No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools

2. The Problem of Quality

CHAPTER 2 The Problem of Quality How do you improve your educational product when you can neither describe the product nor explain how it is produced? James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy What, exactly, do teachers and principals do with and for children when they are at school? Parents send their children to school for the better part of their waking lives but rarely have much of an idea about what has happened at the critical interface between their minds and the variety of experiences they encounter and in which they have engaged. At the end of the school day, parents will ask their child, “So, how was school today?” and she will probably say, “Fine.”1 The problem is that no one else really knows, either, at least not with absolute certainty. The child’s teacher—if he is attentive and responsive—probably has a better idea about how well the student is doing than anyone else, especially if the child is young. But even the child’s teacher cannot tell for sure whether the student is engaging with the material or whether her peers and parents are reinforcing or undermining his efforts. Chances are that the principal does not know more than the teacher. She probably has a pretty good assessment of her teachers’ level of effort and competence, but when she walks through the door, she witnesses a performance rather than an 25 accurate picture of what goes on day to day—although the principal of course knows this. The principal’s administrative superiors know even less than the principal does, but because they are living under No Child Left Behind, they assign standardized tests to the students. These tests may measure some things more or less accurately but have their own consequences. The teacher—if he feels that there will be real effects from his students’ test scores—may alter his teaching to have the students perform better on the tests. If we did not like what the teacher was doing, such changes may be bene‹cial. The problem, of course, is that we did not know what he was doing in the absence of our test, so we cannot ever say if his reorientation was good or bad. It is hardly a trivial problem. Any accountability program such as No Child Left Behind must accurately measure what a given school or teacher is adding to the knowledge and skills of a given student, above and beyond the following: how innately “smart” the student is; how well prepared the student was before coming to this school or to this teacher; how rich or poor the student is; how well the student has mastered standard English; how chaotic or predictable the student’s life is; how healthy the student is; how hungry the student is; how motivated the student is; how much the student’s peers reinforce or hinder the school or teacher’s efforts; how involved the parents are; how helpful their involvement is; how safe the school is; and how clean, toxin-free, and well-equipped the school is. Filtering out all of these factors is not an easy task, even when the body politic is united in the underlying goal of what constitutes a 26 NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS “good” education, which may or may not be the case today. But this is exactly what No Child Left Behind purports to do. In this chapter I begin with the most basic and most challenging questions when thinking about NCLB’s prospects: What determines educational quality? How, if at all, can we observe and identify it? Answering these questions requires a bit of thinking about how, if at all, any public policy can secure excellence amid so much uncertainty and complexity. Though I will digress into a bit of economics and organizational theory, understanding how organizations cope with complexity is critical to evaluating No Child Left Behind’s effects on the public schools. Both NCLB’s proponents and its opponents have gotten a bit ahead of themselves in trying to envision the long-term effects of this law without adequately considering the basic challenge that we may never be able to measure with perfect certainty how well a school or a teacher is doing with any single measure of educational performance. In this book, I also ask readers to adopt the point of view of a public school principal trying to...