Can No Child Left Behind Close the Gaps in Pass Rates on Standardized Tests

I. INTRODUCTION In a follow-up to the 1966 Coleman report, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) documented large and sustaining gaps in student achievement across almost all socioeconomic and demographic groups in the United States. In the continuing struggle to eliminate these gaps, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (public law 107-110, NCLB) in January 2002. NCLB stipulates that "all students will meet or exceed the state's proficient level of academic achievement" by 2014. Moreover, adequate yearly progress must be demonstrated separately for "economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency" (pp. 1446-48). Prior to NCLB's passage, much research discussed the merits and possible pitfalls of high-stakes testing and education accountability systems (Hanushek and Raymond 2001; Ladd 2001; Murnane and Levy 2001). Since its passage, NCLB has come under attack from many angles. It is underfunded. The punishments for not "progressing" are quick to be threatened and are overly severe. Standardized tests fail to accurately measure skill levels. It encourages teaching to the test in place of a well-rounded curriculum. States can increase test scores by lowering standards. And so on. (1) Despite their possible merits, the authors ignore all of these criticisms and accept the goal of having all students achieve a proficient level of academic achievement as measured by their performance on a standardized test. In this context, therefore, the purpose of this article is to quantify the degree to which the worst-performing schools can realistically increase their pass rates and thereby narrow the gap in pass rates by removing inefficiencies and/or mimicking the education practices of better-performing schools. The authors do this by estimating education production functions, in which average pass rates are the output and school characteristics--some of which schools choose (like class size) and some of which schools cannot choose (like the percent of students from low-income households)--are the inputs. The estimates of the production functions are then used to define the gap in pass rates as the difference between the average pass rate of the worst-performing schools and the average predicted pass rate of better performing schools. The authors then decompose this gap into three parts--the portion due to characteristics that money can buy, the portion due to uncontrollable factors, and the portion due to regression error. Because the regression error accounts for about 40% of the gap, the interpretation of the regression error will greatly affect policy implications. Finally, a brief comment on achievement gaps is warranted. First, according to the Coleman report, an achievement gap exists when there is a gap in average academic skills across identifiable groups of students, such as whites and blacks. NCLB considers a different gap. It is concerned not with differences in average levels but with the percent of students who do not demonstrate an acceptable level. If literacy is the standard, for example, then NCLB is concerned with getting all students to be literate rather than ensuring that all groups of students have the same average reading skills. NCLB, therefore, could be successful in eliminating its defined gap of literacy while exacerbating achievement gaps as defined by the Coleman report. In an attempt to evaluate NCLB, therefore, the authors focus on the pass rate of students as defined by those that meet or exceed state standards. Second, the authors do not evaluate the narrowing of pass rates across student demographic groups, which is most appropriately done with student-level data. Rather, the authors are in a better position to simply evaluate the narrowing of pass rates within student demographic groups. Thus the potential effects of NCLB may be much weaker than what is documented because the authors focus solely on closing the gap within subgroups, for example, between Hispanics in the worst and best schools and not, say, between Hispanics in the worst schools and whites in the best schools. …