No Child Left Behind, the groundbreaking legislation passed a decade ago to bring more accountability into public education, is due to be overhauled and possibly reauthorized, but political gridlock in the nation’s capital has made that all but impossible.
So instead of reforms aimed at making the law a more realistic push toward greater academic achievement for America’s children and less of a punishing scold, the Obama administration has invited states to seek waivers from the yearly benchmarks set for schools.
In recent weeks it’s become increasingly clear why Hawaii is likely to join the parade of states seeking a waiver. The law mandates that schools demonstrate that all of their students are proficient in math and reading by 2014, and only a handful of the state’s 286 public schools appear within striking distance of that goal. Preliminary statistics show that six elementary schools — Haleiwa, Manoa, Waikiki, Mililani Ike, Momilani and Noelani — had 90 percent or better of their students testing as proficient in reading or math, or both.
But the state Department of Education, correctly, is opting to approach the matter carefully. A few states have applied for the waiver already — Michigan and Tennessee among them. Cara Tanimura, director of the systems accountability office here, said it would be more prudent to wait for guidance from the U.S. DOE on what the federal authorities expect the state to use in place of the No Child rulebook.
Education officials in most states, as in Hawaii, are eager to avert a train wreck of demoralizing sanctions and funding consequences that failure would bring, but they are adopting the same wait-and-see stance.
The state needs to craft an alternative — a combination of progressive academic targets and a means of tracking students — that both satisfies U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and is attainable within the state’s budgetary constraints.
Duncan already has warned against expectations of an easy out.
"Everything we’ve done has been at a very high bar," he said after the recent announcement. "And as we go out with this waiver package, we will only give waivers to states that maintain that high bar."
If that wasn’t enough, Tanimura said the state must worry about its $75 million Race to the Top award, the competitive federal grant Hawaii won with a proposal for education innovation and reform. Exactly right: The state DOE doesn’t want to jeopardize that program by telegraphing unintentionally any avoidance of rigor.
Tanimura credits the No Child law with compelling much more precise systems for following student progress: Rather than tracking merely aggregate performance by entire schools, states now can analyze smaller groups, such as English language learners, and understand better where corrections are needed.
The subgroups also include economically disadvantaged students, and the most recent preliminary data show that a significant achievement gap persists for lower-income kids. Last year the overall performance was logged fully 10 percentage points above disadvantaged-student performance levels. In reading, 67 percent of all students were proficient in reading compared with 57 percent of the poorer students. Math scores showed the same gap: 55 percent proficiency overall, 45 percent for the disadvantaged.
Clearly, there’s work to do, in Hawaii and across the country, to bring students up to speed. But the current No Child hammer-over-the-head, one-size-fits-all design doesn’t seem to be performing, either.
Hawaii’s response to the federal waiver invitation needs to ensure that the oversight focus remains sharp but that the remedies put emphasis less on reaching an inflexible bar and more on giving children the boost they need.
