Leaving Birmingham Behind

People have their differences of opinion about No Child Left Behind, but even the law's supporters would concede that it sets extremely ambitious goals for improvement. NCLB requires states to establish a series of escalating performance targets for schools and districts, rising from wherever they were when the law was enacted in 2002 to 100 percent proficiency by 2014--a pace and scope of improvement without precedent in American history. Everyone knows this to be true.

But it's not.

While the law was written to raise performance targets every year, in many states the actual standards for schools to make "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, have gotten easier every year, because Congress made the mistake of allowing state departments of education to annually alter the definition of AYP. Every year since the law was enacted, the 51 state departments of education have, en masse, submitted hundreds of requests to the U.S. Department of Education to water down their accountability systems. Some were rejected but--inevitably, due to political and bureaucratic pressures--some were approved.

The end result, five years and counting into NCLB, is that objectively, abjectly failing school distrticts like Birmingham, Alabama are making AYP, even as the district is hemorrhaging students and money, even as students in most grades and most subgroups fail to meet NCLB proficiency standards. Nearly half a century after bombs and protests in Birmingham helped catalyze the civil rights movement, Birmingham is failing poor black students on every dimension except NCLB. And this isn't unusual--the same is true in states and cities across the nation.

To read the whole sorry tale, see this report by yrs. truly released today by Education Sector.

Update: While the report focuses on the Alabama and Birmingham story, it contains ratings for all 50 states, and for the second year in a row it singled out Wisconsin for special scrutiny. Alan Borsuk of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who's one of the best state education journalists out there, and I say that not just because he covered our report, covers the Wisconsin angle here.