Centennial Place, Atlanta, Georgia

In Centennial Place Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia, Principal Cynthia Kuhlman says she hardly thinks about NCLB’s accountability goals. “AYP is not good enough for us,” is what she says. Centennial Place educates more than 500 students, 90 percent of whom are African-American and two-thirds of whom are from low-income families and has been one of the top schools in the state in academic achievement for several years running. Centennial Place students learn mostly through projects, turning a classroom into a plane for a trip to Africa in one lesson, building a tundra out of cake and ice cream for another. “The best way to do well on the test is to teach the standards in an exciting way,” says Principal Kuhlman.

Centennial Place is also very strategic about analyzing test results and feeding them in to a continuous improvement process. Last year, they noticed that students with disabilities were lagging, although still above Georgia’s AYP targets. Listen to how Principal Kuhlman responded: “We took it to heart. We went through a period where we didn’t acknowledge that our special education students weren’t doing well. No Child Left Behind helped us focus.”  The result? In 2005, 87 percent of students with disabilities met or exceeded standards in math, and 85 percent in reading. Centennial Place is not just a good school for poor, urban students. It is a good school that any of us would be lucky to have for our own children.

Granger High School, Yakima Valley, Washington

Another example comes from the rural Yakima Valley in Washington State. Granger High School educates mostly Latino (82%) and Native American (6%) students, most of whom (84%) come from low-income families. In 2001, Granger scores on Washington’s test were near the bottom: 20 percent of students were proficient in reading, 11 percent in writing, and just 4 percent in math. Principal Richard Esparza has worked every way he knows how to turn around the culture of low expectations and serious discipline problems throughout the school. Every teacher is asked to advise students and every teacher is asked to make home visits. When teachers don’t want to go these extra miles, Esparza has a practiced speech where he offers to write them recommendations to find other jobs. But nothing is going to get in the way of his helping students succeed. The results: In 2005, 61 percent of students were proficient in reading, 51 percent in writing, and 31 percent in math.

All of this progress was accomplished while the graduation rate has dramatically increased, and at a time when Washington State tightened definitions for calculating graduation rates. Still, Granger did not make AYP last year. Esparza knows why and he’s focusing on more improvements. His feeling about NCLB? “I love it,” he says, “It has to happen if our nation is going to be competitive.” While the law needs to be tweaked, Esparza is emphatic: “Hold schools accountable. Don’t let schools like mine off the hook.”

These schools – like many others that my colleagues and I know and work with in every part of the country – aren’t grumbling about NCLB, but instead are thinking deeply about how to make sure their students learn what they need. This is not easy or simple work, but the dedicated professionals in these schools know that they are providing children with the single best way to secure a place in our economic, civic and cultural mainstream. If you want to understand just how complex it is, you can read detailed profiles of these and other successful schools at www.achievementalliance.org.
 
As important as it is to focus on schools in high-poverty areas, NCLB has served another equally important purpose. It is shining a bright light on previously invisible students in our suburbs and small towns. Students of color and poor students have languished in many affluent and middle class districts, while success was measured only by the performance of top students or based solely on overall averages. In yesterday’s New York Times, Samuel Freedman wrote eloquently about the struggle for equity in Princeton, New Jersey – a highly educated, highly affluent district that didn’t make AYP because of low achievement among African-American students – an achievement gap that has been acknowledged but somehow not closed for years. Freedman reports that Black parents credit NCLB with finally focusing attention on their struggle, and finally making the school district pay attention to their children.

What Needs to Happen Next?

There is no question that NCLB has focused teachers and education leaders all over the country on improving outcomes and closing achievement gaps. But we are a long way from translating this increased focus into increased student achievement at all levels and all schools: Middle school reading achievement nationally has not been improving as much as mathematics, and overall achievement in high schools has been stagnant or declining in many states, even as achievement gaps grow wider. It is clear we need more attention from policymakers, more resources, and more effective strategies for improving secondary schools.

Moreover, while there was some good news in lower and middle grades from the NAEP long-term trend assessment data released earlier this year, we can not fairly attribute this progress specifically to NCLB. In about a month or so, the new Main NAEP results will allow us to look much more precisely at whether the focus from NCLB has actually helped to improve achievement nationwide.

While we will all hope for more good news when NAEP results are released, we already know that there’s much more work that needs to be done. One of the most pressing issues is to provide more help to the schools that are not meeting accountability goals under NCLB. While there are a lot of schools that are focused on improving, some schools are struggling with the challenges in ways that are not constructive.

Teaching to Test: Not Inevitable, Not Advisable

Chief among the concerns are that some schools are responding to the challenges by resorting to rote teaching, obsessive test preparation, or narrowing of the curriculum. These responses are neither inevitable nor wise. In fact, in all of my travels and all of my research, I have never come across a high-performing school that was inordinately focused on “drill and kill” or test-prep strategies. High-poverty schools where students are excelling tend to be the most dynamic, creative, engaging learning environments I come across.

Many struggling schools don’t have the staff expertise or external support to raise achievement. That’s how they became struggling schools in the first place! The counter-productive responses to new assessments and accountability that no one supports are the actions of educators who desperately want to do better, but simply lack the capacity, know-how and resources to do what experience tells us works best. And they don’t get the help they need, at least in part because when central school district offices, state departments, and even the U.S. Department of Education were established, they were not designed to assist low-performing schools. We need to build that capacity, and quickly.

Offering more expert help to the schools that have not made AYP will cost money. Congress could advance these efforts by funding the school improvement grants in section 1003(g) of the No Child Left Behind Act, which are in the statute but have never been funded. Funding section 1003(g) at authorized levels would double the federal investment in the school improvement process and would provide critical help where it is needed the most.

We at the Education Trust work with lots of low-performing schools that need help to use their resources more effectively, and helping schools identify ineffective practices and implement more effective instructional strategies should be a focus of section 1003 (g) funds. But we also see that many of these schools need more resources. Nowhere is their need more acute than with respect to teacher quality.

Teacher Quality

Despite knowing the importance of teacher quality, especially for students with little support for education outside of school, and despite all of the lofty language and public commitments to closing the achievement gap, we systematically assign our most vulnerable students to our least qualified, least experienced teachers. When there are shortages, poor and minority students get out-of-field teachers; as teachers accrue valuable experience, they often transfer into -- and are paid more to teach in -- the most affluent schools. So high-poverty and high-minority schools tend to have a harder time recruiting quality teachers, and then serve as a revolving door for the novice teachers they help train.

Congress knew very well that teachers are the most important factor in education, and also recognized the significant problems in teacher quality and distribution. By including major teacher quality provisions in NCLB, Congress brought federal policy in-line with what research documents is the most important issue in raising student achievement and closing gaps.

The teacher quality provisions in NCLB embody three basic principles:

- First, all students are entitled to qualified teachers who know their subjects.

- Second, parents deserve information on their children’s teachers and the qualifications of teachers in their schools.

- Finally, NCLB recognizes that states, school districts and the national government have a special responsibility to ensure that poor and minority students get their fair share of qualified, experienced teachers.

Congress increased funding for teacher quality initiatives by 50 percent (from $2 billion to $3 billion each year), targeted the money to high-poverty school districts, and gave local officials nearly unfettered discretion to spend the money in ways that were tailored to local circumstances. School districts could offer expanded professional development to teachers who weren’t yet highly qualified and offer bonuses or other incentives in their hardest to staff schools.

What’s happened with all the new money and all the new focus on teacher quality? No one knows.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education has not actively implemented the teacher quality provisions. For the first two and half years after NCLB was enacted, the Department refused to exert any authority at all over the states’ implementation. The Department did not ask for and did not review state definitions or plans. Guidance from the Department has been erratic and inconsistent -- both across states and over time.

Take the straightforward issue of accountability for the teacher quality provisions. The consequences of failing to meet the teacher quality goals are spelled out in section 2141 of the law. Despite the clarity of these provisions, persistent rumors suggest that teachers will lose their jobs if they don’t meet their state’s “highly qualified” definition, and that school districts will lose federal funds if they do not meet the goals. Nothing in the statute authorizes or even suggests these Draconian consequences, but the U.S. Department of Education has not seen fit to dispel these misunderstandings. It is inexplicable that the Department has not been able to clarify the most rudimentary issues with respect to the teacher quality provisions.

What we are left with is a bold policy initiative from Congress that has never seen the light of day. Billions of dollars in new federal money have been poured into teacher quality initiatives with no federal oversight. This vacuum of federal action has allowed states to game the system, making compliant states look bad and conniving states look good. Most states have taken advantage of the Department’s lax enforcement to report that almost all classes already are taught by highly qualified teachers, even in the highest poverty schools. This despite years of research about grave shortages in certain subjects, such as secondary math and science.

Even more disturbing has been inaction on the inequitable distribution of teacher talent. Congress required each state to develop a plan to measure and address the disproportionate assignment of unqualified, inexperienced, and out-of-field teachers to poor and minority students. The Department has never issued regulations or guidance detailing what those plans should include, nor have they ever asked states to produce such plans, or even reminded states of these obligations.

These provisions are critically important for closing the achievement gap and for fulfilling our fundamental obligation of equality in opportunity. But for all intents and purposes, these provisions have been interpreted out of the law. Through a grant from the Joyce Foundation, we are working with three Midwestern states, and the three biggest cities in these states, to measure and address the distribution of teacher quality. With the help of researchers at Illinois Education Research Council, we have recently shared data with policymakers in Illinois that documents the striking disparities in access to teacher quality based on poverty and race. We are finding that we need to initiate a process that Congress required more than three years ago, but that has been ignored. And the states with whom we are working may be among those who are dealing most proactively with the problems of inequitable distribution of teacher quality -- in many other states, they have yet to even acknowledge the disparities in access, let alone craft a plan to address the problems.

Supplemental Services

NCLB requires schools that miss goals for three or more years to offer tutoring to low-income students, referred to under the law as “supplemental services.” These services are paid for by school districts with a set-aside of their federal funds equal to as much as 15 percent of the school district’s allocation. That means that almost $2 billion is available this year for low-income parents who choose to take advantage of these new opportunities.

The law establishes very specific responsibilities for states to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of supplemental service providers in section 1116(e). These evaluations are critically important because supplemental services represent a new and untested improvement strategy. Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education has failed to enforce these provisions, relying solely on “the market” to serve as the arbiter of quality in this educational experiment with students from low-income families.

The low-income parents that have entrusted their children to these state-licensed providers did not sign up to make their children guinea pigs for the private sector, or, for that matter, badly organized public-sector programs. Failure to hold states to their responsibilities in evaluating supplemental service providers represents an inappropriate disregard for the interests of low-income students. It also undermines the knowledge base on which to evaluate this innovative program’s effectiveness.

Congress demanded evidence on which parents could make individual choices, states could make policy determinations, and on which Congress itself could act in subsequent authorizations. The Department’s lack of enforcement means that parents are in the dark, and that, with respect to supplemental services, we may go in to the reauthorization of NCLB with the same tired debates based on ideology, not evidence.

Conclusion

Almost four years ago, this Committee showed great leadership in charting a new course in federal education policy. There is much more work still to do and new challenges continue to emerge. Thanks in large measure to NCLB, however, the nation is finally getting traction on correcting the deep inequities that have for so long stunted the growth of so many of our young people and dishonored our democratic ideals. Because of NCLB, achievement gaps are no longer simply tolerated; a culture of achievement is taking hold in our schools, and we are better poised to confront the new challenges.

Now is no time to rest on our laurels. Decades and even centuries of neglect and discrimination are not reversed in three years’ time. Now is the time to show resolve and press forward. It will take more of your attention and more of our combined resources to close the achievement gap once and for all. None of this will come easily, and it will demand more of your courage.

First and foremost, however, we need to recognize that we are on the right path, we are seeing some promising results, and we need to stay the course on demanding that all students count. Every child growing up in America deserves a strong education, and NCLB – while certainly not perfect – has sent that message loud and clear.

I thank you for the honor of testifying before you today and look forward to answering your questions.