No parent kept informed

After George W. Bush took office in 2001, he immediately set about fulfilling a campaign promise: reforming American public education, Texas-style.

As chief executive of the Lone Star State, Gov. Bush had presided over a public-school accountability system that sought to raise student achievement through a system of standardized testing. The results are still in dispute.

Disputes already are raging about whether schools are implementing key provisions of President Bush's education reform package, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-particularly the provisions that provide parents in failing schools with such alternatives as free tutoring and government-sanctioned school choice.

Frederick Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, says tutoring and school choice are "the life rafts that Congress is throwing to children in our most troubled schools." He notes that "they are also hammers intended to pound districts into taking the hard steps essential to improving those schools." Many districts, though, do not want to take hard steps.

Now, states wishing to receive federal education funds must, by the 2005-06 school year, test every child in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math annually. Each state determines what constitutes "adequate yearly progress" toward the 2014 goal of universal student proficiency, even choosing its own tests.

If a school fails to show adequate progress for two consecutive years, it must notify parents of their right to transfer their children to a higher-performing district school. The failing school must use NCLB funds to pay for the transfer, including transportation costs. In the third year of failure, failing schools must allow low-income parents to choose tutors for their children, and again, the school must pay for it. Years four, five, and six of consecutive failure bring such consequences as turning a school into a charter or the takeover of a school by a private firm.

How many districts are cooperating with the school-choice provision? The short, official answer is nobody knows, since NCLB does not require that kind of tracking. Anecdotally, the number is "dismal," according to Leaving No Child Behind? Options for Kids in Failing Schools, a book co-edited by Mr. Hess and Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn.

Why? First, most parents remain in the dark about their rights under NCLB. (In a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of respondents said they knew "very little" or "nothing at all" about the law.) Second, the public-education system is stoutly resisting change. Certainly, the grip of status-quo unionism is part of the problem, but the mechanics of NCLB funding may also be to blame.

For example, the act requires public schools to use NCLB funds to pay for school transfers and tutoring. But schools get to keep any leftover cash, providing, in theory, an incentive for success. Instead, some schools are trying to appear successful, even when failing, so that parents don't take their federal money elsewhere.

Also, under this portion of NCLB, the fox guards the henhouse: The job of notifying parents about failing schools falls to . . . the failing schools.

In Worcester, Mass., that played out last year in the form of a muddy, obtuse letter. Seventeen of the district's 46 schools had been designated as needing improvement and 4,689 students were eligible for a school transfer.

The Worcester district sent parents a letter that characterized the schools' failure this way: "Although these schools are succeeding in some areas, there is still room for growth." The letter then detailed the limitations of NCLB's grading system and criticized the law's choice provisions, telling parents that "in most instances, because of space limitations, we may not be able to transfer every child in a family to the same school." The letter also noted that parents who switch their child to a higher-performing school forfeit their right to tutoring, and set up a series of time-consuming hoops for parents to jump through in order to exercise their NCLB rights.

"Plainly, [failing] schools have every incentive to present the act as muddled and misinformed, to highlight new and innovative programs being initiated [in their own schools], and to make the process of switching schools and securing supplemental services . . . as cumbersome as possible," writes Hoover Institution fellow William Howell in Leaving No Child Behind? "To undercut the act, districts need only explain to parents (again and again) why it is such a bad idea to change schools or to entrust private companies with their educational welfare."

That strategy worked in Worcester. After parents learned they'd have to endure a series of meetings at which they would explain why they wanted to change schools while administrators explained why they shouldn't, few parents came forward to exercise their NCLB rights.

More Chicago parents are exercising their right to public-school choice, but not nearly as many as might benefit from it. Although 120,000 students were eligible to transfer in 2002, only 26,000 were allowed to apply for 2,500 slots in schools achieving adequate progress. In the end, only 737 students actually transferred. The district provided only 1,100 available seats in higher-performing schools in 2003, and this year will offer just 457 transfer seats. The district says the higher-performing schools are already full. Of those meeting NCLB standards, only 20 have space to enroll new students.

Meanwhile, analysts say NCLB's one-size approach to school transfers does not fit all districts. Maine, for example, operates a chain of public schools (80 of which are essentially one-room schoolhouses) on the hundreds of islands off its coast. Parents there are geographical captives, NCLB notwithstanding. Some sprawling districts in rural Colorado face a similar problem. Colorado education commissioner William J. Moloney met recently with 16 superintendents. Each is in charge of a rural district of over a thousand square miles dotted with a handful of far-flung schools. "Their question to me was, if we have a parent who wants to transfer, where are they going to go?" Mr. Moloney said.

In Florida, there's a different problem. Before NCLB, the Sunshine State was a model of public-school accountability, having already instituted rigorous standardized testing, minimum literacy standards for graduation, public- and private-school vouchers, and a public-school remediation system. In 1999, Florida launched its A+ Plan for Education, a system that rated the state's approximately 2,500 schools with grades A through F. Five years later, under Gov. Jeb Bush, the state had multiplied by six its number of A-rated schools, from 202 to 1,230. Florida parents were thrilled.

Then came NCLB. Under the federal accountability system, 87 percent of Florida schools did not make adequate progress in 2002-03-including 75 percent of A-rated schools. Even though both the state and federal accountability systems calculate student achievement using the same standardized test, they crunch the numbers differently on several measures. Among these, the main reason for Florida schools' failure under the federal plan is that NCLB requires states to disaggregate test scores into subgroups, including race, ethnicity, disability, limited English proficiency, and low income, while A+ does not. Under NCLB, if a single subgroup does not make adequate progress, the whole school fails. This is meant to ensure "no child" is left behind.

It also means students in some A-rated Florida schools are eligible for public-school transfers under NCLB. That's created some weird scenarios, such as when students in an A-rated Miami-Dade school were offered the option to transfer to a school that achieved adequate progress under NCLB-but was a Florida "F" school whose students were eligible for vouchers under Florida's A+ Plan.

Heritage Foundation senior education policy analyst Krista Kafer notes that the Sunshine State anomaly shows that NCLB needs tweaking. "You could say Florida was an inspiration for NCLB. They have public- and private-school choice, they rate their schools, their system predates NCLB, and it took awhile to get it in place," she said. "The disparity between worthwhile state accountability plans and NCLB absolutely needs to be fixed."

AEI's Frederick Hess agrees. In No Child Left Behind? he and co-editor Chester Finn suggest that lawmakers consider making NCLB friendlier to states that, through their own programs, demonstrate genuine receptiveness to the act's choice provisions. Also, said Mr. Hess, NCLB should be changed to "distinguish between truly horrendous schools and those that barely miss AYP [adequate yearly progress] cutoffs in one or two of the dozens of scrutinized categories." In addition, the act ought to provide districts with incentives for giving students in failing schools more school-choice options, including inter-district transfers, and non-district options such as cyber-schools, homeschools, and even private schools. And, to clear up confusion over parents' NCLB school-choice rights, Mr. Hess suggests that Congress clarify parental-notification language, forcing choice-resistant schools to make parents' rights clear.

Making NCLB's choice provisions work as intended, Mr. Hess said, "will not ensure that NCLB succeeds across the board, but it will be a promising and important step."