With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization stalled for the foreseeable future, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced her own initiative Tuesday to introduce more flexibility into how schools are held accountable under the law. While we acknowledge that NCLB can be a blunt tool at times, we are wary that Spellings' vague plan will help states circumvent existing accountability measures.

Spellings' plan is designed to answer complaints that NCLB's required interventions don't differentiate between schools that fall just short of making adequate yearly progress (AYP) and those that aren't even close. Her proposal, therefore, would create a pilot program for up to 10 states that would allow them to shift resources to those schools that are badly missing AYP. According to Spellings, this differentiated accountability would help states provide "triage" for the "chronic underpeformers" by giving them aid that had previously gone to schools with scores closer to mandated targets.

We have serious concerns about this initiative. Since NCLB's passage - and the passage of the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act that preceded it - states have been strikingly recalcitrant about implementing the law's accountability requirements. They have lowered standards, gamed the system, and manipulated every possible loophole to reduce the number of schools identified as failing to make AYP. In the face of documented abuse of the significant flexibility that already exists under NCLB, giving them more leeway in how they implement accountability is potentially dangerous.

We agree with Spellings that, to some extent, more differentiated interventions in low performing schools make sense. Schools that are chronically failing the majority of their student body require different interventions than schools that narrowly miss goals in a few subgroups. The House Education Committee's draft NCLB legislation, widely circulated last fall, included some sensible approaches in that direction. But school districts and states already have substantial flexibility in how they implement the more consequential interventions for schools that have failed to make AYP for multiple years. The "other" option in NCLB's current menu of options for schools in restructuring - those that have failed to make AYP for over five years - is a loophole you can drive a truck through. And most states have. In only a few instances have school districts implemented the most intensive restructuring options, such as reconstituting a school's entire staff, converting it to a charter school, or closing it altogether. So, while we welcome some differentiation to allow states and districts to target intervention resources to the most troubled schools, we're very wary as to what that flexibility looks like.

Unfortunately, Spellings hasn't provided enough details to assuage our concerns on this score. The "fact sheet" the Department released Tuesday is incredibly vague, offering little indication of what states would be allowed to do under the pilot that they can't do under existing law. In her remarks, Spellings suggested that states "send [the] most experienced and effective teachers to work in the neediest schools" - but nothing in the law keeps them from doing that now! Nor is it clear what the Department expects states to do with the added flexibility. The fact sheet states that the Department will give priority for the pilot project to states that have "clear" and "significant and comprehensive" interventions for the lowest performing schools--but doesn't offer any clarification on what the standard for judging this will be.

We are also concerned that the pilot program could allow states to ignore schools that are coming close, but still missing, AYP. The fact remains that these schools are not meeting performance requirements and are leaving some groups of students behind. These "within range" schools, as Spellings refers to them, are not institutions that just had one down year. They are schools that missed AYP for at least two consecutive years and potentially longer. Less help for these failing schools suggests that it is ok to miss AYP so long as you come close - a notion that runs counter to the idea of leaving NO child behind, and could be particularly harmful to the most vulnerable subgroups of students.

The fact sheet says that states would still have to follow their existing AYP standards, so these schools presumably would continue to be identified for school improvement. But it's not at all clear whether they could be immune to the law's supplemental education services, school choice, and school improvement plan requirements - which would thwart NCLB's accountability goals for these schools.

An Alternative Plan

There are good reasons to introduce more differentiation into interventions for schools that fail to make AYP. This should not, however, be a zero-sum game where the Department of Education grants leniency to some schools in exchange for more intervention in another. And it certainly should not offer more leniency without a very strong guarantee of greater intervention in the lowest-performing schools. Congress has the opportunity in NCLB reauthorization to provide states with a clearly defined national minimum standard for intervention, which can vary depending on how close a school comes to making AYP. For instance, a school missing by just a few students could receive supplemental services, while one falling well short of the mark would be subject to harsher requirements. Adding flexibility in this manner would still give states the ability to experiment with new types of interventions that exceed the standard, while also ensuring that the initial goal of accountability is preserved. Or, to put it more succinctly, states would be able to bend, but not break when it comes to accountability.