NCLB Ratings Week

Jennifer Booher-Jennings' op-ed in today's Washington Post on the unfortunate incentives NCLB gives educators to focus on average students at the expense of the above-average and those who are really struggling may sound familiar to Education Sector and Washington Monthly readers, who were able to read an extended discussion of the problem here a year ago.

NCLB encourages teachers and principals to neglect large swaths of students because the law's drafters decided to judge schools on the basis of whether a sufficient percentage of their students cleared a statewide test score hurdle once a year, rather than on the basis of how much schools educate each student over the course of a school year (which presumabely is what parents and taxpayers want to know). This is in-the-eduweeds stuff, but the point is that the single-score method incentivizes schools to focus on kids who score close to state standards, because such kids are going to be a lot easier to get over the bar than kids who can barely read and write. (In theory, schools will have to focus on these kids by 2014, when NCLB requires 100 percent of students to meet state standards--but loopholes in the law will allow schools to continue to ignore at least some of these kids). Nor are kids who cruise over the bar worth focusing on; schools don't get any credit for raising their scores, even though they represent more than half the kids in many school systems.

I don't like making educators out to be cynics, caring only about the kids who will help them keep their reputations and, ultimately, their jobs. Many teachers obviously care deeply about all their students. But educators are rational people and the logic of NCLB is pretty clear--it's the kids near the bar, those who score near state standards, who are going to provide the biggest returns on tutoring and othe investments, because schools only have to raise their scores slightly to get them over the reading and math bars and thus help educators avoid the consequences of failing to meet NCLB's performance expectations--consequences that ultimately include losing their jobs.

All this matters because NCLB's school-rating system is at the core of the law's effort to raise student achievement. Encouraging schools to help students at the expense of others (including the neediest students) isn't exactly good public policy--or smart politics.

The solution to NCLB's wrong-headed school-rating incentives is to expect schools to increase every student's achievement every school year, a so-called value-added method of rating schools. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings earlier this year allowed North Carolina and Tennessee to begin rating schools this way. If NCLB's reauthorizers are smart, they will ensure that in the near future every other state has the capacity to do the same.