Healing America's sick schools
GROVER WHITEHURST, who heads the research arm of the US Department of Education, says that the quality of education research today is the rough equivalent of medical research in the 1920s. That's a scary thought. After all, Americans of that era enjoyed not much greater than a 50-50 chance of benefiting from an encounter with the medical system.
"We're trying to fill huge deficiencies in knowledge," says Whitehurst, the director of the federal Institute of Education Sciences. "The problem is out in front of the research."
In a few months, a new president will inherit the promises and problems of No Child Left Behind, the nation's increasingly unpopular education policy, which seeks to raise standards and improve accountability, especially in low-income elementary and secondary schools. The intent of the 2002 NCLB bill remains sound. But public and political support for reauthorization will require changes that give good schools some freedom from inflexible federal requirements while providing failing schools with more hands-on help.
In Massachusetts, 277 schools have been identified for some level of state intervention, based on their failure to make sufficient annual progress toward the NCLB goal of proficiency in English and math for all students by 2014. Not all of these schools, however, worry Massachusetts education commissioner Mitchell Chester. The state's high standards and challenging MCAS test, says Chester, make it unrealistic for some worthy schools to meet NCLB's annual progress benchmarks. The higher they start, the tougher the climb.
Massachusetts and other states that rank high in education shouldn't lower their standards to satisfy NCLB. Federal education officials must instead find a way to measure progress that recognizes the differences among states. One way to do that would be for the next president to challenge the Institute of Education Sciences to design and append several questions to each state's standardized test. That could become the common measurement for deciding which schools need federal improvement grants or emergency intervention by the state.
The next president should also consider the consequences of operating a national education department that spends just $575 million - 1 percent of its budget - on research. The lofty mission of the Institute of Education Sciences is to provide hard evidence on which to base education policy and practice. But the level of research in education is so uneven and even shoddy, at times, that the institute's analysts spend much of their time identifying what doesn't work and advising local educators on what programs and curricula to avoid. A better-funded institute could spur better research both in Washington and in university settings.
Right now, warns Chester, "the research is largely uncoupled from the policy strategy."
For all the criticism of NCLB, the Bush administration was right to demand accountability. When it was missing, educators often overlooked the needs of students in urban neighborhoods and subgroups of students, including minorities, in suburban school districts. The next president should demand a similar level of accountability but recognize what the current administration couldn't see. Turning around ailing schools calls for the kind of commitment needed to heal the sick. 