Myth: No Child Left Behind is not working –
the proof is in the new NAEP scores.

Lots of people are questioning whether the new scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress mean that No Child Left Behind has failed.

One example is Monty Neill, co-director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, who was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as saying:

“Once again, the NAEP scores demonstrate that the nation cannot test its way to educational quality….Congress should follow the lead of the more than 60 national education, civil rights, and religious organizations that are calling for an overhaul of this damaging federal law."

There is no question but that the new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores (see What’s New) are a bit of a disappointment, though nowhere near as bad as some are claiming. The pace of improvement slowed from 2003-2005 after some solid gains from the late 1990s. The best news coming out of what has often been called the nation’s report card is fourth-grade math, in which every group moved forward, posting the highest-ever scores since this particular NAEP test was first administered in 1990. But eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading only went up a little bit, and eighth-grade reading actually saw slight backsliding.

If NAEP scores had been better, it would have been tempting to say that No Child Left Behind is unequivocally working to improve instruction. The new NAEP results are a bit of a reality check, reminding everyone that laws don’t educate children; adults educate children.

But it is too much of a reach to say that No Child Left Behind is not working. What NCLB does is set up signaling systems that allow us to know whether children are learning the rock-bottom minimum skills and knowledge without which they will be adrift in the modern world. It also sets up school-improvement processes that are only now kicking in.

Each state sets its own standards, curricula, and assessment systems, and NAEP is the outside audit of whether states are in fact doing what they say they are doing. It was No Child Left Behind that required every state to participate in NAEP and that required that NAEP be administered every two years.

So NCLB is working insofar as it is keeping attention focused on student achievement, letting us know where there are problems, and requiring schools to have plans to fix problems.

NAEP should be used as the signaling devise it is supposed to be, alerting us that middle schools do not seem to have figured out how to move all our 12-year-olds to proficiency in reading or mathematics. But this is not news. We have known for a long time that reforms have been focused on elementary schools, leaving secondary schools in many ways untouched. NAEP is yet another confirmation of what we already knew.

NAEP should also be a warning that we have not yet completely figured out reading instruction, even in the elementary years. It is too soon to tell if Reading First, which is the major early reading initiative of the federal government, is having an effect, because Reading First is focused on the early grades. We won’t begin seeing its effect until the next NAEP.

But certainly there is cause to wonder if reading instruction has been too narrowly focused on reading strategies and not enough on building the kind of background knowledge that allows children to analyze and make inferences from text, which is what NAEP asks them to do. Each state will have to go through the NAEP results carefully to see what information it contains and see where they need to adjust and recalibrate.

That’s the point of a signaling system – to provide information that can be used to change course.

But it would be nonsensical to claim that the signaling system has failed because it told us bad news.