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6. Carrots, Sticks, and Unbroken Windows: Making NCLB Live Up to Its Promises
- University of Michigan Press
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CHAPTER 6 Carrots, Sticks, and Unbroken Windows Making NCLB Live Up to Its Promises If we are to make use of what we knew in Dewey’s day (and know even better today) about how the human species best learns, we will have to start by throwing away the dystopia of the ant colony, the smoothly functioning (and quietly humming) factory where everything goes according to plan, and replace it with a messy, often rambunctious, community, with its multiple demands and complicated trade-offs. Deborah Meier, Educating a Democracy The measurement of educational quality is as messy and complicated as education itself. But it is not impossible, and it would be a mistake to wave our hands and assume that No Child Left Behind cannot be ‹xed. The law undoubtedly constitutes a ›awed vehicle, but it makes the kinds of promises to our most disadvantaged citizens and their children worthy of a great liberal democracy. Making NCLB work is worth the effort. As Gary Or‹eld of the Harvard Civil Rights Project has argued, “What is sorely needed now is an acknowledgment that the too-hasty compromises and contradictions [of NCLB] need to be sorted out, that experts in implementing deep educational change 130 and people who know what the reasonable expectations for progress are and how to measure progress in a more sophisticated way be brought into the process.”1 In chapter 2, I argued that experience is everything in education. It shapes success, failure, assessment, and compliance. Those closest to the production process know its quality better than anyone else, though even their assessments will never be perfectly accurate. Incentives constitute an important part of the story as well. Given the limitations on principals’ and teachers’ time resources, any high-stakes accountability plan must be formulated with careful attention to the bureaucratic responses to and unintended consequences of its evaluations and menu of consequences. Chapter 3 introduced the empirical data for the analyses: a 2003 survey of Minnesota’s public and charter school principals on their leadership, their in›uence, and No Child Left Behind. Combining these results with data on student characteristics, test score results, and adequate yearly progress (AYP) status, I found a troubling though unsurprising relationship between a school’s success and failure under No Child Left Behind and the characteristics of the student population. However, principals’ leadership decisions can matter under NCLB’s test-based regime, offering encouragement that educational outcomes are not determined by socioeconomic status alone. Chapter 4 turned the analysis around, looking at the effects of being labeled as a failing school on principals’ behaviors under and attitudes toward No Child Left Behind. Troublingly, AYP identi‹cation does not appear to be associated with a reenergized and refocused principalship but with risk aversion and a loss of in›uence. I also examined principalship in charter schools, whose dependence on customer preferences—according to the theory laid out in chapter 2—offers inducements toward a more proactive and customerfocused principalship. Though Minnesota’s charter schools have a startlingly high AYP failure rate, it may well result from the effects of NCLB’s status model of quality assessment rather than from de‹ciencies in the charter school principalship. I concluded by questioning the logic of denying traditional public schools the bene‹ts of an incentive structure that combines bureaucratic autonomy with a more stakeholder-focused leadership. Carrots, Sticks, and Unbroken Windows 131 [18.232.169.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:38 GMT) In chapter 5, I discussed three alternatives to NCLB’s status approach to quality assessment: growth, value-added, and production models of measurement. Though more data are needed, patterns of success under growth models appear to differ from and be preferable to what we see under the current status approach. Charter schools would likely do better under either alternative, as would many traditional public schools with large percentages of minority students and of students eligible for free and reduced price-lunch that were doing the kinds of things that excellent schools do. I then turned to data from the Minneapolis Public Schools, incorporating the results of parent and student surveys into my larger data set of AYP success and failure along with student and school characteristics . These investigations produced striking results. Though the Minneapolis Public Schools displayed a very high rate of failure—not unlike many urban school systems around the country—schools whose students and teachers felt them to be safe and orderly, focused on curricular standards, and...