Obama’s replacement for No Child Left Behind

President Obama proposed a major overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law this week, pushing back student achievement goals by six years, while establishing nationwide performance standards for all 100,000 public schools and making teachers accountable for students’ progress. The blueprint Obama submitted to Congress eliminates the 2014 deadline by which all American students were supposed to become proficient in reading and math—a goal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared “utopian.” Instead, the new policy would measure student progress more broadly, not just by test scores in math and reading, and establish a new goal beginning in 2020—making all high school graduates “college-and-career–ready.” The plan requires states to base teachers’ evaluations at least partly on how well their students perform. The bottom 5 percent of the nation’s schools would be subject to drastic intervention, including dismissals of principals and teachers, while schools that show great progress would be rewarded with recognition and a larger share of federal funds.

The administration hopes Congress will complete work on the overhaul by August, but policy disputes await. Leaders of the nation’s two main teachers’ unions have already objected to the blueprint. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the plan makes scapegoats of teachers, assigning them “100 percent of the responsibility” for academic success and “zero percent of the authority.”

What the editorials said

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The 2002 NCLB law was George W. Bush’s signature domestic initiative, but it is “widely considered to have failed,” said The Economist. With a third of U.S. schools still not reaching progress benchmarks, the law’s 2014 deadline for achieving academic proficiency “now looks comical.” And parents and teachers complain that it has forced a regime of “teaching to the test,” which sacrifices education to rote learning in pursuit of dubious statistics.

Obama’s new plan looks like a step forward, said The Washington Post. Under his plan, students would still be tested in math and reading every year, but schools would be judged on a more comprehensive scale, taking into account graduation rates and individual progress as well as test scores. The key is getting rid of bad teachers, said USA Today. Only 2 percent of teachers

are “ever fired or fail to have their contracts renewed because of poor performance.” Dedicated and talented teachers should welcome being rated on their students’ learning, but “their unions show little sign of putting teacher quality ahead of members’ job protection and work rules.”

What the columnists said

Conservatives can find much to like here, said Chester Finn in National Review Online. Chiefly, Obama retains President Bush’s commitment to “common standards,” while making room for innovative charter schools and avoiding a national curriculum. Beware, though, what happens to this proposal as it passes through Congress, and the pressure that will be exerted years from now to water down standards.

I, too, once believed that “competition and incentives will improve education,” said Diane Ravitch in the Los Angeles Times, but years of experience show that belief to be a fantasy. NCLB has failed to make a significant impact in the nation’s lowest-performing schools, and charter schools—despite all the hype—have a very mixed record. “Some are excellent, some terrible,” and overall, they “are no better than public schools.” There is no magic wand for making all teachers “excellent,” and teachers are only one of many factors that influence a student’s education, including family support, the distractions that come with poverty, and student motivation. Obama has simply proposed “an aggressive version” of NCLB—“a poor substitute for a well-rounded education.”

Obama’s blueprint is a product of his own political education, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. After fighting a bruising battle over health reform for the past year, the president is eager to offer a plan “that the broad middle of America could support.” In the process, he’s emphasizing his centrist credentials by facing down the teachers’ unions—a prime Democratic constituency. But Congress has Obama’s blueprint now. And it won’t be the same when Congress finishes with it.