Travis Hicks of the Title I Monitor writes that the Department of Education has not provided the states with reviews of their progress under NCLB, as required by Section 6161 of the law.  The reviews are essential as management and reporting tools in the implementation of this complex, costly and politically sensitive legislation. They are a specific precondition of the technical assistance the states are to receive from the feds to address shortfalls, and essential to Department reports to Congress on state compliance with the law. 

As the debate over NCLB reauthorization continues, swinging in the direction of a version II much weaker than the original, the Administration's case is hardly bolstered by its incapacity to provide states with feedback and support.  Opponents have another telling example of Administration incompetence, along with the Reading First fiasco. The point boils down to "walking the talk." Expect to hear opponents of the law say: "If the feds can't follow the law, how can they expect anyone else to do so? This just proves it's too complicated, onerous and under-resourced."

Your editor finds the source of failure at two levels - the culture of the Department of Education, and the capacity of the class from which political appointees are drawn. 

No Child Left Behind is an effort to create an entirely new - and national - system of public education. It replaced a set of complex measures unrelated to consequences, with a simple measure of student performance tied to serious consequences. It imposed a requirement to collect, analyze and act on student data in near real time.  It created a support system of funding, technical assistance and programs based on scientific research to help states, districts, schools, teachers and ultimately students meet the measures of success. It created a system of consequences - like SES and choice - to help students in schools that fell short of standards, that also put pressure on those schools and their districts. It invited the private sector to supply products, services, and programs in support of schools and where consequences called for students to receive additional help. It created standards for deciding whether those offerings would be supoported with federal funds.

The implementation of NCLB called for a U.S. Department that looks nothing like the one that existed in 2001 (or today).

• Implementation of NCLB required a department that internalized responsibility for moving the country from one system to another. Yet this department was no less a creature of the old system than the states and districts it was expected to guide.

• It required substantial staff capacity in analysis and operational planning, yet this department outsources most of its research and analysis, and viewed planning more as the creation of documents for press conferences and presentations to Congress.

• It required some understanding of the capacity of our nation to supply what schools needed, and to encourage expansion of that supply. But this department had virtually no institutional knowledge of the k-12 education industry; limited capacity to oversee the kind research and development process feeding product development that holds in the Departments of Energy, Defense and Agriculture; and insufficient expertise to come up with a definition of scientifically based research relevant to an emerging marketplace.

It's not so much that the Department of Education had no people with such skills, although they were certainly a minority. The department was organized to support the old system, and needed to be reorganized -  to support the new system and, at least as important, to make clear that the old system was in the past.

Here's where the Bush Administration's political appointees failed. They simply lacked the intellectual capacity to conceptualize and fill out the marketplace implied by NCLB, and the operational capacity to conceive the bureacratic structures required to achieve that vision. The Department didn't fail to create a useful definition of SBR, it's political leadership didn't see the importance. The Department isn't responsible for turning Reading First from the bleeding edge of the new market into an opportunity for corruption, the leadership let it happen. The Department hasn't failed to review state progress under NCLB, the political leadership didn't make it happen. No Secretary has addressed the Education Industry Association, the Department lacks any significant official with personal responsiblity for relations with the k-12 industry - let alone school improvement providers, because the leadership doesn't consider it important.

Perhaps the most disappointing feature of the current trend to weaken NCLB in version II is that so much of the mess is a function of poor leadership at the Department.  They just never grasped the enormity of the vision, and they lacked the expertise and mindset required to see it realized.