Ruly Crew: Lessons from the Clinton Administration's Attempts to Cajole the States into Complying with Federal Mandates for Standards-Based Reform. (Feature)

The no child left behing act, signed by President Bush in January 2002, builds squarely on the framework of standards-based reform established in Goals 2000 and the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). These two pieces of legislation, proposed by President Clinton, forged a new federal-stare partnership to implement in every state an accountability system based on challenging standards and aligned assessments for all students. They also targeted federal resources to high poverty schools and provided states, districts, and schools with greater flexibility in the use of federal resources in order to achieve results. While there are substantial continuities between the Clinton and Bush reforms, there are also some important differences that will bear significantly on the implementation challenges now facing states and the federal government. The 1994 legislation recognized that states had been leading the education reform movement for more than a decade, and it sought to bring the federal government into line with the standards-based reforms being formulated at the state level. Together Goals 2000 and the 1994 ESEA reauthorization provided a broad and flexible framework for state action, and deliberately placed considerable trust in states to work out the details themselves. In contrast, the No Child Left Behind Act reflects significant impatience in Washington with the pace of state-led improvement and, in particular, with the slow pace at which states have instituted tough accountability systems. The legislation contains new and highly prescriptive testing and accountability requirements for states. It requires more testing and more frequent testing, sets a 12year timetable by which every state and every school must bring every student and every demographic subgroup of students up to proficiency, and spells out in more detail than previously the consequences for schools that fail to make adequate progress toward this goal. These provisions substantially shift the historic balance of federal vs. state control over education. They combine new federal dictates over the timing of improvement with continued state control over the standards for improvement, perhaps providing perverse incentives for states to lower the academic standards they recently adopted. In addition, most analysts believe that the new definition of "adequate yearly progress" included in the statute will result in a substantial proportion of the schools in each state immediately being identified as failing, due as much to the statistical properties of the definition as to the quality of the schools in question. Implementation of the new law will therefore pose significant challenges to the states and the federal government. States will be looking for ways to meet new federal requirements without seriously disrupting their own standards-based reforms. The U.S. Department of Education will be working to ensure full compliance with the new requirements, but realistically must also provide states with enough flexibility to adapt the requirements to the states' varying circumstances. Requirements for states to implement systems of standards, assessments, and accountability have been the central feature of federal elementary and secondary education programs since 1994. They have also been the most politically difficult to craft and implement. Their successful implementation this time will depend on the willingness and ability of federal and state officials to negotiate a complex set of technical, political, and organizational challenges--and a good deal of luck. The actions that state and federal officials take to address these requirements will determine whether they provide the right pressure to drive needed changes in state and local practice, prove to be utterly unworkable, or are relegated to the margins of state and local improvement strategies. …