Giving the Game Away

The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized as creating "perverse incentives" or "unintended consequences" whereby seemingly virtuous policies inadvertently cause more harm than good by incenting bad behavior. It's a convenient man-bites-policy-dog way to frame a news story, and it allows people to preface denunciations of the law with some variant of "Of course I agree with the goals of the NCLB, but..." I've always been puzzled that educators are so quick to argue from the assumed moral weakness of their colleagues, taking as a given that teachers and administrators are bound by various made-up laws of human behavior that compel them to sell little Johnny down the river at the first opportunity. 

That said, the general principle is sound: education is complex and multi-dimensional and accountability systems should reflect that. Incentives should be aligned with goals; if they're not, problems can arise. There's a longstanding concern, for example, that holding high schools accountable for student learning will create incentives for schools to "push out" low-performing students by implicitly or expliciting encouraging them to leave. The solution seems pretty obvious: hold high schools accountable for graduation rates, reducing the temptation to engage in devious push-out behavior. Shut down the easy way out. 

Unfortunately, the high school graduation provisions in NCLB as written are pretty much a joke, allowing many states to adopt insane metrics that bear little or no resemblence to the actual percent of students graduating from high school and/or creating improvement timelines so attentuated that schools wouldn't have to get all students through high school until roughly the launch date of the Starship Enterprise. So the U.S. Department of Education took two eminently reasonable steps by require all states to (1) adopt a common standard of "high school graduation rate" whereby those words actually mean what they say, and (2) create improvement timelines that don't theoretically terminate in the next millenium. 

This would go along way toward solving whatever perverse "push-out" incentives currently exist. It also reflects the explicit policy of nearly every state in the nation, as expressed by their governors in a recent agreement. Naturally, the National Governor's Association supports this policy is working to eviscerate this policy while people are distracted during the upcoming transition. As Charlie Barone reports: 

A reliable source tells us that the NGA is lobbying the Obama transition team to roll back the regulation issued by Secretary Spellings in October that requires states to set a uniform and accurate method for measuring high school graduation rates. Spellings simply put in regs what the Governors themselves pledged to do more than three years ago. However, only 16 states so far have done so.

NGA has targeted a key member of the education transition team to carry their water for them and has been pressing hard, but it is not entirely clear whether the targeted person is helping them.

High school graduation rates represent a useful clarifying issue. There is no doubt that all students need to graduate from high school. There is no doubt that many students don't, and that poor and minority students are less likely to graduate than others. There is no earthly reason why the method for calculating high school graduation rates should vary from state to state, or that it should be anything other than "of those students who begin high school, the percent who graduate." If you're against meaningful accountability for a common high school graduation rate standards, then you're simply against accountability and common standards, period, full stop.