Too Many Remedies?
In Washington, the U.S. House education committee kicked off the school year by issuing a No Child Left Behind Act reauthorization draft notable for proposals to measure students’ academic growth, add indicators beyond reading and mathematics, and differentiate between schools that miss making “adequate yearly progress” by a lot and those that fail in just one or two subgroups. While the draft proposal also offers some relatively elaborate thinking on the “muscle” behind the law’s ambitious accountability framework—its remedies for failing schools—little public attention or interest has been devoted to thinking about the challenges posed by these remedy provisions. It is crucial that we reflect on the lessons that experience has taught us and how they should inform our decisions during the reauthorization.
No Child Left Behind’s novel “cascade” of remedies takes effect when federally aided schools fail to “make AYP.” If a school fails to make AYP for two consecutive years, students are offered “public school choice” during the following school year. If the school continues to fail, it is subjected to a sequence of additional remedies, including student eligibility for “supplemental educational services” after three years; “corrective action,” such as implementing a new curriculum or appointing an outside consultant, after four; and the development of a “restructuring plan” after five. The district must implement the restructuring plan after a sixth consecutive failure to make AYP. These provisions were to be the law’s teeth, ensuring that persistently low-performing schools improved and that students stuck in those schools had a way out.
We recently collaborated with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a national team of scholars to examine, five years in, how the remedy provisions are working in states, districts, and schools. The findings, newly available in the volume No Remedy Left Behind , suggest that...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or purchase this article.
Subscribe to Education Week and Save
Get a full year and save up to 45%!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
- K-8 Principal
- EdVantages/Performance Academies, Detroit, MI
- Superintendent
- Pinellas County Schools, Pinellas County, FL
- Elementary School Teacher
- Success Academy Charter Schools, New York, NY
- Principal
- Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, Los Angeles, CA
- 2 Positions -Associate Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer, and Director of Human of Resources
- Washington County Public Schools, Hagerstown, MD
