Responding to the Every Student Succeeds Act With the PLC at Work ™ Process. Richard DuFour
standards and state tests, and the prevailing view was for local control, meaning each school district—indeed, each school and classroom—was left on its own to decide what an acceptable level of student performance should be.
NCLB mandated annual assessments in reading and mathematics in grades 3–8 and once in high school. Schools were required to report results separately by race, ethnicity, and other key demographic groups. They also were required to demonstrate adequate yearly progress and faced interventions and increasingly severe sanctions if they failed to do so.
If a school failed to make adequate yearly progress two years in a row, students in that school were allowed to transfer to another school in the district that was meeting standards, and the state would hold back 10 percent of the school’s Title I money. Failure for a third year meant the school had to provide free tutoring services to students. Continued failure could lead to state interventions, such as closing the school, turning it into a charter school, taking control of the school, or using another turnaround strategy.
A school’s inability to meet the standard of any one of these thirty-eight factors meant the entire school was failing.
The Goals 2000 initiative established thirty-eight different factors to determine whether or not a school was failing under NCLB. A school’s inability to meet the standard of any one of these thirty-eight factors meant the entire school was failing. By the year 2014, the inability of a single student to demonstrate proficiency on the mandated state test meant the school would be designated as failing. If educators did not improve student achievement, they would be subjected to increasingly punitive sanctions for failure to do so (U.S. Department of Education, 2003).
However, NCLB left the questions of which academic standards to adopt, which annual assessments to use, and what constituted proficiency on those assessments to each state to decide. So how did states respond? In too many cases, they lowered standards, adopted easier assessments, and set low benchmarks for proficiency in an effort to ensure their schools would look good to residents and avoid NCLB sanctions. Critics of the law described this phenomenon as an educational race to the bottom.
Within five years of the passage of NCLB, Michael Petrilli, a member of the Bush administration charged with overseeing this law, concluded that even though initially he had been a “true believer,” he had “reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair” (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007). He lamented the fact that asking all states to reach universal proficiency by 2014 but allowing them to define proficiency as they saw fit had, inevitably, created a race to the bottom. He writes, “I can’t pretend any longer that the law is ‘working,’ or that a tweak and a tuck would make it work” (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007).
In 2009, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) proposed a plan to address the NCLB problems of lowered expectations—the Common Core State Standards.
Common Core State Standards
If states could agree to a set of national standards in mathematics and English language arts and on the assessments to monitor student achievement of those standards, they could promote greater academic rigor and a more accurate comparison of student achievement between states. Thus, the Common Core State Standards initiative was born, an initiative initially supported by forty-five states (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b).
Meanwhile, however, the stipulations of NCLB remained in effect, and each year as more and more schools failed to demonstrate adequate yearly progress, states petitioned the U.S. Department of Education under President Barack Obama’s administration for waivers to avoid sanctions and allow them to pursue other avenues of school improvement. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used this opportunity to provide waivers only if states agreed to implement the Obama administration’s education priorities, collectively known as RTTT.
According to the U.S. Department of Education (2009), the states agreed to include the following six priorities.
1. Work collaboratively with other states to adopt a common set of high-quality standards internationally benchmarked that ensure college and career readiness. (This stipulation was generally understood to mean that states must embrace the emerging Common Core State Standards.)
2. Join a consortium of states to administer rigorous assessments based on the internationally benchmarked standards.
3. Make student growth (or value-added testing) a factor in teacher and principal evaluations, including decisions regarding retention or removal of tenured and untenured teachers.
4. Make student growth a factor in a plan to provide additional compensation (merit pay) for effective teachers and principals.
5. Identify persistently low-performing schools (the bottom 5 percent in the state) and develop plans to either close or reconstitute them.
6. Provide alternative routes to certification for both teachers and principals.
RTTT offered federal funding to cash-starved states struggling to deal with the most dramatic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, to receive the funds, states had to compete with one another to demonstrate their willingness to embrace RTTT requirements. Education policies states had been reluctant to enact and Congress had been unwilling to mandate soon became implemented through multibillion-dollar carrots coming precisely at a time when school systems most needed federal funds. Two-thirds of the states changed their laws on teacher evaluation, half the states declared student test scores would be included in teacher evaluations, and eighteen weakened tenure protections (Goldstein, 2014). While NCLB might punish schools, RTTT provided the tools to punish individual teachers and principals. Finally, it was time to assess these reform efforts and ask, “How are they working?”
While NCLB might punish schools, RTTT provided the tools to punish individual teachers and principals.
Assessment of Reform Efforts
Educators are familiar with the reform strategies that have swept over them since the passage of NCLB—launching test-based accountability that ensured every public school would eventually be designated as failing, increasing the availability of vouchers so students could abandon public schools, taking steps to make it easier to fire educators and replace them with people with no education background, insisting on teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, reconstituting schools, closing schools, and providing merit pay. All this was done to promote the goals of ensuring U.S. schools would become the highest-performing schools in the world and improving poor and minority students’ achievement.
After many years of experience with these punitive strategies, it is fair to ask, “How has that worked for us?” In Rick’s book In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better (DuFour, 2015), he makes the case that these reforms failed. He is not alone in arriving at this conclusion. The National Center for Education and the Economy concludes, “There is no evidence that it (the reform agenda) is contributing anything to improved student performance, much less the improved performance of the very low-income and minority students for which it was in the first instance created” (Tucker, 2014, p. 2).
Similarly, the National Education Policy Center writes, “A sober and honest look at the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act reveals a broad consensus among researchers that this system is at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive” (Welner & Mathis, 2015, p. 7).
Not a single state came anywhere near the NCLB goals, and none of the highest-performing nations in the world were using any of the reform strategies imposed on U. S. public schools.
The number of U.S. students scoring below proficient on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam has remained flat since the early 2000s (Sparks, 2016), and other indicators of student achievement were rising faster in the decade before NCLB than the decade after its passage (FairTest, 2015). Not a single state came anywhere near the NCLB goals, and none of the highest-performing nations in the world were using any of the reform strategies imposed on U.S. public