Stop With The NCLB Nostalgia

Some reformsters just can't stop longing for the days of No Child Left Behind, particularly the test-based accountability component. Reformy Rahm Emanuel thinks there's political gold to be mined by harping on the issue. Mike Petrilli's substack includes spirited defense of NCLB, echoing Arne Duncan's misty-eyed insistance that we quit when we should have doubled down. 

The narrative is that after NCLB started and brought test-based accountability that made schools just get better and better for about a decade, and then things just started to stall about the same time that Congress replaced NCLB with the less stringent ESSA. That was 2015. 

Petrilli and others have been reacting to a New York Times piece from Ross Wiener, and while it gets some things wrong, he's right on the mark with this:

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

The narrative of NCLB doing swell things until America lost its nerve and bailed does not reflect any reality I lived through. I was classroom teacher of English in those years. Let me tell you the story of NCLB and test-based accountability that I remember. 

When NCLB testing first hit, we received it initially as one more fiddly piece of government paperwork. But early on, there were some troubling signs. 

One was how it trickled down through the bureaucratic infrastructure. NCLB came to us as a state policy; back in those days we didn't expect that kind of micromanagement to come from the feds and it took us a while to catch on to the real source of these policies. We were also used to state trainings that tried to convince us to buy in, the hope that we would nod and smile and adopt the policy like we'd thought of it ourselves. But in the days of NCLB, that changed; no more friendly convincing, but instead a steely-eyed "You can get with the program or get rolled over."

But the program was nuts. While NCLB was "launched" in 2002, very little trickled down to the classroom for five-ish years. My region didn't get our first training in Value-Added measures (PVAAS in PA) until the fall of 2009, and it was absolutely alarming. I wrote about that training at the time in my regular newspaper gig (I wasn't a sophisticated blogger yet) and said, in part, this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

This came just as local district administrators were waking up to the coming NCLB disaster. The required annual improvement on test scores increased slowly at first, but the last few years of NCLB included incredible demands for test score improvement, culminating in 2014 in which 100% of all students in every school were supposed to be "proficient." Every classroom teacher in the country knew this was not possible, but any time one wanted to bring this up to The People In Charge, they simply spat back, "Well, which children do you want to leave behind?" 

Legislators and bureaucrats may have operated on the belief that of course Congress would change the law before 2014 arrived, but they failed to do so, and actual schools had to operate with the knowledge that by 2011 or thereabouts there would be only two types of schools-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. 

That unmeetable deadline had multiple effects. For one, there's something very demoralizing about feeling that legislators have set you up to fail. And of course that unmeetable deadline provided the leverage for Obama/Duncan to push states into Race to the Top (or RttT Lite) and the Common Core, with its accompanying message of "Teachers are doing a terrible job, so let us tell you how to do the work." Boy, we were hoping that Obama was going to make things better; that did not happen.

But why did test scores go up for a while, and then... not?

The early approach to the tests was hopeful administration directives. "We'll revisit our curriculum to make sure it's aligned, and then if you just do good teaching, the tests will take care of themselves." That was combined with practice testing and the kind of test prep that is aimed at teaching students how to take that kind of standardized test.

Then came targeting. Schools sorted students into three groups, usually with the aid of the practice test. Group A: These students will do well enough on their own. Group B: These students are unlikely to do well enough ever. Group C: These students are close enough to the line that with some extra work we might be able to drag them over. Group C got extra test prep. They were taken out of study hall and, in some cases, even taken out of music or art or science or history so they could spend extra time getting ready for the tests. 

This was the infamous period in which schools used a simple metric-- Is it on the test?-- for deciding what mattered and what didn't. And for a while it worked, though it came at a cost to other aspects of education. Schools even altered districts structures in an attempt to get the notoriously-low-scoring 8th graders under the same roof as some other better-scoring grade,

But all of these fixes could only do so much. By 2015, an entire generation of students had learned how to take these tests-- there was nothing to be gained in scores there. Nor is there any good fix for one major obstacle-- making students actually care about how they do on a test that is boring and has zero stakes for the students themselves. And of course, painfully for those of us teaching English, a shift from teaching whole works to drilling dumb short excerpts with multiple-choice questions to better mimic the tests.

Schools were in the grip of Campbell's Law, and teachers were shoved into a Dilbert-esque world where we had to take a bunch of time away from doing the work in order to create reports on how we were doing the work. 

So here's my narrative. In 2002, the was an attempt to reorganize the entire education system around standardized reading and math tests. It took about a decade for the reorganization to be fully implemented and for the schools to rebuilt themselves around the new normal. That adjustment period looked like an increase in test scores (which way too many people continued to treat as if they were a perfect proxy for educational achievement), but once the system was rebuilt around testing and students and teachers adjusted to the new status quo, and once they were settled into the new normal, test scores settled into a new equilibrium with the usual dips and bumps that every classroom teacher is used to seeing year to year (because students vary from year to year and test scores do not represent some ebb and flow of a singular body). 

By the way-- the pandemic undoubtedly resulted in teachers and students achieving less than in an ordinary year, but the testing dip also represents schools spending less time to test-taking prep because instructional time was shortened and schools chose to use that precious resource for education rather than testing. 

There are so many reasons not to go back to the days of NCLB, not the least of which is that it made the cynical assumption that education could only be improved by using threats and punishment. My question for every reformster arguing that we need to bring back testing and consequences-- at your workplace, do you only try to do your job well when you are sufficiently threatened by your bosses?

Some reformsters are going to argue that NCLB totally got real test score gains for Group Z. My response is a request to go do a follow-up study on those folks and find out if having a raised test score resulted in improved life outcomes. Because if the only desired goal of raising test scores is to have raised test score, I do not-- and I can't stress this enough-- give a shit.

NCLB and the attendant text-centered accountability movement gave a gut-kick the morale of the teaching profession as we were forced to understand that most of the people who we thought were supposed to have our backs actually viewed us a problem. Test-centered accountability has proven toxic to schools and education. And secondary effects are appearing, because a whole generation has been raised thinking that The Test is the main point of school, resulting in fewer people choosing the profession while those that do choose it come into it with some narrow, meager ideas of what the job is about.

I don't have a lot of trust of the Science of Reading movement, but I do appreciate the reform voices that are saying, "Look, teachers want to do well, so let's help them get the tools to succeed" as opposed to "Let's threaten teachers some more so they'll take out the secret magic lesson plans they've been hiding and start doing better." I know which message was more consistent with NCLB (right down to the implication that it was teachers who were leaving children behind). 

I have no doubt that the whole history looks different when you have a mile-high view informed mostly by spreadsheets. But on the ground, in classrooms, NCLB was a mess and test-centered accountability was destructive and not particularly helpful. Nostalgia for those days is misplaced. Test-based accountability was worse than inadequate, and after two decades, we should know better.