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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Obama and NCLB: The good--and very bad--news

George Bush could have not realized how much of a friend President Obama would be to his No Child Left Behind initiative.

Obama bashed NCLB when he was running for president, saying that obsession with high-stakes standardized tests was no way to run an education system.

But today we learned the vision that Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have for the post-NCLB era, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t look much different.

Now that Obama lives in the White House, he seems to have developed a certain fondess for some of the key concepts of NCLB that essentially doomed it to fail: the high-stakes standardized testing regime, the punishment for the lowest-achieving schools, the arbitrary deadlines for success.

Yes, the Obama plan will eliminate some of the unrealistic mandates of NCLB.

The accountability system known as “adequate yearly progress” — the measure of how much progress schools, school districts and states made annually based on a cockamamie formula involving standardized test scores — will end. That’s good. Under AYP, even excellent schools were deemed to be failing.

But another arbitrary accountability system will be put in its place — and the current standardized testing schedule put in place by NCLB will remain. Very bad. The lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in every state will be punished even harder than under NCLB, according to my colleague Nick Anderson, who reported about the Obama plan today.

NCLB had a deadline of 2014 for all students in all public schools to achieve “proficiency” in basic subjects under a scheme that was impossible to reach.

Everybody knew it was illusory — even the legislators who passed it. Goals, they said, are good to set, even if they are unreachable. That may be true, but certainly not if that unattainable goal is connected to an unworkable accountability system.

The Obama plan understands that--at least about the 2014 deadline. But it sets up a new deadline of 2020 for states to have all kids on a path to “college and career readiness” — whatever that path is supposed to look like.

Teachers complained that under NCLB, curriculum narrowed to only those things that were tested (math and reading), that they wound up devoting too much classtime to test prep so the school could meet the AYP requirements, and that teachers were being given all the responsibility of raising student achievement but none of the decision-making ability.

Obama today promised to treat teachers “like the professionals they are.” What Obama and Duncan have in store for teachers makes one wonder just how they think professional teachers should actually be treated.

The Obama plan does include funds for schools to broaden their curriculum and bring back some of the subjects that lost their presence — the arts, science, history, physical education, etc. Good.

And he said that he doesn’t want to penalize teachers under the NCLB when their students don’t improve.

But one of the most egregious efforts promoted by Obama and Duncan would link standardized test scores of students to teacher performance evaluations and pay. That means that all of the other factors that might go into a student’s test score — whether they are tired, or hungry, or can’t see well, or have a toothache, or were distracted in class, or have test anxiety, etc. — don’t actually matter.

Until this point Obama and Duncan had been on the wrong education course, promoting their $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition in which states actually compete for funds by proposing reform plans that include initiatives Duncan likes. The losing states don’t get anything. Too bad for them.

NCLB had important goals: ensuring that every child in America had access to a quality education and was prepared to attend and succeed in college. The law, however, was doomed to fail by its very structure.

From the early looks of it, the Obama and Duncan education vision can’t succeed either.

I always cringe when school reformers say that what they are doing is only “for the children.” But, really, it’s hard to see how the kids who need the most help are going to get it from this new plan.