Education - Reforming The Public School System

No Child Left Behind

In January 2002 President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (PL 107-110), which was intended to improve the public school system in the United States and provide educational choice, especially for minority families. The law mandated that all public school students be proficient in reading and math by 2014, with progress measured by the administration of annual standardized tests. In addition, TABLE 3.8 Percentage distribution of 8th-grade students, by number of days absent from school in the preceding month and race/ethnicity, 2003 Catherine Freeman and Mary Ann Fox, "Table 3.1. Percentage Distribution of 8th-Grade Students, by Number of Days Absent from School in the Preceding Month and Race/Ethnicity: 2003," in Status and Trends in the Education of American Indians and Alaska Natives, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2005, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005108.pdf (accessed January 19, 2006)all subgroups—those with certain racial backgrounds, limited English proficiency, disabilities, or low income—must meet the same performance standards as all students. Failure to make adequate yearly progress may result in escalating sanctions against the school, including the payment of transportation costs for students who wished to transfer to better-performing schools, extra tutoring for low-income students, replacement of the school staff, and potentially converting the school to a charter school or even turning to a private company to operate the school.

Although the NCLB was passed with bipartisan support, critics quickly emerged, including those who charged that the mandate was underfinanced by the Bush administration. More important, they considered the law inflexible and so flawed that it actually undercut the goals it sought to achieve. Some questioned the reliance on high-stakes standardized tests, which forced schools to spend a considerable amount of time preparing students to take the tests, an effort that produced no lasting educational benefit and required a reallocation of resources. In many cases gifted students' programs were cut back. Because low-income, minority gifted students lacked the options of their white counterparts, they were left to languish in classes that failed to stimulate them. Moreover, because of the strict testing requirements, many schools that were regarded as successful by almost all objective measures found themselves designated as failed schools. In some cases a school failed to meet its goal simply because two or three students in a subgroup failed to take a standardized test. In addition, the Center on Education Policy reports in From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 3 of the No Child Left Behind Act (March 2005, http://www.ctredpol.org/pubs/nclby3/press/cep-nclby3_21Mar2005.pdf) that the percentage of the nation's public schools that were identified each year between 2001 and 2004 remained a stable 13%.

A further problem was that minority students who attended schools that were unquestionably substandard found that even if by law they had the right to transfer to another school, there were few places to go. In Chicago, for instance, nineteen thousand students in 2003 asked for transfers to high-performing schools, but there were only one thousand slots. However well intentioned, the NCLB was already proving difficult to implement, demonstrating once again that there were no easy answers to improving the U.S. educational system, especially for minority and low-income students.

In National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005 Mathematics and Reading Trial Urban District Results (December 2005, http://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/commissioner/remarks2005/12_1_2005.asp), the NCES reports that between 2003 and 2005 no urban school district surveyed showed a significant increase in the average reading score of fourth or eighth graders, or in the percentage of students at or above basic reading skills. Concerning mathematics performance, there were only modest increases in half the urban districts surveyed. This report suggests that the gap between white students and minority students might actually be increasing, despite assertions by the Bush administration that the NCLB has resulted in a narrowing of the gap.

School "Choice"

In The Condition of Education, 2004 (2004, http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2004077), the NCES finds that the percentage of parents who enrolled their children in chosen public schools, rather than in their assigned public schools, increased between 1993 and 2003 from 11% to 15.4%. (See Figure 3.2.) More than half the parents surveyed (51%) reported that they had the option to send their children to a chosen public school. Among those parents, 65% sent their children to their assigned public school, while 27% sent their children to a chosen public school. In 2003 African-American students were most likely to attend a chosen public school (24%) and whites were least likely to attend (12.9%), probably because whites were more likely to attend chosen private schools. (See Table 3.9.)

SCHOOL VOUCHERS

Despite the Supreme Court's rejection of segregated schools, many minority students have been relegated to failing neighborhood public schools with little diversity. One proposed solution to this problem is the school voucher, a concept pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. A voucher program provides parents with a predetermined amount of money—in essence the tax dollars already collected by a community to be used for education—and allows parents to present that voucher to the public or private school of their choice. Proponents for vouchers believe that not only will minority children FIGURE 3.2 Percentage distribution of students in grades 1-12, by type of school, 1993 and 2003 "Differences in Parental Choice: Percentage Distribution of Students in Grades 1-12, by Type of School: 1993 and 2003," in The Condition of Education 2004, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/pdf/25_2004.pdf (accessed December 29, 2005)benefit but also that public schools, fearful of losing tax revenues, will gain an incentive to improve. Opponents of vouchers maintain that "choice" will simply drain money from the public schools and worsen their condition, while not providing real choice for students from impoverished or low-income families.

Vouchers have been used on an experimental basis around the country—mostly in Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and in Florida—and have produced mixed results. While some minority children have been able to use vouchers to escape inferior schools, many families still lack the money necessary to educate their children outside of the public system. The value of the vouchers, ranging from $1,250 to $3,700, is simply too small to cover the tuition for most traditional private schools, leading a number of parents to opt for Catholic schools, which can be less expensive. The funding of religious education, though, may not hold up to constitutional scrutiny. In "Vouchers Are Constitutionally Suspect" (2001, http://www.adl.org/vouchers/vouchers_constit_suspect.asp), the Anti-Defamation League states that "voucher programs … would force citizens—Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists—to pay for the religious indoctrination of school children at schools with narrow parochial agendas. In many areas, 80 percent of vouchers would be used in schools whose central mission is religious training."

Moreover, parents using vouchers incur additional costs, such as transportation and school lunches, that many have found they cannot afford. According to Andrew Stephen in "America—Andrew Stephen on Magic Solutions for US Schools" (New Statesman, December 2002), in Florida "a quarter of the kids who were signed up for vouchers this school year have already found themselves back in the public system." In these cases voucher programs end up not helping low-income children at all but segregating them further in neighborhood public schools while children from higher-income families who can afford the additional costs use the vouchers to attend private schools.

The voucher movement suffered a serious setback on January 5, 2006, when the Florida Supreme Court struck down that state's Opportunity Scholarship voucher system, saying that it violated the constitutional requirement of a uniform system of free public schools. With this argument, the court avoided the controversial issue of whether public school dollars could be used to fund parochial education. The National Education Association reports in "Florida High Court Rules against Vouchers" (January 6, 2005, http://www.nea.org/vouchers/flvou-chers1-06.html) that even supporters of the voucher system in Florida admitted that the court decision most likely threatened the two other voucher programs in use in the state.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

Like vouchers, the idea of charter schools has also found proponents in the minority community. A charter school is publicly financed but operates independent of school districts, thereby combining the advantages of a private school with the free tuition of a public school. Parents, teachers, and other groups receive a "charter" from a state legislature to operate these schools, which in effect exist as independent school districts. They receive public funds and are accountable for both their financing and educational standards.

According to Robin J. Lake and Paul T. Hill in Hopes, Fears, and Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2005 (November 2005, http://www.crpe.org/ncsrp/pubs/2005_report/HopesandFears2005_report.pdf), the charter school experiment started in Minnesota in 1992. By September 2004 almost one million students were enrolled in thirty-three hundred charter schools in forty states and Washington, D.C. As with vouchers, results have been uneven, with a number of notable successes offset by charter schools that failed to improve student achievement. Overall, however, the charter school movement has stood the test of time, and these schools have provided some parents with real options for their children's education.

However, one unintended consequence of charter schools is that they are more segregated than public schools. According to Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee in "Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education" (Education Policy Analysis TABLE 3.9 Students in grades 1-12 by type of school attended, by student and household characteristics, selected years, 1993–2003Archives, September 5, 2003, http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n32/), "seventy percent of all black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools compared with 34% of black public school students…. The pattern for Latino segregation is mixed; on the whole, Latino charter school students are less segregated than their black counterparts." Frankenberg and Lee report that 70% of African-American charter school students were attending charter schools composed of 90% to 100% minority students. (See Table 3.10.)