June 13, 2008, New York—The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed in 2001 with broad bipartisan support, but in the years since its enactment it has come under sharp attack from many quarters. The controversial legislation, which requires states receiving federal funding to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and to hold schools accountable for making adequate yearly progress in raising student achievement, is now widely acknowledged to need a major overhaul when it is reauthorized.

In Fixing No Child Left Behind, a new publication from The Century Foundation, Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg suggests that there are three crucial features of the act that are particularly troublesome: the under-funding of NCLB; the flawed implementation of the standards, testing, and accountability provisions; and major difficulties with the provisions that are designed to allow students to transfer out of failing public schools. In this brief he lays out the specific issues that need to be addressed in each of these areas, and proposes ways to fix the problems.

Fixing No Child Left Behind is the first brief in The Agenda, a new series from The Century Foundation. Briefs in The Agenda series put forward specific ideas for making progress in addressing crucial challenges facing the United States. The proposals in the series are built on innovations that have already proven to be effective. Expanding on policies that have demonstrated past success is the central premise guiding The Century Foundation’s Agenda series.

In Fixing No Child Left Behind, Kahlenberg notes that failure to fix the problems with NCLB could undermine the entire standards-based reform movement, and our entire system of American public education. “By taking standards-based reform off-course—failing to provide adequate resources, failing to establish a coherent and sophisticated set of standards and assessments, and failing to provide children stuck in underperforming schools with appropriate remedies—NCLB could fuel the argument for moving toward a system of privatized education in the United States,” he writes.

In the brief, Kahlenberg recommends that when Congress reauthorizes NCLB, it
should:

• Raise the level of funding to meet the enormous task at hand: raising student proficiency and closing achievement gaps between groups. Careful research suggests this will require dramatically increasing federal funding (from modest increases for states with more affluent students and low standards to ten times current levels for high-needs states with rigorous performance standards).

• Modify the standards, accountability, and testing provisions of NCLB by requiring states (or a national body) to set clear and well defined content standards of what students should know and be able to do; produce high-quality tests; set multiple performance standards to encourage students at all levels to improve; measure what students are actually learning in school, not outside of it; provide similar assessments at the beginning and end of the school year to better capture student gains and provide better diagnostic aid to teachers; hold students accountable as well as teachers; employ a graduated scale of compliance with performance standards; and use carrots as well as sanctions for teachers as well as students.

• Alter the transfer provisions in NCLB to encourage socioeconomic integration by providing incentives for middle-class schools in suburban areas to accept transfer of low-income students across district lines; increase magnet school funding to encourage suburban middle-class families to send their children to schools in urban settings; eliminate the disincentive of middle-class schools to accept low-income students by providing a safe harbor on accountability for such students; provide free transportation for NCLB transfers, including across school district lines; and fund information centers to educate low-income families about their rights to seek a better education for their children.

Kahlenberg believes that a well-constructed bill—one that fully funds the ambitious goals of NCLB, one that provides coherent national standards, tied to high-quality assessments, and reasonable stakes for students and teachers alike, and that provides a genuine transfer option for low-income students to attend high-quality middle-class schools—would strengthen our public education system immeasurably. He also believes that many of NCLB’s critics would favor a law that incorporates these changes and makes the system one that works for children, parents, schools, communities, and local governments.

Fixing No Child Left Behind is available online at The Century Foundation Web site: www.tcf.org. For more information about this and other briefs in the Agenda series, or to interview Richard Kahlenberg, please contact Christy Hicks at hicks@tcf.org or (212) 452-7723.