Education Standards: Overview

Introduction

Since the administration of President George W. Bush introduced the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001, intense debate has taken place over the role of standardized tests in American education. NCLB ties federal money for education to test scores and aimed to achieve national minimum standards of literacy and math skills by 2014.

Supporters say that schools should be held to objective standards, and that failure to show improvement is justification for cutting spending or redirecting spending to more effective schools. Further, proponents claim that standards are a strong incentive for educators to ensure that children are learning effectively.

Critics say that standardized tests place too much emphasis on test scores that can be affected by cheating and other methods designed to move low-achieving students out of school (including not discouraging students from dropping out of school altogether). Nevertheless, education standards have become part of the educational landscape. Among other changes, it has led some large urban school systems to hire former business or military leaders instead of trained education professionals to lead their schools.

Understanding the Discussion

No Child Left Behind (NCLB): An act passed by Congress in late 2001. The law requires that public schools demonstrate improvement in students' proficiency in math and reading, as measured by standardized tests. Under this law, schools that consistently fail to show improvement would be deprived of federal funding.

Standardized Tests: Tests designed to measure students' performance, usually in subjects like math and reading where objective standards can be measured. Standardized tests are given across a range of different subjects, often on a statewide or national basis, to determine the relative success of individual schools in teaching students.

Vouchers: Grants of public money given to parents to pay tuition at private schools.

History

Public education has long been a source of intense controversy in the United States. Points of dispute include what subjects should be taught, how they should be taught, and whether students have adequately mastered the subjects that are taught. The debate over public education takes place on both the local level, where most public schools are financed and supervised by locally elected boards of education, and on the national level, where the debate is often framed in terms of whether American society overall is adequately prepared for the future.

Some countries, including France, have a single, specific course of study that is carried out in every public school. Students in the French system can easily transfer from one school to another and find themselves in exactly the same place, in terms of what is being studied and when it is being presented. However, the sheer amount of school districts spread across each state makes the situation in the US complex. State governments exercise varying degrees of control over school boards. Public education has traditionally been a local or state function with no federal involvement, except in the form of federal financial aid.

In 2001 the administration of President George W. Bush proposed the No Child Left Behind bill. The legislation, which Congress passed in 2001 and President Bush signed in January 2002, linked federal aid to school performance. In brief, the law stipulated that individual schools must test student proficiency in math and literacy and show progress from year to year. Failure to show progress on standardized test scores meant so-called failing schools would lose their funding. The act marked the most significant federal interference with public school administration since requirements enacted thirty-five years earlier to end racial segregation in public schools.

The No Child Left Behind law did not set specific standards, and states were free to choose among different standardized tests. The law simply insisted that, whatever tests were chosen, individual schools must show progress, usually measured in reducing the number of low scores. At the same time, however, the law established national standards and demanded that 100 percent of children be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Advocates of this approach argue that an adequately trained society is important if the United States is to maintain its world economic standing. For example, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, testified before Congress that the education system should adapt to the demands of a changing global economy. Proponents of strict standards for achieving improved scores on standardized tests also argue that schools should be responsible for the results of their teaching. They compare schools to private companies providing services: if the services fail to satisfy customers, companies go out of business. So, too, they argue, with schools. If students in a particular school are not making progress, that school is threatened with a cut-off in funding, and eventual closure.

One way that school systems have responded to the movement to demand accountability has been to hire retired senior officers from the armed forces or business executives to implement performance standards. Supporters of this strategy argue that if professional school administrators cannot get the job done, then maybe a fresh approach is needed. In 2006, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District (the second-largest district in the country) hired retired US Navy vice admiral David L. Brewer III as its superintendent. Brewer succeeded another education outsider, former Colorado governor Roy Romer, in the position.

These dual trends—judging schools solely by test results and bringing in as administrators individuals whose experience lies outside education—engendered criticism from many teachers and professional school administrators. Their arguments are, first, that test scores do not reflect the overall needs of children in school, and second, that running schools is not analogous to running the military or a bank.

Some educators, as well as parents and others, complained that the education standards overemphasize test scores at the expense of understanding the multitude of issues confronting schools. For example, the results of schools with high-achieving students can be affected by a handful of lower scores by special needs students. Although such schools may do an excellent job with all students, their failure to show ever-higher test scores puts them into the category of failing institutions and jeopardizes their funding.

Teachers and parents argue that some schools are faced with a multitude of problems that can affect their test scores but that do not reflect the ability of teachers and administrators. Schools that primarily serve very poor neighborhoods and that include children of recent immigrants who do not speak English fluently may appear to be failing when in fact their students must overcome many other issues. Underperforming schools often have the least-experienced teachers assigned to them, or cannot afford the amenities enjoyed by students in more affluent districts. Still other critics observed that meeting expectations of NCLB led some educators to fudge the results in a variety of ways, including cheating, because of the pressure to improve test scores.

Education Standards Today

In 2009, President Barack Obama promised to reform NCLB in his years in office. During his campaign for the presidency, he had discussed the issue that failing schools should not be punished but should instead be funded so that they can improve. However, as Congress continued to fail to propose any changes to the law, in 2012 Obama began offering states the ability to apply for waivers that would grant them flexibility within the law to ensure accountability through state-implemented systems. For that school year, thirty-four states sent in applications and received waivers.

Congress came a significant step closer to reforming NCLB when the Every Child Achieves Act was passed by the Senate in July 2015. This act, which would depart from NCLB’s legacy of testing and punishing, would also give the power to assess academic performance and create accountability systems back to state officials, prohibiting the federal government from mandating teacher evaluations or issuing sanctions based on test scores. Because the House had also passed its own version of a reauthorization bill, as of November, the two legislative bodies were still meeting in conference to broker and flesh out a final bill to send to the president to replace NCLB.

Some educators believe the existing model of schools-elementary schools through grade five; junior high schools from grades six to eight; and high schools from grades nine through twelve-needs to be reformed. Propositions have included creating two tracks for students starting in tenth grade: one for job-specific training in skills that will lead to employment at age eighteen, the other for students likely to attend college.

Several experiments began based on the idea that small, more personal schools would be more effective in reaching students. Sometimes these schools are housed on different floors of existing school buildings.

Advocates of vouchers, which essentially redirect government public education funding to pay for private schools, continued to promote them as a way of bringing the advantages of the marketplace competition to education. Opponents argue that voucher programs deprive already struggling school districts of much-needed funding.

In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) overrode the No Child Left Behind Act by returning many of the federal mandates of the NCLB Act to the state level. The ESSA also empowered each state to decide the ramifications that underperforming schools face instead of those imposed by the federal government. Passed with bipartisan support, the ESSA was both praised for reforming aspects of NCLB and criticized for not reforming NCLB enough.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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