January 22, 2004

Newsfeed: Fred Hess

Fred Hess discusses criticism of the “No Child Left Behind” act

Two years after its inception, the “No Child Left Behind” act (NCLB) is receiving criticism. Fred Hess, professor of education and social policy and director of the Center for Urban School Policy, believes the program motivates schools to drop truant, low-performing students to meet the new standards.

It’s hard to work with kids who don’t show up to school and it’s hard to work with kids who show up to school but aren’t serious about what’s going on in school. And when you put accountability measures on high schools, they feel the pressure to move those kids out. And that happened Chicago, and it probably will happen in other places as NCLB comes to bear.

Hess says more money needs to be allocated for developing the kinds of tests the initiative requires.

The big problem in the NCLB legislation is that it calls for a kind of testing that isn’t widely done right now in the United States — testing that focuses on kids meeting certain criteria rather than testing that distributes kids across 100 percentile ranks. So there’s a huge gap between what’s available to measure whether kids are meeting standards and the requirements of the act. And there’s not much money going out to develop these new kinds of tests either.

Hess says one way to make NCLB effective is to ensure the tests measure important skills.

There’s been debate in Illinois over whether open-ended questions should be included in the math test or not, and the answer comes down to: “Of course we’d like teachers to teach that, but it costs an extra $3 million to score each open-ended question.

Hess says the legislation is doing some good in focusing attention on minority and low-income students living in high-income districts.

One of the intents of the federal law was to bring attention to minority kids, to special interest kids, to low-income kids who tend to not be well observed in school districts where the vast majority of kids are upper-middle class kids and performing at high levels. And it’s working to do that.

Hess feels the partisan debate may be due to the current political climate and the 2004 election.

NCLB passed with bi-partisan support. When the president and his administration claim credit for the act and make it a partisan feather in the Republican cap, that pretty much forces the Democrats to pick up all the complaints and problems. And it’s not a pretty sight to see a bi-partisan start degenerate into a partisan squabble. But it’s understandable, given the political moment.

— Ginny Gelms