What Does the NCLB Reauthorization Really Mean?

Congress is back in session and both Congressional leaders and the President are eager to prove to voters that they can move forward and are not at a stalemate created by rigidly partisan politics.

That means education watchers can expect to see a renewed focus on public education policy – one of few areas where Democrats and Republicans often find themselves agreeing.

This renewed focus is good news for educational and social justice advocates who would like to see changes made to No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan effort originally initiated by President George W. Bush.

One of the changes many public policy experts expect to see is a new definition of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

The sense, by many with an interest in educational and social justice, is that the benchmark needs to measure growth – improvements made for each student – instead of focusing on a single, specific, overall benchmark for an entire grade level.

Making this change could arguably be good news for a number of groups because it would end the “bubble student” phenomenon, where teachers and administrators pay the most attention to students who are only slightly below grade level, because they know this group is most statistically significant.

Under the current AYP definition, very low-performing students can make dramatic gains during the course of a school year, but this improvement is not acknowledged under the current system unless the student does not hit or exceed the benchmark.

At the same time, a change in the system would also be good news for high-achieving students.

Under the current NCLB law, it is tempting for teachers to ignore the needs of students already performing well above grade level, because they know these students will exceed requirements for the tests, and that the tests in no way measure anything beyond basic grade level expectations.

This means that our nation’s highest achieving students often see their needs ignored. In some cases, we know this creates an increase in the phenomenon of “at-risk gifted children” – students who are so unchallenged at school that they become bored and begin behaving inappropriately in order to get attention and to be engaged.

Many educational and social justice advocates, of course, would like to see No Child Left Behind scrapped entirely, marking an end to high-stakes testing across the board. This seems unlikely. But having a more accurate, meaningful assessment that measures the growth of all children would certainly be a step in the right direction.