No Child Left Behind - The New Version

A little over 5 years ago, President Bush signed into law the legislative act of No Child Left Behind or NCLB. Arguably, it was a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation from the beginning and doomed to be rewritten, but credit should be given that someone took a stand against a system that is failing many of it students.

What we understand now, and many of us understood then, that the reliance on a single measure of high stakes test results was far too simple. Micahel Pitrelli, former assistant deputy secretary who helped draft the law, recently said the the legislation should be scrapped in favor of multiple variables that measure success. Pitrelli also recommends national standards and a national test in a recent Education Gadfly article. Wow, what an idea, national standards. I have written about standards in many previous posts and am still amazed that people just don't get the power of common standards.

Other things that I don't understand about the US DOE is why don't they push things that really contribute to student achievement? Mastery of Learning, good Instructional System
Design, quality conditions of learning and so on. Thomas Guskey in Implementing Mastery of Learning, clearly outlines a fairly bullet proof approach to ensuring student achievement. It ties in with Benjamin Bloom's theories that all children can learn, just at different paces. Jack Bowsher outlines an approach to sound Instructional System Design in Fix Schools First, an interesting book with some very sound methods. And I never seem to hear much from the US DOE about principles of sound instructional design, an approach that Robert Gagne developed near the end of WWII.

Often times, we look to measure the problem instead of examining why the problem is occurring in the first place. A high stakes assessment measures and reports the success or failure of the classroom. Knowing that the great majority of a student's achievement, or lack of, is determined by the classroom experience, why aren't we focusing on the classroom setting, professional development for teachers, a national standard integrated curriculum, standards for curriculum content, mastery of standards and technologies that are applicable to the way our students learn today?

One thing is for sure, NCLB will change and districts will have to change the way they collect and report data. How flexible are your systems and how easily will you be able to adapt? Software vendors are very hungry for these types of changes because they mean new versions, new license sales and more money. Consider open source and open standard solutions that allow you to control your environment and keep your operational budget dollars to put back into the classroom where learning happens.