No Child Left Behind College Edition: New Obama proposal focuses on higher education, career prep

President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the No Child Left Behind laws will put a larger… President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the No Child Left Behind laws will put a larger focus on college preparation and career development.

Last weekend, the Obama administration released its blueprint for revising the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, requesting that state lawmakers and school administrators weigh in on the changes as part of a reauthorization process for the education law.

Pitt clinical professor of administrative and policy studies Stewart Sutin predicted that “this legislation could likely affect who ends up getting into Pitt.” He said the University looks at many factors when it reviews applications and that those factors could include state tests.

“As those tests change, Pitt is going to have to keep a close eye on their effectiveness in testing students’ ability to succeed,” he said.

“If we don’t find some way to improve the early education system, we are going to find less and less high caliber students to welcome to Pitt,” Sutin said.

Pitt professor and Dean of the School of Education Alan Lesgold said that the changes in Obama’s proposal are not being made because No Child Left Behind failed.

Rather, the new proposal will accomplish what the original initiative did not.

“No Child Left Behind was successful in that it highlighted the achievement gap between upper- and lower-income schools and made it an issue of public policy,” Lesgold said. “Where the new legislation will take off is where No Child Left Behind floundered.”

The previous legislation failed because the original laws relied on an informal, unfunded agreement between states to decide how they would test, he said. The country essentially had many impoverished states setting up standards, leaving their students unprepared for most well-paying jobs and quality colleges, he said.

That is why the new proposal will focus on a new maxim: “college and career readiness.”

“With the new goal, administration officials are focusing less on yearly achievement and more on the skills that students will need for school or work in the future,” Lesgold said. “The new laws are meant to help states and school districts think through both what the real goals of education ought to be and what exactly it means to get a passing grade.

But with these goals comes a whole new set of problems, he said. No one should expect an easy fix.

“Now we have to worry about flushing out what ‘college and career readiness’ means,” Lesgold said. “It has to mean more than getting a passing score on a reading or arithmetic test. The tests need to assess the students’ ability to use literacy and mathematics to address the problems of 21st-century life and work.” “That’s going to be the hard part,” he added.

Sutin agreed, stressing another major change likely to be written into the law that involves developing a new reaction plan for failing schools.

“While No Child Left Behind made strides in identifying which schools were failing and why, the legislation did nothing to provide improvements apart from shutting down under-performing schools,” he said.

Under the new proposal, evaluations of schools would focus more on providing incentives and rewards to those schools that are performing, and attempt to remodel failing schools after them.

“The schools, districts and states that are successful in reaching performance targets will be recognized,” the blueprint reads. “Rewards may include financial rewards for the staff and students.”

Lesgold said he can foresee several potential problems with Obama’s proposal.

He said he worried that both the old legislature and Obama’s new proposal could suffer if the state and federal governments were only willing to enforce the policies by making threats and weak promises.

“All of the problems with these legislations come back to a lack of trust between the states and between the academic institutions,” Lesgold said. “Everybody is more worried about other schools cheating with their standards that no legitimate progress is made. We need to trust more in the teachers themselves to get these changes done in the classroom.”

Lesgold said he favors the machinery in place throughout many European school systems, where standardized tests are formed and graded locally. Schools from around a particular area keep an eye on the practices of the other schools, and schools tend to improve, he said.

“It would be hard to establish practices like that in the U.S. because there is no trust to build upon,” Lesgold said. “Teachers and administrators are too worried about losing their jobs.”

Sutin said the proposal will also be hard to pass without bipartisan support.

“We need support from teachers and the private sector, as well,” he said. “Unless the private sector is actively engaged in helping to define what the skills and competencies that an employable person needs, then we really risk missing the mark.”

Sutin speculated that if Obama’s revisions and others do not get put into law, then the United States risks falling even lower that the 17th position the country currently occupies on the list of most well-educated nations.

“In the past, we were consistently the most well-educated nation,” Sutin said. “Now we risk falling in line with countries that utterly fail to establish effective and operational education standards, opening the door for a future of progressively worse poverty and outsourcing.”