December 9, 2015

IT HAD TO BE KILLED BECAUSE IT WAS FORCING ACCOUNTABILITY:

In Defense of No Child Left Behind (Michael Hansen Dec. 9, 2015, US News)

In summarizing the first category of evidence - on whether No Child Left Behind was successful - virtually all rigorous studies I know of show at least a neutral effect on learning or more commonly, in many grades and subjects, significantly positive gains for students overall. This is true of studies looking at national data from the nation's report card (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), as well as data from big states like Florida and Texas.

The issue of reductions in achievement gaps is a separate issue, and I'd characterize this as slightly more mixed - some studies find improvements while others point to greater student segregation (a trend now decades-long) undermining real opportunities for improvement. I don't know of any study that shows evidence of gaps being universally worse as a result.

Most of these evaluation studies rely on accountability-induced variations in pressure to perform and therefore should be interpreted as pointing to accountability as the primary mechanism for gains under No Child Left Behind. And notably, though testing and reporting will continue in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act's next incarnation, accountability falls to the states.

A separate piece of evidence is the long-term trend results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2012 is the most recent year for which the long-term trend report is available), which shows broad improvements in performance for most grades and subjects and reductions in achievement gaps. The long-term trends are large enough that they should still remain significant in 2014 in spite of the slight drop that year. The 1999 long-term trend report (the only long-term trend report predating No Child Left Behind enactment) was not nearly as rosy on these counts. Though National Assessment of Educational Progress trends alone cannot definitively point to No Child Left Behind as the cause for these gains, student learning has been moving in the right direction in the No Child Left Behind era.

Posted by at December 9, 2015 9:24 PM

  

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