Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education for the desegregation of the nation’s schools, many low-income and minority children still lack access to quality educational opportunities. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused on improving those opportunities by requiring all public schools that receive Title I education grants -- a mainstay of domestic education policy -- to meet accountability and academic performance standards.
Gary Orfield is co-director of the Civil Rights Project -- a civil rights research organization and Mott grantee -- at Harvard University and professor of education and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In the following Q&A, Orfield discusses some of the educational and civil rights concerns raised by No Child Left Behind, as well as efforts by the project to inform the national debate.
Mott:
Why is education reform -- and the No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB] in particular -- of such interest to a project focused on civil rights?
Gary Orfield (GO):
We believe that civil rights is about equal opportunity for all racial and ethnic groups in a society, including equal access to a quality education. Education is key to opening the door to living-wage jobs and to making an impact on the other issues that keep these groups marginalized, yet it’s historically been unfairly distributed in this country.
No Child Left Behind was an extremely important opportunity to do something about these shortcomings. Its goal of having a qualified teacher in every classroom is wonderful. Its ideas of having performance standards for students, of holding schools accountable for meeting those standards, and collecting information about the academic progress of racial and ethnic groups can all be very good things.
The problem is that, despite some good objectives, the mechanisms by which they are supposed to be achieved are both poorly defined and based on a weak understanding of how you actually change schools. The result is that the effects are sometimes counter productive and can even unintentionally undermine educational opportunities for the very kids the act is supposed to help.
Mott:
In your opinion, in what ways is NCLB moving toward its intended objectives? In what ways is it failing them?
GO:
The act has sparked significant activity in terms of gathering data about how individual schools are meeting -- or not meeting -- performance standards, and the performance of various groups of kids throughout the system. There has also been some effort to get more qualified teachers into the classrooms and to provide at least some resources for early reading and drop-out prevention programs. These are definitely good things.
The fundamental problem is that it also requires every school receiving Title I funds -- which most public schools do -- to perform at or above a fixed set of standards within a specific number of years. It also says they must make measurable progress each year in closing the academic achievement gaps among sub-groups of students. But while those are admirable goals, the act failed to follow through on its promise to provide the resources that would help schools to meet them. This is especially a problem for schools in high poverty areas and with high minority enrollment, since they’ve traditionally lacked the money to build strong programs in the first place.
No Child Left Behind also seems to believe that schools can be motivated to reach these goals by either sanctioning them when they fail or by allowing students to move to higher performing schools. But often when one school in a community is failing, others located nearby are likely to be in financial- or performance-related trouble themselves. In fact, there is no empirical evidence to show that these mechanisms work in any productive or meaningful way for the students, the schools or their communities.
Mott:
What were some of the assumptions that went into the creation of NCLB and how have they since fared?
GO:
One key assumption was that educators and teachers would resist standards and would be unwilling to do what was necessary to reach them. Yet in our own studies we’ve found that 80 percent of teachers do want performance standards; they just want them to be appropriate and within reach, given the resources they have available to them.
This illustrates the key problem with the act, which is that such assumptions weren’t really explored or discussed with the right people at the time the legislation was designed. If you read the entire act, there are many really wonderful -- and an equal number of not so wonderful -- parts that were drafted at the end of a congressional session with virtually no input from educators, community leaders or civil rights folks.
Our focus at the Project is not about challenging the motives of those who supported No Child Left Behind, but changing the process by which future versions of the legislation are drafted and ensuring that everyone necessary is at the table.
Mott:
What do you consider to be the potential and appropriate role of education policy in helping to address issues of poverty, racism and inequality?
GO:
Education policy needs to acknowledge that schools don’t exist in a vacuum. Many children arrive at kindergarten with huge gaps in their development, yet we expect schools -- particularly those with the fewest resources -- to make up for that. This is where No Child Left Behind has fallen short, in that it promises the public that schools will be held responsible for accomplishing goals that many simply can’t reach without additional support. This type of education policy will never produce equality if we don’t think about its framework more broadly and make sure that the right resources are in place.
We also need to look at the way education policy in this country continues to discriminate, even inadvertently, against low-income and minority kids. Collecting data about how well -- or how poorly -- various sub-groups of students are doing in meeting academic standards is great if you then use the information to help the schools and students improve. If you instead use it for sanctions and accelerate the deterioration of inner-city schools and neighborhoods, then you’re only contributing to the problem.
We need to use education policy to realize and redefine the ways of creating positive change, rather than as a destructive force that punishes those who need help the most.
Mott:
Where is the national conversation on education policy headed and in what way will the Civil Rights Project be involved?
GO:
There is very active discussion going on about what needs to be done with education policy, particularly with future versions of No Child Left Behind. Schools considered to be ‘high performing’ and located in more affluent communities have also fallen short of the benchmarks and have been sanctioned, which has helped raise awareness of the act’s shortcomings.
I also think that as concerns over the administration of No Child Left Behind are worked out between the federal, state and local governments, we’re going to see revisions that make the act perhaps less punitive.
[The Civil Rights Project] will stay involved by studying and providing information about the consequences of education policy on poor and minority students and schools, as well as what might be done to make the system work better. We’re going to continue to work to bring the voices of community folks, educators and civil rights leaders to the conversation about those policies. And we’re going to help explain back to the public the concerns and progress of the nation’s schools and education policies.