zombies   NCLB and Other Zombie Ideas

Almost no politician today, Democrat or Republican, has anything good to say about No Child Left Behind, the deeply unpopular – yet amazingly difficult to kill – incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The law should have expired in 2007, but a dysfunctional Congress has failed to replace it with a saner approach. Now that Republicans are fully in control and eager to show they "can govern" (a novel idea for many of them), prospects for ESEA reauthorization could change. But legislative progress still seems dicey.

What haven't changed, unfortunately, are the ideas that spawned NCLB back in 2001: a reliance on standards and testing as a way to close "failing schools," fire "bad teachers," shape curriculum and instruction, and promote privatization schemes – in short, as a cure-all for what ails K–12 education. Members of Congress and other policymakers differ on a host of details: Title I funding formulas, the number of required tests, options for states and localities, the extent of federal control. But a consensus on the NCLB philosophy of accountability lives on in Congress, state education departments, and especially the Obama administration. Democrats in particular, backed by major foundations, test publishers, and "civil rights" groups (who are in denial about the harm to minority kids), are fighting to preserve federal testing mandates.

The strange thing is, there's a woeful lack of data to support so-called "data-driven" policies. In effect, NCLB has been a massive natural experiment to see if these ideas have merit. The data say no, even by NCLB's sole criterion of standardized test scores. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), for example, 4th and 8th graders made more gains in the decade before NCLB was enacted than afterward. The "achievement gap" between English learners and English-proficient students has actually widened since 2001. In addition, U.S. performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has declined over that period. Yet cheerleaders for high-stakes testing don't seem to have noticed, or at least, won't admit to its failure.

What we have here is a classic case of zombie ideas, which the economist Paul Krugman defines as "policy ideas that keep being killed by evidence, but nonetheless shamble relentlessly forward, essentially because they suit a political agenda." In other words, policies whose proponents refuse to admit are misguided, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Rather than "data driven," they are ideologically driven.

Not only has NCLB failed in its objectives to boost achievement for all students and to eliminate "achievement gaps" for underserved groups. It has also done plenty of collateral damage – especially to the students who it claimed would benefit:

  • Standardized testing has become so excessive that precious instructional time is being wasted.
  • Test-prep in just two subjects has effectively become the curriculum in schools with large numbers of African-Americans, Latinos, and English learners.
  • For these students, creative teaching has largely become a thing of the past.
  • Educators have mostly acquiesced, since their evaluations, salaries, and job security depend increasingly on test scores.
  • Many of the best are becoming demoralized and even leaving the profession, no longer able to do what they know is best for kids.
  • Tests given almost exclusively in English have exerted pressure to reduce or eliminate native-language instruction, killing bilingual programs on a scale that Ron Unz could only dream of.
  • Classrooms are returning to behaviorist, transmission models of instruction; for most schools, the stakes are too high to trust students to help direct their own learning.

It's not hard to understand why textbook and test publishers are pushing zombie ideas from which they directly benefit. Pearson Education, for example, stands to make billions off testing for the Common Core. For politicians, striking a "tough love" pose is always attractive, especially when the targets lack the power to fight back effectively. It's still amazing, though, to see President Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and other Democrats going after teachers and their unions, who used to be one of their core constituencies.

The larger question is why so many educators, academic "experts," and erstwhile advocates for children are going along. Of course, honest people can and do disagree about these issues. It's frustrating, though, that a healthy debate so seldom occurs, at least in the field of English learner education. It's also depressing to see the enormous resources behind top-down "reform." Sometimes it seems that every education policy group is now on the Gates Foundation's payroll. Or Broad's or Walton's or Carnegie's. Well, not quite everyone. Bill Gates will never offer ILEP a million dollars (as he did for the "Understanding Language" project at Stanford). Not that we'd accept it.

On the brighter side, there's a growing resistance among parents and progressive educators. Excessive testing seems to have reached a tipping point, beyond which the Opt-Out movement may be unstoppable. It's already having an impact on Congress, further complicating efforts to clean up the mess left by No Child Left Behind.