Your editor almost let “How to Fix No Child Left Behind”, an article by Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe in the May 24 issue of Time, pass without comment. Aside from the fact that it never discusses the important role of private providers of school improvement services in leaving no child behind, it is a reasonable summary of the law’s political controversies.

But two items have not stopped nagging to be addressed.

The first is a line of thinking attributed to California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connnell. The story implies that he believes NCLB’s emphasis on Adequate Yearly Progress, which requires schools to get every student to basic proficiency in key subjects as measured by state tests by 2014, creates what the reporters' call “perverse incentives.” Specifically, by requiring schools to focus more resources on students who are not proficient, NCLB is shortchanging students who are proficient or better.

This item is troubling. The essence of a "perverse incentive" is unintended negative consequences. By this standard, the reallocation of resources from students who can at least meet basic requirements in math and literacy, to those who can’t – in no small part because historically they were children of color denied adequate resources – was neither unintended nor negative. It was the avowed objective of the law and a very good thing.

It would be very disturbing if California’s superintendent actually believes this, given the vast number of poor students in California who are benefiting from the long overdue redistribution of wealth. But it is also disturbing as the way the reporters chose to describe the effect – an approach that appears quite sympathetic to why “the law is unpopular in wealthier, high-achieving communities.” What’s perverse here is characterizing NCLB’s goal of redistributing resources from the affluent to the poor as perverse. The reporters should have added something to this discussion from Secretary Spellings‘ speech to the NAACP Summit on May 19 describing NCLB as a civil rights law. Indeed, the idea that any chief state school officer would actually associate himself with this idea is so outlandish that this posting will be brought to the attention of O'Connell's press staff for comment.

(Parenthetically, the article also leaves the reader a bit confused on how to square the idea of growth models for AYP with its requirement of 100% student proficiency by 2014. For one example of how it can be done, read the summary of Ohio's program in this week's New Education Economy. ®)

The second item is the reporters’ discussion of the negative “unintended consequence” of “growing evidence that schools are giving short shrift to other subjects” in order to help students pass the reading and math tests.

The troubling point here is the reporters' decision that teaching to the test is a "consequence" of NCLB. Here "consequence" means "result." This strikes your editor as sloppy thinking. Unlike the reallocation of resources towards the less proficient, paying less attention to civics was not intended by the legislation itself. 

Arguably it was not unintended in the sense of “unknown.” Education reformers understand the “teach to test” phenomenon and could reasonably predict that administrators and teachers would approach NCLB's testing regime just as they have their state systems.

And this takes us to an equally credible view of causation the reporters failed to explain. Experience in life shows that people who don’t know what they are doing, do what they know. Experience in education reform shows that after a point, more hours of drill and kill focused on the test offer diminishing returns to student performance, an negative returns for some. Reading and math skills can be infused in almost every subject – to the point of transparency to the student – when teachers feel responsible for the total student rather than one subject, work in teams, and use student data to inform instruction; and when students are engaged in learning through paths they find interesting. Today's dominant, labor-intensive, "brute force" approach to teaching and learning - where test taking is an end rather than a means - is hardly a consequence of NCLB. It precedes the law by perhaps fifty years. "Teach to the test" reflects the capacity of a teaching force whose skill set has not moved far beyond circa 1970 and the public school systems’ failure to adapt and develop the broad surround of innovative teaching and learning programs that have been available for the past twenty years.

And that brings us back to the reporters' failure to discuss the growing role of the private sector in school improvement.