One-Size-Fits-All Leaves ELLs Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act has been marketed as a law designed to help underachieving students, including English language learners. "Holding schools accountable" for their academic progress is advertised as a sure-fire way to eliminate racial and ethnic "achievement gaps." According to this logic, attaching punitive sanctions to low test scores – accepting "no excuses" for failure – will force educators to do a better job for minority children.

It's an effective sales pitch, delivered in the language of civil rights. Former Secretary of Education Rod Paige has hailed NCLB as a tool of racial justice, "the next logical step" after Brown v. Board of Education. President George W. Bush, among others, continues to denounce the law's critics for espousing "the soft bigotry of low expectations," a belief that minority students "can't learn." NCLB-style accountability, its enthusiasts claim, is the only way to ensure that no child is "left behind."

Don't buy it. NCLB is an evasion, not an affirmation, of civil-rights principles. It diverts attention from the cause of equal opportunity by focusing on a single, misleading measure of school quality: standardized tests. It ignores everything else, including the adequacy – and equity – of resources, facilities, staff, and curriculum.

For ELLs in particular, NCLB embodies a one-size-fits-all philosophy that threatens to dismantle bilingual education, reversing a generation of pedagogical advances. Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 Supreme Court decision on school districts' obligations toward these students, specifically rejected that approach. When children face language barriers, the court ruled, schooling must be adapted to their needs:

"There is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education." [emphasis added]

No doubt, if NCLB had existed in 1974, the Supreme Court would have extended this principle to high-stakes testing and "adequate yearly progress" as well. One-size-fits-all "accountability" has had perverse effects that contradict everything we know about best practices for ELLs.

Academic assessments, the linchpin of NCLB's accountability system, are almost invariably in English and are rarely meaningful for children who are still in the process of learning English. Although the law requires that the tests be "valid and reliable," somehow this provision goes unenforced when it comes to ELLs.

Thus NCLB "holds schools accountable" on the basis of information that is questionable at best. Relying on such data about student progress, it is unable to distinguish between ELL programs that are working well, those that are improving, and those that are failing. Yet invalid and unreliable tests are the sole criterion for "high stakes" decisions about schools, such as imposing labels and sanctions for "failure."

NCLB also demands that the "ELL subgroup" – which the law defines by its inability to score at "proficient" levels because of language barriers – must nevertheless make the same progress as all other students toward 100% proficiency in language arts and math by 2014. It's a Catch-22. As individual ELLs become proficient in English, they leave the subgroup and their scores are no longer averaged in. So, as a result of individual student progress, the ELL subgroup average goes down. In effect, NCLB "holds schools accountable" for failing to achieve what is mathematically impossible.

Why would would we impose such a system if the aim is truly to improve the public schools? Such a policy would make sense, on the other hand, if the aim is to discredit the public schools and build political support for alternatives such as vouchers, corporate takeovers, and charter schools. There is no question that privatization of American education is the ultimate goal of some (though not all) NCLB proponents.

No doubt others sincerely believe that NCLB will benefit ELLs and other "left behind" groups. But, if so, they owe it to these students to carefully analyze the law's impact thus far. Doing so, we believe, leads to an inescapable conclusion: As a "civil rights" measure, No Child Left Behind is on a collision course with reality.