Fifty years ago this May, the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, beginning the end of formal segregation in public schools. The ruling ushered in a new era in American public education. It became a turning point in a battle to ensure access to public schools for minority students, and ultimately disabled students as well.
But, while today, as a legal matter, the access battle is largely over, a new struggle for quality and equity has taken its place. Although neighborhood demographics cause de facto school segregation in many communities, it is the staggering gaps in academic achievement and outcomes separating minority and white students that demand the immediate attention of policymakers. National Assessment of Educational Progress data show that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students trail white students academically by four grade levels by the time they finish high school. And new data from the Urban Institute and the Harvard Civil Rights Project indicate that only about one-half of black and Hispanic students graduate from high school nationwide. Meanwhile, black students are overrepresented in special education and underrepresented in gifted education programs.
These disparities mean that the overall demographics of schools are now less analytically useful than data about what happens to students inside the schools. What classes they take, the qualifications of the teachers teaching them, and how much students are learning are now the central measures of equity.
Much-needed reform. In an effort to address these disparities, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001. NCLB is intended to better document achievement gaps and force states and school districts to address them. The law builds on the 1994 Clinton reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which first required states to develop standards, assess students, and use that information to develop ways to hold schools accountable for student learning. NCLB now requires states to modify their accountability systems to measure school progress, not based on overall averages, but rather using the disaggregated achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, special education students, and students whose first language is not English.
These are not minor changes. Before NCLB, most states did not include racial, ethnic, or other subgroups in their accountability systems. In fact, according to the Education Commission of the States, only six considered achievement gap data for school accountability. Instead, in the 33 states that had some sort of performance-based accountability, the rating generally hinged on a fixed percentage of students passing a state test. This meant that a school could be highly rated even if a sizeable portion of its students -- in practice, often minority students --
lagged behind.
There is considerable fear that NCLB's emphasis on highlighting achievement gaps will erode support for public education -- especially among the majority of voters who do not have children in school. Though superficially plausible, this argument is wrong. As parents become more sophisticated consumers of education, ignoring problems will drive them to seek other options for their children -- such as private schools. An exodus to private schools, which has already occurred in too many urban communities, will turn public schools into the education provider of last resort. Not coincidentally, African-Americans rate public schools less favorably than whites do, and they increasingly support vouchers. That is a sign of trouble that public education supporters must not ignore.
Of course, laws like NCLB have inherent liabilities. For starters, large reforms usually require fine tuning as they're implemented. Stanford Professor Michael W. Kirst, who served as a federal education official during ESEA's early years, notes that it took several reauthorization cycles to fix that law's early kinks. Likewise, more than a generation after federal special education legislation was first passed, and despite great strides for disabled students, there are still widespread problems with that law. So it is with NCLB.
In addition, today's public policy challenges are complicated. Legislation aimed at solving them is inevitably complex, too. That often leads to confusion at the state and local levels during implementation. Some of the current resistance to NCLB is attributable to misunderstandings about what the law requires and, just as important, does not require.
Finally, though NCLB has broad benefits for the public and specific advantages for low-income and minority students, it imposes concentrated burdens on states, school districts, and schools. The general public, and poor and minority students in particular, are not organized to advance their interests and be heard in the political process. But adults in the education system are. Politically, education reform is not different from tax reform, agriculture reform, or health care reform. Organized interests and the general public's interests are not always the same. What sometimes makes education reform harder to understand is that the organized interests represent respected and important figures, such as teachers, not plausible villains, such as big industries. But at the end of the day, the political dynamic is still the same.
Understanding this dynamic is essential to understanding the real nature of "opposition" to NCLB today. Although the vocal critics get the attention, many states, school districts, and schools are quietly and anonymously working to make NCLB succeed.
Dropping the ball. Unfortunately, President Bush's indifference to education after the passage of NCLB compounded each of these challenges. Ironically, those seeking to undermine NCLB have enjoyed an ally in Bush, who has made several blunders that strengthen their hand.
First, Bush administration officials believed the Clinton administration had allowed states too much flexibility to flout ESEA. As with other issues, they responded by reflexively doing the opposite of the Clinton policy: overregulating and turning a deaf ear to even reasonable calls for change. Now, two years after NCLB was passed, the Department of Education must change its regulations to give states and schools flexibility that
was allowed under the law in the first place. Of course, regulatory hassles gave NCLB opponents months of easy arguments.
Similarly, the Bush administration failed to issue quick guidance about key parts of NCLB and help states and school districts understand its more complicated provisions. The resulting misunderstandings created immediate implementation problems and more softballs for NCLB opponents, but they also have longer-term consequences. Many states, for example, are not using all the flexibility NCLB allows in the design of accountability systems, leading to problems identifying schools "needing improvement."
Finally, Bush's failure to sufficiently fund the law created political and substantive problems. The political liability is obvious; the president's anemic funding requests call into question his commitment to making the law work and put NCLB's Democratic supporters in a bind. Though Republicans claim dramatic education funding increases since Bush took office, they neglect to add that, had his budget requests been passed as submitted, federal funding for NCLB would be almost $7 billion less than it is now. There are legitimate academic arguments about whether, technically, NCLB is adequately funded. Politically driven estimates of NCLB costs in some states are wildly inflated.
Nevertheless, state and local policymakers need the leverage of new resources to implement a contentious law.
Issues for 2004. Despite these problems, education was still an easier issue when the big Republican idea was to abolish the Department of Education. Albeit flawed, now Republicans do have an education agenda.
Education is a tricky issue in presidential elections. Particular education policies do not move votes the way issues like gun control or abortion do. Polls indicate less than 10 percent of voters would change their votes over a candidate's education positions. However, education helps voters form a more general, values-based impression of a candidate, and these general impressions move blocks of votes. This is how George W. Bush used education in the 2000 election campaign. When he talked about education and the achievement gap, he was speaking less about schools than about values and directing his message less to minority parents than to moderate swing voters.
Sen. John F. Kerry has a similar opportunity. He can use education to show that his values include public-sector reform and challenging whatever stands in the way of progress. This would not be new, for Kerry has already shown his reformist instincts. For example, in a provocative 1998 education speech at Northeastern University, he showed a progressive bent and a willingness to tackle difficult issues. A few more speeches like that, and people may wonder how Democrats lost the education issue to Bush in the first place.
Yet, if Kerry fails to hold firm on accountability and does not articulate a positive reform agenda, he risks allowing Bush to frame the issue. Early childhood education, improving teacher quality, and expanding public school choice and charter schools are vital to making NCLB work. These are issues on which Kerry can draw stark contrasts with Bush. Moreover, promoting a solution-oriented agenda instead of simply attacking NCLB keeps Kerry out of the "accountability versus spending" corner, where Karl Rove wants him.
In practice, changing NCLB's accountability framework means lessening requirements for one or more minority groups, giving the president an easy opening to attack. Though the president's poll numbers on education have dipped recently, the 2000 election demonstrates that it is a mistake for Democrats to take the issue for granted.
Higher stakes. The stakes in the NCLB debate go beyond the 2004 election. Though obscured by various partisan skirmishes, the fundamental disagreement between liberals and conservatives in education today is whether large public bureaucracies can reform themselves.
Conservatives say no. They claim such institutions are too compromised by inertia and politics (specifically, interest group pressure) to change substantially. They believe that unless the clients -- children -- can leave a failing system, real reform is impossible. By contrast, most on the left argue that, when not starved for resources, the public sector can fix itself and deliver high-quality education. In this view, allowing clients to exit the public system drains resources and is counterproductive.
NCLB's detractors claim that the law is a conservative plot designed to pave the way for privatization and vouchers. This is ridiculous, considering NCLB's many liberal supporters. Yet political resistance to the law could lead to this outcome. Failure to eliminate the achievement gap is unlikely, by itself, to substantially alter the political alignment on education. But failure to even try seriously validates the conservative argument. And neither that result, nor the systematic undereducating of minorities, is what Brown was about in the first place.
