carolina and Tennessee are among the few states that currently have the sophisticated student-tracking systems needed to create value-added school-rating systems. But many other states are building the same capacity and the prospect of every state using the promising new rating systems that North Carolina and Tennessee are pioneering is increasingly real. Spellings could speed the process by giving states financial incentives to catch up to their Southern brethern.