Research and Analysis on NCLB

Conference Sessions

The Past, Present, and Future Impact of No Child Left Behind on English Language Learners, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, April 10, 2007

Dissertations

Commissions

Aspen Institute Commission on No Child Left Behind

  • Beyond NLCB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation's Children (February 2007)
    Striking a tone reminiscent of A Nation at Risk – "We are failing to ensure our children are sufficiently prepared academically to compete with their international peers" – the report hails NCLB as "a bold step" in the right direction. What's needed now is more of the same, the commission recommends: More testing in more subjects and more grades, more prescriptive regulations for states and school districts, more "holding accountable" for test scores, and more punitive consequences for educators. FairTest sums up its vision as "NCLB on Steroids."

Research Centers

Economic Policy Institute

  • 'Proficiency for All' – An Oxymoron, by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder (November 2006)
    "By ignoring the inevitable and natural variation amongst individuals, the conceptual basis of NCLB is deeply flawed; no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. A standard can either be a minimal standard which presents no challenge to typical and advanced students, or it can be a challenging standard which is unachievable by most below-average students. No standard can serve both purposes ... but this is what NCLB requires."

Center on Education Policy

Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University

  • Assessment, High Stakes, and Alternative Visions: Appropriate Use of the Right Tools to Leverage Improvement, by Dan Laitch (November 2006)
    "This brief examines the theoretical basis behind high-stakes accountability, the intended and unintended consequences of such systems, and proposed alternative reform models. It also reviews existing research on all models, although the research is scant for some alternatives. As a caution to research consumers, the brief also details the highly political nature of much related contemporary research."
  • The Accuracy and Effectiveness of Adequate Yearly Progress, NCLB's School Evaluation System, by William J. Mathis (September 2006)
    The current use of AYP "as the prime indicator of academic achievement is not supported by reliable evidence." It is also unrealistic to expect all children "to reach mastery level on their state’s standardized tests by 2014, the fundamental requirement of AYP, is unrealistic." Finally, NCLB is "significantly underfunded in a way that will disproportionately penalize schools attended by the neediest children."
  • Ending the Blame Game on Educational Inequity: A Study of 'High Flying' Schools and NCLB, by Douglas N. Harris (March 2006)
    Claims by the Education Trust and the Heritage Foundation about educational miracles at disadvantaged schools are based on "questionable methodological assumptions" and misuse of data. More scientific analyses recognize the importance of social and economic inequality in explaining underachievement.
  • High Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act, by Sharon L. Nichols, Gene V Glass, and David C. Berliner (September 2005).
    The researchers found "no convincing evidence that the presure associated with high-stakes testing leads to any important benefits for student achievement." Between 1990 and 2003, the growth of NCLB-like accountability schemes was associated with no increase in NAEP reading scores. Meanwhile, there was considerable evidence that testing pressures encouraged students, especially minorities, to drop out of school after the 8th grade.
  • No Child Left Behind: Where Does the Money Go? by Gerald W. Bracey (June 2005)
    NCLB has been a bonanza for standardized test developers, publishers of intensive-phonics materials, and tutoring companies. But while schools must meet tough accountability standards, the application of these standards to private companies has been "weak."
  • The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators through High-Stakes Testing, by Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner (March 2005)
    "This research provides lengthy proof of a principle of social science known as
    Campbell’s law: 'The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.' Applying this principle, this study finds that the over-reliance on high-stakes testing has serious negative repercussions that are present at every level of the public school system."
  • Evolution of Federal Policy and Implications of No Child Left Behind for Language Minority Students, by Wayne E. Wright (January 2005)
    NCLB has transformed programs for ELLs, by dropping the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy in favor of mainstreaming students as rapidly as possible. "Schools are under immense pressure to raise test scores, so instruction narrowly focuses on the tests and discourages instruction focusing on the true needs of" ELLs.

Harvard Civil Rights Project

  • The No Child Left Behind Act: The Civil Rights Perspective (October and November 2006)
    Roundtable discussions co-sponsored by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute featured important new papers on assessment and accountability by Daniel Koretz, Robert Linn, Catherine Snow, Gary Orfield, Linda Darling-Hammond, Russell Rumberger, and others.
  • School Accountability under NCLB: Aid or Obstacle for Measuring Racial Equity? by Ann Owens and Gail L. Sunderman (October 2006)
    Because AYP has been a moving target in many states,"it is difficult to know how much progress has been made improving student performance." Meanwhile, "schools most likely to be identified as needing improvement are highly segregated and enroll a disproportionate share of a state’s minority and low-income students." Many of these schools remain stuck in the failing category for the fourth or fifth year in a row. As a result, "NCLB concentrates sanctions in schools serving disadvantaged and minority students."
  • Domesticating a Revolution: No Child Left Behind Reforms and State Administrative Response, by Gail Sunderman and Gary Orfield (September 2006)
    "The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 relies on state education agencies to play crucial roles in implementing the federal mandates. Yet whether states have the capacity to meet this challenge is a fundamental question. This report examines how states are meeting the financial and human resource demands and whether they have they have the expertise to meet the law's requirements. It found that states made a good faith effort to comply, but also a striking lack of resources and expertise to accomplish the law's goals."
  • Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends, by Jaekyung Lee (June 2006)
    A comparison of NAEP and state assessment results before and after NCLB found that the law "did not have a significant impact on improving reading and math achievement across the nation and states." Nor has NCLB helped to narrow the "achievement gap" between disadvantaged minority students and white students. Based on current trends, the study projected that only 25% of poor and black students would reach proficiency targets in reading and only 50% in math by 2014.
  • The Unraveling of No Child Left Behind: How Negotiated Changes Transform the Law, by Gail L. Sunderman and Gary Orfield (February 2006)
    Reacting to growing political opposition to NCLB, the Bush Administration has begun to cut separate and inconsistent deals with each state. As a result, "accountability no longer has a common meaning across states or even within states. ... [T]here were clear winners and losers from the changes. Some of the changes ... have compounded the flaws in the NCLB accountability provisions by making it harder for some districts, primarily those serving minorities, to make AYP. Others, such as the changes in the highly qualified teacher requirements benefit some regions of the country over others."
  • Listening to Teachers: Classroom Realities and No Child Left Behind, by Gail L. Sunderman, Christopher A. Tracey, Jimmy Kim, and Gary Orfield (September 2004)
    An in-depth survey of teachers found numerous negative consequences of NCLB at the classroom level. E.g., "in response to NCLB accountability, they ignored important aspects of the curriculum, de-emphasized or neglected untested topics, and focused instruction on the tested subjects, probably excessively. Teachers rejected the idea that the NCLB testing requirements would ... improve the curriculum."

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)

  • Is the No Child Left Behind Act Working? The Reliability of How States Track Achievement, by Bruce Fuller, Karen Gesicki, Erin Kang & Joseph Wright (June 2006).
    State test results tend to exaggerate student progress, as compared with NAEP scores, PACE found. They are also inconsistent: "Trend lines often follow jagged, saw-tooth patterns over time – as state education officials change testing companies, shift the bar defining 'proficient' performance, and teachers spend more time on test preparation activities."
  • Penalizing Diverse Schools? by Bruce Fuller (December 2003).
    The more demographic subgroups in a school, the more likely it is to fall short of "adequate yearly progress." Thus NCLB's accountability system gives less diverse schools have an unfair advantage over more diverse schools. Even when test scores are nearly identical, the latter are in more jeopardy of punitive sanctions.

National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST)

  • Challenges in the No Child Left Behind Act for English Language Learners, by Jamal Abedi and Ron Dietel (Winter 2004)
    Identifies numerous anomalies, e.g.: "A key NCLB goal is for all subgroups, including ELL students, to reach 100% proficiency in English language arts. However, if ELL students were proficient in English language arts, they would not be ELL students in the first place. ... NCLB’s adequate yearly progress requirements encourage retention of the most capable ELL students within the ELL subgroup, contrary to educational purposes."

Journals

Bilingual Research Journal

  • Teaching to the Test: How No Child Left Behind Impacts Language Policy, Curriculum, and Instruction for English Language Learners, by Kate Menken (Summer 2006)
    "An intensive year long study in 10 New York City high schools, detailing how high-stakes tests become de facto language policy in schools." Among the findings: "Curriculum and instruction focuses on test content and strategies, and English as a second language classes have become more like English language arts classes for native English speakers. In bilingual classes, tests are found to promote monolingual instruction with test translations guiding decisions about language allocation."

Education Policy Analysis Archives

  • Relationships Between High-Stakes Testing Policies and Student Achievement after Controlling for Demographic Factors in Aggregated Data, by Gregory J. Marchant, Sharon E. Paulson, and Adam Shunk (20 November 2006)
    "This study considered state demographic characteristics for each NAEP testing period in reading, writing, mathematics, and science from 1992 through 2002, in an effort to examine the relation of high-stakes testing policies to achievement and changes in achievement between testing periods. As expected, demographic characteristics and their changes were related significantly to most achievement outcomes, but high-stakes testing policies demonstrated few relationships with achievement. ... Considering the cost and potential unintended negative consequences, high-stakes testing policies seem to provide a questionable means of improving student learning."
  • The Impact of Language and High-Stakes Testing Policies on Elementary School English Language Learners in Arizona, by Wayne E. Wright and Daniel Choi (22 May 2006)
    A survey of 3rd grade teachers found that NCLB and Proposition 203, the voter-approved English-only instruction law, "have mostly resulted in confusion ... that there is little evidence that such policies have led to improvements in the education of ELL students, and that these policies may be causing more harm than good. ... [T]he focus on testing is leading to instruction practices for ELLs which fail to meet their unique linguistic and academic needs."
  • High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Does Accountability Pressure Increase Student Learning? by Sharon L. Nichols, Gene V Glass and David C. Berliner (3 January 2006)
    " This study examined the relationship between high-stakes testing pressure and student achievement across 25 states. ... We found no relationship between earlier pressure and later cohort achievement for math at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Further, no relationship was found between testing pressure and reading achievement on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests at any grade level or for any ethnic student subgroup."
  • Conflicting Demands of No Child Left Behind and State Systems: Mixed Messages about School Performance, by Robert L. Linn (28 June 2005)
    "While each state has constructed its own definition of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements within the confines of NCLB, substantial differences between the accountability requirements of many state systems and NCLB still have resulted in mixed messages regarding the performance of schools."
  • How Feasible Is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)? by Jaekyung Lee (7 April 2004)
    Features designed to make NCLB more "flexible," such as "uniform averaging" and "safe harbor" provisions, are unlikely to be effective. Thus "many schools are doomed to fail ... [because of] policy mandates with unrealistically high expectations that were not based on scientific research and empirical evidence."

Equity and Excellence in Education

  • Can Irrational Become Unconstitutional? NCLB's 100% Presuppositions, by Kevin G. Welner (August 2005)
    Two of the law's assumptions are scientifically insupportable: that all children can reach proficiency by 2014 and that, if they fail, their schools alone are to blame. In this context, NCLB-mandated sanctions is an arbitrary and capricious exercise of government power that conflicts with the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
  • The Soft Bigotry of Low Expenditures, by Kevin G. Welner and Don Q. Weitzman (August 2005)
    The Bush Administration should be held accountable for its refusal to provide adequate funding to effectively implement NCLB.

New Politics (Winter 2005)
A special symposium analyzes the politics of NCLB from the viewpoints of progressive educators including Stan Karp, Lois Weiner, Michele Brooks, Michael Charney, and Carlos Alberto Torres.

Rethinking Schools
Extensive coverage of NCLB, which the publication views as "a 'test and punish' law, not a school improvement plan. It uses achievement gaps to label schools as 'failures' without providing the resources or strategies needed to eliminate them."

Professional and Advocacy Organizations

Center for American Progress

  • Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report on Educational Effectiveness (February 2007)
    Just in time for NCLB reauthorization, CAP has teamed up with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to produce a Nation-at-Risk-style condemnation of American schools: "The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics." Gerald Bracey critiques this uninformed ideological rant on Huffington Post.

Civil Society Institute – NCLBGrassroots.Org

  • NCLB Left Behind: Understanding the Growing Grassroots Rebellion Against a Controversial Law (August 2005); press summary
    "47 of the 50 states are in some stage of rebellion against NCLB, with several states including Utah, Colorado and Connecticut in open revolt.... Such grassroots flash points are shaping an emerging consensus on the law. Leaders from across the political spectrum are rejecting NCLB as an ill-conceived federal intrusion into education policy, traditionally the domain of state and local government. While virtually all parties agree that closing the achievement gap is critical, there is a growing realization that NCLB’s approach of repeated testing and heavy-handed punitive measures will not produce the desired results."

Council of Chief State School Officers

  • ESEA Reauthorization Policy Statement (October 2006)
    "Our goal for ESEA reauthorization is to move beyond no child left behind and toward every child a graduate— prepared for postsecondary education, work, and citizenship in the 21st century. Achieving this goal will require a new state-federal partnership that includes" (1) increased autonomy for states pursuing "standards-based reform," (2) "greater focus on building state and local capacity to improve learning opportunities for all students," and (3) "increased investment in research, evaluation, technical assistance, and collaboration to help inform state and local efforts."
  • Recommendations to Reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (January 2007)
    "The purpose of this document is to build upon CCSSO’s ESEA Reauthorization Policy Statement to provide more specific recommendations to Congress about how to update and improve upon ESEA to help ensure that all students are prepared for postsecondary education, work, and citizenship in the 21st century. The following specific recommendations regarding the current No Child Left Behind Act have been endorsed by chiefs as states’ top consensus priorities for
    ESEA reauthorization."
  • Statewide Educational Accountability under the NCLB Act—A Report on 2006 Amendments to State Plans (November 2006)
  • CCSSO Resources on No Child Left Behind

FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing

  • "Failing Our Children: How 'No Child Left Behind' Undermines Quality and Equity in Education, by Monty Neill, Lisa Guisbond, and Bob Shaeffer (May 2004)
    "What makes NCLB so dangerous is the way it links standardized testing with heavy sanctions through the rigid 'adequate yearly progress' (AYP) formula. Thus, the weaknesses of standardized exams – their cultural biases and their failure to measure higher order thinking – are reinforced by strict penalties. The consequence ... is intensive teaching to the test."

Forum on Educational Accountability

National Education Association (NEA)

National Indian Education Association (NIEA)

  • Preliminary Report on No Child Left Behind in Indian Country (October 2005).
    In a series of hearings, witnesses testified about the impact of NCLB on Native American students. Among the conclusions: "The effect is increasingly to focus on testing at the expense of efforts to meet individual students' needs or progams focused on Native language and culture."

Public Education Network (PEN)

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)

Government

Council of Chief State School Officers
Detailed guidance about the technical requirements of NCLB and the law's impact on school reform.

Government Accountability Office

House Committee on Education and the Workforce

National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition

National Conference of State Legislatures

  • NCSL Task Force on NCLB Report (February 2005)
    Bipartisan study raises Constitutional questions about NCLB's coercive mandates for accountability and critiques the Bush Administration and Congress for failing to fund the law adequately.

US. Department of Education