Don’t leave behind the good parts of No Child Left Behind

Despite its high price tag and the level of compromise required for passage, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) correctly answered the question of how to improve education in America (for the most part). But to truly improve on student performance, it needs diligent enforcement and to commit resources to classrooms that have so far been lacking.

The 2001 passage of NCLB was a rare instance of Democrats and Republicans coming together to pass a comprehensive bill to revitalize education. But NCLB left one key ingredient behind: the money. This and other flaws doomed the new law to failure in the field.

Now, Maryland and other states are seeking waivers from many requirements of NCLB, as new Obama Administration rules allow states to do. As this continues, we must protect some of the innovative parts of the legislation, especially those that have helped many urban and minority communities.

As an educator, I value the ongoing commitment of the President and his administration to reforming schools. As an American taxpayer, I also support NCLB’s goals for teacher accountability. I know a lot of other teachers do as well.

The challenge lies in applying that accountability fairly, and in accounting for what the teacher does or does not do — not just what the student does or does not know.

If Maryland and other states successfully achieve waivers from having to obey the parts of NCLB that just aren’t working, their governments should be asked to explain how they will work to make the rest of the legislation best serve students and families.

Here are just four parts of NCLB that have helped many minority communities improve academic performance, and simply need to be tweaked so they work better:

Allowing parents to remove their children from the designated local school if it continues to perform badly on Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) exams. This also applies to schools that are consistently dangerous, such as Prince George’s County’s High Point High School.

For years students, parents and teachers have complained about the violent atmosphere present at High Point. These concerns were largely ignored until the situation exploded last year. To keep the tempest under wraps even longer, the Board of Education censored one of its own members who dared to investigate the concerns independently.

NCLB created this opportunity for students and their families because legislators understood that it would be difficult for a child to learn without a safe and secure environment. Even more if more parents are informed of this right and how to use it, parents won’t have to skirt the law to send their children to safer schools (as some Ohio parents recently did).

Requiring a school to provide tutors to their students, at no cost to parents, if the school fails to meet AYP in math or reading for more than two years, until the school improves. This is a costly measure, but it has been poorly advertised to parents and seldom used by schools.

Studies have proven that students, especially those in urban-minority communities, need between 8 and 15 hours of “out of school” learning activities a week to successfully compete with their peers around the world. The most needy children will only be lifted from the bottom of their classes if they have access to tutors proficient in subjects in which students are struggling.

Compelling all schools to break down student performance by such categories as race, economic status, and disability, in addition to just reporting the student body’s overall academic achievement. Before NCLB, many states and many Maryland school districts didn’t do this and therefore were able to gloss over the need to focus instruction and achievement goals for certain types of students.

Mandating that teachers be certified in the area they teach. We hear repeatedly that more than half of those teaching math and reading weren’t certified to teach in those areas, but we continue to be puzzled by their students’ poor performance in these subjects. This part of the law forces districts and states to look at this issue and develop plans that get certified teachers into the right classrooms.

There are serious questions about the wisdom of the NCLB law, most pressingly that the funding necessary to achieve its core objectives is continually lacking. Nevertheless, we should not rush to throw out the good reforms that came with the bad intentions. I know almost no teacher that will oppose accountability measures or a merit system, so long as they felt it would fairly judge their work and they were given the resources needed to do their job.

We wouldn’t judge the effectiveness of a hedge fund manager without a computer to make trades. We wouldn’t judge a quarterback if he didn’t have an offensive line that blocked well enough to give him the time to throw the ball. Likewise, we shouldn’t attempt impose a merit system on educators who still lack the tools they need to do their jobs well.