NCLB is Ten Years Old, But Measuring Educational Effectiveness is Still No Easy Task

I can hardly believe it, but a full ten years ago this week, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law.  The first decade of NCLB has seen much discussion on how best to measure public education’s effectiveness — and on whether high stakes testing has increased accountability, or undermined U.S. education.

It’s a really challenging debate, with strong points supporting the opposing perspectives. The evidence on school progress in the NCLB era is mixed — plus it’s difficult to tie improvements to any single reform effort. The Department of Education’s measurement tool is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (which has been around since long before NCLB, but which was broadened under the law).  Recently released 2011 NAEP results in 4th and 8th grade math and reading for several urban school districts showed, in general, improvement in math and reading since 2003, modest improvement in math since 2009, and little change in reading scores since 2009. (Urban school districts offer an important yardstick for the nation as a whole, because many urban districts have historically underperformed in comparison to suburban counterparts.) So, NCLB’s first decade produced modest gains, which may or may not have roots in NCLB.

Obviously, the question of how we define a quality education is an important piece of the discourse on NCLB and assessing educational effectiveness. It’s extremely important, of course, to equip children with core reading and math skills from the early years of schooling. But it’s also crucial to provide students the foundation necessary to develop into responsible citizens – something more than countless hours of test preparation.

If math and reading tests can’t offer a perfect measure for school effectiveness, it’s even tougher to determine whether schools are doing a good job of providing a foundation for citizenship.  But the Southern Poverty Law Center makes an effort at this kind of assessment in a recent report, Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States.  SPLC looked at how state education standards and curricula cover the civil rights movement, which is certainly an essential piece of citizenship education for students in the U.S. The conclusion? Most states do a poor job of covering the movement, especially states located far from the South, and states with smaller African-American populations.

SPLC’s report takes an unorthodox approach to measuring educational effectiveness — and one that illuminates areas of needed improvement in school reform.  But, intriguingly, the inspiration for the report was the 2010 NAEP, on which a meager 2% of high school seniors correctly answered a question about Brown v. Board of Education.  This suggests that traditional testing may offer useful bases for innovative assessments of educational effectiveness.