No Child Left Behind = More High School Dropouts

Anonymous, thanks for your comments.

I think you are misunderstand what the originally cited article meant by high stakes. I recommend reading the article itself rather than my brief excerpts from it, but here's another key paragraph from it.

In short, NCLB’s accountability requirements led to the pressures that fed the dropout rate, says Linda McSpadden McNeil, a professor of education at Rice and the study's lead author. "What we found is, the higher the stakes—whether principals get a bonus or lose their jobs, or whether your school could lose funding or even be closed if the scores don't go up—then the greater the likelihood that the adults in the system start to look at the kids according to whether they are assets to the schools' rankings or whether they are liabilities."

The tests were not being used as a graduation requirement, but the high stakes schools faced for poor performance inevitably affected the way the principals and teachers did their jobs. There was a benefit to getting rid of poor performers, which means there was (probably not consciously or deliberately) little effort to encourage potential dropouts to stay.

The book I reviewed showed how high-stakes testing affected a middle school. I'm sure the designers of NCLB explicitly warned against teaching to the test, but in practice, that has been the near universal response of educators whose jobs or raises have depended on measured performance on it. In the excerpt of my review that I quoted in the original posting, I state, "This behind-the-scenes view of a real school at work reveals that Tyler Heights would be a success story whether its students are tested or not."

The school is considered a poster child for NCLB, but the truth is more complex--or perhaps it is simpler. This school was led by Tina McKnight, a gifted principal who knew that her job was to facilitate learning, no matter the external requirements imposed by the board of education. She had to use a curriculum that directly addressed how to perform better on the NCLB tests, but as I note later in the review:

Regardless of curriculum or school policies, the key to learning is found in the day-to-day interaction between caring teachers and their students. Tina McKnight's success comes from recognizing that her job is to provide an environment that brings out the best in such everyday moments.

She provides leadership, encouragement, and resources. Then she gets out of the way. As Congress reconsiders No Child Left Behind, they would do well to follow her example. Provide legislation that facilitates learning, not artificial priorities that impede it. Then get out of the way.

NCLB is a great example of what engineers like to call "the Law of Unintended Consequences." The data show an increase in high school dropouts, and it is not unreasonable, given further research, to recognize that the increase is an unintended consequence of this particular approach to making educators more accountable for the results of their work.

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)