A PLEA FOR STRONG PRACTICE Educational Leadership November 2003 Knowing how schools actually improve is our most urgent task especially in light of the design flaws in No Child Left Behind Richard F Elmore In the past school year I have visited about a dozen low performing schools schools that will probably be classified as failing under the provisions of No Child Left Behind NCLB I have visited classrooms and observed teachers teach I have spoken to teachers and principals about their work I have also spoken to system level administrators about how they plan to respond to the accountability provisions of NCLB I have learned something about the problems of low performing schools and the processes required to improve them Elmore 2003 As I look back on my experience I am struck by the gap between what I observe in these schools and what NCLB says about accountability and failing schools This gap is not surprising One of the most robust findings of my 25 years of research in policy implementation is that policymakers usually know shockingly little about the problems for which they purport to make policy In this instance however the degree of separation between the problems of failing schools and the policy prescriptions of NCLB is striking NCLB s Design Flaws NCLB was an act of extraordinary political hubris It is the single largest nationalization of education policy in the history of the United States promoted paradoxically by a conservative administration with the docile cooperation of congressional liberals Most of the normal institutional processes that precede the reauthorization of a major piece of federal policy got short circuited prior to its enactment so most of the expert advice on issues of testing assessment school improvement and accountability that would usually have been brought to bear got ignored The result is a law that has several profound design flaws Elmore 2002 a few of which are as follows Overinvestment in testing under investment in capacity building NCLB aggravates a trend in state accountability policies It focuses primarily on measuring growth in school performance against fixed standards the so called adequate yearly progress AYP requirement and only incidentally on building the capacity of individual educators and schools to deliver high quality instruction to students This flaw is inherent to some degree in the politics of performance based accountability Standardized testing is relatively cheap and easy to implement Capacity building is expensive and complex Policymakers generally like solutions that are simple and cheap rather than those that are complex and expensive When we bear down on testing without the reciprocal supply of capacity however we exacerbate the problem that we are trying to fix Schools search for short term solutions test preparation for example rather than longer term more powerful solutions such as curriculum focused professional development Ungrounded theories of improvement NCLB judges a school s performance by the distance between its current performance level and the performance standard for which the school is being held accountable The law requires more or less equal increments in growth disaggregated by type of student each year a requirement that has no basis in empirical evidence about how schools improve their performance The process of genuine improvement does not occur in equal annual increments The AYP requirement a completely arbitrary mathematical function grounded in no defensible knowledge or theory of school improvement could and probably will result in penalizing and closing schools that are actually experts in school improvement Weak knowledge about how to turn around failing schools The research on how to turn around failing schools is weak as are the state and local policies and programs designed to address this problem If one can draw any conclusion from that research it is that a small number of schools may emerge from classification as failing schools that some of these will quickly return to failing status and that only a few will continue to improve after they have emerged from failing status Many so called turnaround schools are in fact functioning only at the minimal level required to keep them from returning to failing status Turning around failing schools in other words is not the same as improving them Ascher Ikeda Fruchter 1998 Viteritti Kosar 2001 Perverse incentives for quality and performance NCLB took a wide variety of state accountability systems developed in the traditional laboratory of federalism and converted them into a single design template using federal funding as leverage The law ironically introduces strong incentives for states that previously had relatively high standards to lower their standards and adopt lower level assessments If they don t lower their standards states will be in the position of classifying far more schools as failing under NCLB than states and localities can actually handle Most states are playing a delicate game of strategic interaction with the U S Department of Education around this problem The accountability systems that preceded NCLB were diverse for good reasons not least of which is that we are collectively at the low end of the learning curve around issues of school accountability When you know less than you need to know to make intelligent policy the most sensible strategy is to encourage experimentation and variability and to try to learn what works and what doesn t NCLB has significantly narrowed opportunities for learning Policymaking by remote control NCLB contains certain provisions parental transfer rights from lowperforming schools and stringent requirements for teacher quality for example that make sense in the rarefied ideological air inside the Beltway but make almost no sense to people who are trying to obey the law Parental transfer rights if they work increase instability in enrollments in low performing schools and adversely affect the distribution of students among schools without necessarily improving instructional practice in either the sending or receiving schools Requirements that teachers meet certain federally mandated quality standards an idea that would have been considered absurdly interventionist not long ago constrain the demand side of an extremely weak and idiosyncratic labor market without doing anything about the supply side Policy gets made in one place and implemented in another how it gets implemented is someone