NCLB

10 New Ideas for Early Education in the 111th Congress

Sara Mead — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:58:00 -0500

The 111^th Congress will have numerous opportunities to enact policies that improve access, quality, efficiency, and alignment in early education, including the economic stimulus package currently being debated in Congress and the scheduled reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). A new issue brief from New America's Early Education Initiative proposes 10 new policy ideas to improve access, quality, and alignment in early education from preschool through the early elementary school years:

1. Ensure that school construction funds are available to support the expansion of high-quality early education programs.

2. Recruit talented individuals to become qualified PreK and early elementary school teachers by providing expedited alternative routes to PreK teaching.

3. Support the ability of charter schools to offer high-quality PreK programs.

4. Strengthen early elementary standards.

5. Allow and encourage chronically failing elementary schools to be reconstituted as PreK to 3rd Early Education Academies.

6. Set aside a portion of school construction funding to support the reconstitution of chronically low-performing elementary schools as PreK to 3rd Early Education Academies.

7. Tap supplemental educational services and public school choice set-aside funds for high-quality PreK programs.

8. Ensure that alignment between PreK and the K-12 public schools is included in the definition of quality for any new federal early education program.

9. Improve accountability for early education programs.

10. Target elementary absenteeism.

Read the full report here.

Restructuring Restructuring

Sara Mead — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:32:00 -0400

A new report from the Center for Education Policy looks at how 5 states are dealing with NCLB's requirements to "restructure" chronically low-performing schools. Under NCLB, schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress for at least five consecutive years are subject to restructuring. School districts must implement at least one of a menu of restructuring interventions in these schools. But the results of these interventions have been decidedly mixed. This year a record number of 3,500 schools nationally--about 7 percent of all Title I schools--are identified for restructuring. Based on in-depth analysis of what districts and schools are doing in these 5 states, CEP concludes that restructuring itself needs to be restructured.

CEP offers five recommendations for how restructuring should be restructured in the law:

Policymakers should expand the federal options for restructuring and encourage states to create state-specific strategies. Under current law, schools identified for restructuring must choose from a menu of restructuring options, which include reopening the school as a charter school, replacing all or most of the school's staff, hiring a private management company to operate the school, turning operation of the school over to the state, or "any other major restructuring of the school's governance arrangement that makes fundamental reforms." Not surprisingly, between 86 and 96 percent of schools in the states CEP looked at chose the "any other" option. CEP could find no evidence that particular restructuring strategies were more effective than others, so it recommends that federal policy makers allow states and districts to implement a variety of research-based approaches.
States need to step up efforts to monitor restructuring implementation.
Federal and state officials need to consider policies to address schools that remain in restructuring. Some of the states that CEP looked at have schools that have now been in restructuring for several years. But NCLB is silent on what should happen to schools that haven't improved after two years in restructuring (one to plan restructuring and one to implement it). The next iteration of NCLB will need to include provisions to address what happens to schools that fail to improve after restructuring.
Unless certain criteria are met restructuring schools should not choose to replace staff, and states should not recommend this option. CEP recommends that schools in restructuring replace staff only if districts have effective human resource systems to help schools recruit and hire new staff, there is a pool of potential qualified candidates for positions, and the district can negotiate with the teachers union to remove potential obstacles to restructuring (CEP suggests states help with this).
States and districts should work to help maintain student achievement in schools that exit restructuring. Schools in restructuring receive additional support and resources from the state and their district, but if those resources are removed once a school makes AYP, there is a danger the school will lose its progress and wind up in restructuring once again.

These seem like sensible recommendations based on CEP's findings. If Congress follows CEP's recommendation to expand restructuring options in the next iteration of NCLB, one additional option they should consider is encouraging elementary schools identified for restructuring to restructure themselves as PK-3 Early Education Academies. PK-3 Early Education Academies would (i) serve children in at least ages 3-8; (ii) offer pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten; (iii) deliver a vertically-aligned and research-based curriculum emphasizing literacy, language, and social-emotional development in the context of a full
complement of core academic subjects; and (iv) provide time for teachers to work together in age and disciplinary teams to align curriculum and instruction from pre-kindergarten through grade three. Older elementary students who previously attended the school could continue to be served there within a separate school-within-a-school focused on their educational needs, or could be given priority for transfer to other higher performing schools in or outside their district. Reconstituting chronically low-performing elementary schools as PK-3 Early Education Academies would provide a compelling wholeschool reform vision, ensure schools implement practices and programs that research shows work to improve student learning, focus policy on ensuring children get a firm educational foundation by the end of third grade, and increase early learning time to help meet this goal. New America proposed PK-3 Early Education Academies as an option for elementary schools in restructuring in an issue brief we published last year offering ideas to improve early education in NCLB.

'Top-Down' Politics, NCLB and Early Education

Sara Mead — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:16:00 -0400

Via David Hoff, my New America colleague Michael Dannenberg offers a useful insight: The politics of NLCB are more "top-down" than "left-right," meaning that the real divide of opinion on these policies is between federal- and state-level officials and policymakers who've led the charge in calling for increased standards and accountability, and local level educators (and the groups that represent them) who have to actually translate those demands into improve performance for kids.

It's an important point. NCLB often gets a bad rap for being a top-down reform, but the reality is that there's a real and important role for top-down reform in education--No one is very good is very good at holding themselves accountable, and educators are no exception. The legacy of different expectations, different resources, and different results for different populations of children bears this out. Pushing local level educators and policymakers to raise their expectations and to behave in ways that are more effective in producing results is an important part of what federal and state education policy reforms must do.

But "bottom-up" reforms are equally important. As Paul Tough wrote at TPM Cafe earlier this week, "a lot of the most innovative thinking and experimentation is happening closer to the ground, in the ranks of nonprofit organizations like Teach for America and New Leaders for New Schools, in the offices of school superintendents and philanthropists, and in classrooms across the country." Effective education reform requires accountability from the top, but also opportunities to foster "bottom-up" innovation and high performance at the local level, to identify the most promising models, and to scale them up to have systemic impacts It's not just a matter of educators responding to policy changes; policymakers should also be responding to the work of effective local education reformers, by altering policies to help expand these models and incorporate their lessons into public policy.

Support for this kind of "bottom-up" reform has been notably lacking from No Child Left Behind, and that lack is one of the reasons for the strong backlask against the law. When there is no strong system for developing and identifying effective, locally-driven solutions to the challenges schools face in trying to meet accountability demands, educators understandably become angry with demands they don't know how to meet. One of the key challenges for the next generation of federal education policy will be reincorporating a "bottom up" reform element into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Andy Rotherham and I have some proposals for this, which will be published in a Brookings Institution paper later this fall.

When it comes to early education, reforms focused on the preschool years have always been strongly bottom-up, by necessity of the fact that the early education system is highly fragmented and lacks a strong centralized infrastructure. Foundations, the federal government, states, and school districts have invested in a wide diversity of local initiatives designed to improve early care and education. Researchers have had abundant opportunities to implement and test innovative models and approaches. Early education advocates have placed a strong premium on responding to parents' preferences and cultural backgrounds supporting a variety of approaches and programmatic models that meet the needs of different families and communities. This approach has clear benefits: It's respectful of parent, family, community, and provider diversity, and it has supported a tremendous amount of innovation. But there are also downsides: Quality is highly inconsistent across varying programs, the fragemented early care and education system is confusing and sometimes inefficient, and too many children lack access to quality education and care. There is a clear place for more top-down initiatives, such as state universal pre-k programs, that seek to establish a clear definitition of quality and some consistency in quality standards and access. But there's also a danger in becoming too top-down in the approach we take to achieve that consistency, and losing some of the very real benefits of the bottom-up approach that has prevailed in early education for so long. In both early education and K-12 education reform, striking the right balance between bottom-up and top-down reforms is a crucial, if tricky, challenge.

Does NCLB Need a Basic Rewrite?

Sara Mead — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:21:00 -0400

This week I'm participating in an online debate about the future of the No Child Left Behind Act at www.newtalk.org. Other participants include Chris Cerf, Checker Finn, Rick Hess, Ryan Hill, Philip Howard, Charles Kolb, Arthur Levine, Diane Ravitch, Thomas Rogers, Sol Stern, Gerald Tirrozi, Deborah Wadsworth, Jerry Wartgow, Randi Weingarten, and Deb White. Readers can also comment on the discussion, so come and check it out!