Email: Unlikely Allies Raise Tough Questions

Unlikely Allies Raise Tough Questions
	Any time the American Federation of Teachers, the Education Trust, 50CAN, and the ACLU do something together, it's worth taking notice. John Kline, representing Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District, managed to pull it off with his proposal to replace No Child Left Behind. Granted, he united those groups in opposition to his proposal, but it's still quite the achievement.

Kline's proposal would have eliminated NCLB's requirements that states set performance targets for schools and intervene when schools fail to meet those targets. States would still be required to test students in grades 3-8, but they would no longer have to develop or implement any plans for schools that don't hit testing targets for each subgroup of students.

A collection of 38 different organizations, including the four listed above, wrote a public letter [PDF] to Representative Kline condemning his proposal for walking away from accountability and awareness of the different achievement gaps bringing shame to our school system.

These are tough issues that don't always fall along traditional lines (hence the diverse composition of the letter-writers). While it should be hard to dispute the failure of NCLB, we are still left with the question of what to do next. We want to keep a focus on improving the equity of our educational outcomes, but we don't want to fall into simplistic, test-based “accountability” measures that end up narrowing curricula and hurting our schools' potential to improve.

Part of the problem with trying to address this at the national level is that different states have different attitudes towards education. The letter-writers point to the pre-NCLB era, when very few states engaged directly on the achievement gap, as an example of what we don't want to fall back on. I would argue that NCLB may have raised the profile of the achievement gap, but the states that didn't want to do much to address it could get around the law simply by watering down their tests so that most students passed.

This is the core of the issue. We can't legislate mindsets. A federal education law is not going to change people's attitudes. Instead, we need a broad push by progressives to focus on the achievement gap at the local and state level in a way that's good for students, teachers, and families. Only when most of us are on board with this idea will we actually be able to make it happen.

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