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This review has been accessed times since September 3, 2008

Rebell, Michael & Wolff, Jessica (2008). Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity. (Foreword by Susan Fuhrman) New York: Teachers College Press Pp. 164         ISBN 0807748501

Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot
University of Georgia

September 3, 2008

Writing in The New Republic in 2005, Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress argued that the Democratic Party ought to stop lambasting No Child Left Behind: “It’s stunning to see Democrats lose their edge on education.” Criticizing his party for what he saw as its sole demands for “money, money, and money,” he proposed that the Democrats’ first task in building an affirmative education policy agenda should be

. . . to stop the unprincipled attacks on NCLB. At its heart, this is the sort of law liberals once dreamed about. In the 1970s, liberal litigators fell one vote short of a Supreme Court decision requiring evenhanded education funding. NCLB doesn’t guarantee funding, but it goes one step further by demanding educational results. It says that, when states accept federal funding, they must ensure that all children (except the most disabled) meet “challenging academic standards. This has made achievement a legal command, not just a gauzy aspiration. The law requires a form of affirmative action: States must show that poor and minority students are achieving proficiency like everyone else, or else provide remedies targeted to the schools those students attend. The law’s unyielding demands have created a powerful tool to raise both expectations and money (Gordon, 2005).

Gordon is speaking as part of the left that views NCLB as a legislative boon to the civil rights agenda. Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff’s Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity similarly takes this view. However, these authors go into far greater detail about what kind of federal-state compact might enhance the likelihood of realizing what they see as NCLB’s promise.

Drawing on papers presented at a convening of policy scholars at Teachers College Columbia in fall of 2006, entitled “Examining America’s Commitment to Closing Achievement Gaps: NCLB and its Alternatives,” the book presents a vision of a federal role that, in addition to holding schools accountable, would require states to provide students with both in-school and out- of-school opportunities to learn. What’s different about this work is that it advances an intellectual and legal framework for how the federal role might actually be re-shaped. Outside of legal circles, that kind of contribution has been rare over the course of the past seven years, during which the policy community has primarily analyzed the politics behind NCLB’s enactment (DeBray, 2006; McGuinn, 2006; McDonnell, 2005); studied and reported on various implementation problems while making recommendations for improvements to the law (i.e., Sunderman, Kim, & Orfield, 2005); and critiqued the emphasis on testing at the expense of other goals (Rothstein, 2004; Valenzuela, 2004; Nichols & Berliner, 2007).

Intellectually, Rebell and Wolff’s work is most strongly related to work by a group of legal scholars, based at the Earl Warren Institute in the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley – Goodwin Liu, Stephen Sugarman, Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., and scholars from other universities, including Rebell himself -- who have been engaged in a project entitled Rethinking Rodriguez. Many of the writing stemming from the project has involved an investigation of possible legal and legislative avenues to securing the right to education, which has been recognized in human rights law (see Robinson, 2007). These scholars’ legal perspectives run a wide gamut: some disagree with the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in its 1973 opinion in San Antonio v. Rodriguez and contend that education should be recognized as a fundamental right. Others, like Matthew Brunnell, argue “that education should be recognized as a judicially enforceable right, but that it need not be a fundamental right” (Robinson, 2007, p. 1685). Goodwin Liu has argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s national citizenship clause authorizes Congress to “ensure a meaningful floor of educational opportunity throughout the nation” (Liu, 2006, p. 330). The intersection between this Boalt Hall project and Rebell and Wolff’s book is the question of how federal policy might work toward ensuring that states provide an adequate education, or “meaningful educational opportunity.” Rebell and Wolff, like Liu and Robinson, contend that federal legislation can play a major role in establishing this right (though both Liu and Robinson argue for doing so in provisions other than the NCLB statute).

Michael Rebell

The book’s introductory chapters (1-3) outline the history of “equality of opportunity” in American education, document and discuss the extent of poverty and inequality as it affects education, and trace the evolution of federal policy to the point of No Child Left Behind. While these chapters are all important context for their argument, particularly for readers less fluent in the history of the federal role, it is in Chapters Four through Nine that that they lay out their vision for modification of the federal role: creating “meaningful educational opportunity” as well as ameliorating what they see as the unworkable accountability provisions of the current statute. I will focus my review on those chapters.

The central problem with NCLB implementation, according to the authors, is that the law’s stated emphasis on opportunity has been de-emphasized in favor of the accountability provisions. This over-emphasis has put the federal role, as it actually plays out at the ground level of instructional practice and state administration, out of balance. The emphasis on all students proficient by 2014 has led to short-sightedness with respect to the law’s stated goal of “ensuring that all children have a fair, equal and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education.”

They write (p. 41):

Althoughaccountability pressures can affect the motivation of school personnel and influence their performance to some degree, the critical goals of the act – elimination of the achievement gap and sustained, high-level academic achievement by virtually all students—cannot be achieved unless mechanisms are also put into place that recognize and overcome the severe opportunity gaps created by the conditions of poverty [described in this chapter].

Building on what states have done in efforts to secure an adequate education, the federal level could attempt to enforce that states are engaged in assuring “meaningful” educational opportunity for its students. Observing that the term “significant” made its way into NCLB, they suggest that in future iterations, Congress instead use the term “meaningful,” because it has been used by state courts and legislatures in ways that have been tied to tangible resources and benefits for students (p 64). This idea is akin, though not identical to, what Kimberly Jenkins Robinson has written (pp. 1713-1714): that the federal right to education could be defined through legislation; and that “the legal requirement would mandate that states provide equal educational opportunity while the inclusion of the aim of developing each child to her or his fullest potential serves to encourage states to increase educational opportunities and to discourage states from engaging in substantial leveling down of revenues, which occurred in some districts after school finance decisions required equality in the school finance system.”

Indeed, a large part of what Rebell and Wolff argue is that over the past several decades, state courts have had to grapple, through litigation about educational adequacy, with the components of state constitutional rights to (for instance), “thorough and efficient education,” “high quality education,” or “sound basic education.” They assert that there is a state court consensus that has identified essential school-based resources, including (p. 71-72): “effective teachers, principals, and other personnel; appropriate class sizes; adequate school facilities; rich and rigorous curricula; a full platform of services, including guidance services, after-school, summer, and weekend programming, tutoring; and additional time on task for students from backgrounds of poverty. . . “ (the list continues beyond this excerpt)

Central to Rebell and Wolff’s argument is that Congress should. . . undertake “a comprehensive study on the costs to states and local districts of 1) complying with the administrative processes of NCLB; and 2) achieving the proficiency goals of NCLB and/or closing the achievement gap.” (p. 103) Further, they write, “the comprehensive cost analyses should consider the costs not only of essential school-based resources, but also the costs of the most important out-of-school support services that students from backgrounds of concentrated poverty need to succeed on a sustained basis.” (p. 103) The authors assume that from this knowledge base and agreement on what constitutes “meaningful” educational opportunity would flow legislation, and then administrative oversight.

The strength of this work is that it looks to a vision of the federal role way beyond the confines of test-based accountability – it looks beyond the traditional framework of categorical programs to a more comprehensive vision. “To implement NCLB effectively and to realize the Brown vision, then, what is needed at this point is to identify the key elements of meaningful educational opportunity that have been substantiated by educational research and articulated in legal and legislative terms by the courts, Congress, and state legislatures in the past, and to shape them into statutory concepts that can give substance, direction, and coherence to the act.” (p 65) By playing an active role in defining “adequacy,” Congress would be building on what the authors describe as the knowledge base accrued in state-level adequacy lawsuits.

These are the twin principles on which the book rests: that the opportunity part of the legislation should be developed AND the NCLB version of accountability improved upon. The authors, remaining consistent throughout in their argument that NCLB is the right model for closing the achievement gap, are dedicated to fixing its accountability flaws. Chapter 7 is the authors’ recommendations about how state content standards may be certified as high-quality and valid; how adequate yearly progress can be calibrated to a growth model; and how unworkable adequate yearly progress requirements for special education and limited English-proficient students at the school level can be scaled back while still ensuring these students have opportunities to learn the curriculum. In insisting that the two precepts cannot be divorced from each other, they never fundamentally question whether the NCLB accountability paradigm is too proscriptive for states, whether the sub-group accountability requirements might have consequences for racially diverse schools that are beyond repair, or whether the mandated testing in grades 3 through 8 might be scaled back in favor of supporting the other kinds of interventions they care about.

However, there are several underlying legal, political, and administrative issues with which the authors do not deal explicitly. One is constitutional: the right to “meaningful opportunity” would presumably be secured in legislation. However, as long as San Antonio v. Rodriguez stands as the Supreme Court’s decided opinion, the authors are assuming constitutional-level authority from a federal statutory provision, which makes its ultimate enforceability subject to challenge.

Even if questions of constitutionality could be resolved, there is the question of how stable the consensus derived from adequacy lawsuits actually is. In asserting that there is a “state court consensus” that could be drawn upon to help determine “meaningful” opportunity, Rebell and Wolff oversimplify the contentiousness surrounding the different methodologies for costing out adequacy at the state level. For instance, the “professional judgment” method is vastly different from the econometric approach (see, for instance, West & Peterson, 2007).

Yet another critical problem is how, exactly, federal authority and enforcement would work. Even when bright lines for states’ compliance are clearly spelled out, as they were, for instance with the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, it is still the U.S. Department of Education-- an administrative agency that has relatively limited potential for oversight – that must ensure that compliance. The idea that the current Office of Elementary and Secondary Education or Office of Intergovernmental and International Affairs (my assumption, they don’t mention particular offices) could assume responsibility for determining states’ adherence to providing educational opportunity is dubious.

Even with the benefit of the sophisticated cost studies they advocate, the federal-state negotiations around “meaningful opportunity” could be endless. States would submit plans and reports to the Department of Education about the resources they are providing and capacity-building offering in the major categories established by the cost studies; the Department, in turn, would present them in a way to make comparisons among states. They write that, “Presumably, education officials and policymakers in states that are failing to provide appropriate resources will be pressed by their constituents to provide more resources and to improve their practices” (p. 150). Just as successful adequacy lawsuits at the state level have often led to confusion and gridlock in legislatures about the remedies, there is a built-in layer of ambiguity about what the standards for such investments would be, who would decide, and once agreed upon, who would enforce them. Would federal officials approve a state’s plan that budgets extra for pre-K programs if that state reduced its investment in interventions for adolescents, an approach often favored by policymakers on the basis of the so-called “inoculation theory”? (see McPartland & Jordan, 1999) What about class-size reduction versus signing bonuses aimed at attracting teachers to rural or urban areas? Particularly if the current chilly state budget climate persists, it is hard to picture federal officials sanctioning states for inadequate investments.

Another consideration is the political difficulty of passing such a provision. When Congress considered creating a quasi-governmental body (the National Education Standards and Improvement Council) to certify not just state-level content standards but also “opportunity-to-learn” standards as part of the 1994 ESEA reauthorization, it was not only conservative Republicans that sabotaged it. Many governors feared that conversations about “opportunity” would become a means to hold states back indefinitely from moving ahead with standards, testing, and accountability (Jennings, 1998). While the authors are right that NCLB has created some legislative precedent for change in this regard, there is always going to be some nervousness in Congress about directing states with regard to ensuring opportunity. While true that the contours of the “meaningful educational opportunity” proposed here would be derived from the states, rather than imposed from on high, any federal certifying function (whether a board or not) is not going to be completely divorced from political influence.

It is worth recalling that in the early 1990s, when “opportunity-to-learn” standards (sometimes also called “school delivery standards”) were being debated, the National Governors Association (1993) produced a report, The Debate on Opportunity to Learn Standards, that analyzed several possible approaches. Numerous scholars, including Andrew Porter, Richard Elmore, and Susan Fuhrman, wrote papers as background. One of the fundamental questions that the report raised was, “What role should outcomes, processes, and inputs play in monitoring education performance?” (p.22) I remind us of this report because I wonder whether some of the earlier versions of proposals around opportunity-to-learn for states might be revived as a more workable set of principles to guide the future federal-state relationship than would be the undertaking of a national-level costing out of, and subsequent attempt to administer, meaningful educational opportunity. In other words, if a parsimonious model of basic school-delivery standards for states could be agreed upon, as some advocates, scholars, and politicians in the early 1990s hoped, it might prove an administratively manageable approach (though as I noted earlier, it will never be a politically simple matter to specify those delivery standards).

Finally, the assurance of a right to meaningful education through legislation should logically necessitate a far greater financial contribution from the federal government. It seems axiomatic that an establishment of a federal right to a meaningful (or adequate) education means a larger federal expenditure to ensure and enforce it. Robinson writes that “the assistance should reward those state that make good-faith efforts to provide the right to education. The federal government should also provide financial assistance to those states that encounter obstacles but make progress toward their goals. Financial assistance would serve as incentive for states to take action to guarantee the federal right and the amount would only provide a portion of the funds needed to cure the educational challenges confronting states.” (1721-22).

Rebell and Wolff don’t specify by how much the federal contribution should increase; or by how much the states’ obligations would increase. It is clear that such discussions of a more proactive federal role in education are taking place during a time of uncertain expenditures on the domestic side of the budget. However, budgetary priorities are also apt to change, and though perhaps not as quickly, so can legislative and judicial antecedents to recognition of education as a right.

This, too, raises myriad questions about what the nature of federal spending should be. Would the feds need to help remedy inter-state inequalities in per-pupil expenditures? If so, will members of Congress willingly approve greater absolute expenditures to some states whose needs are considered greater than those of others? What proportion of any new federal dollars would go into instructional programs; or what proportion for community supports and anti-poverty initiatives or birth-age 3 programs? These are precisely the questions that the five justices in the majority in Rodriguez feared were a slippery slope. Beyond this is the problem that the over-emphasis of the federal role on school-level accountability is no simple matter to reverse, as states already have many sunk costs invested in the NCLB model (see DeBray-Pelot & McGuinn, forthcoming).

Rebell and Wolff, by striving for the legislative fulfillment of Brown in the next ESEA reauthorization, demonstrate how much bold aspirations and new intellectual foundations have been missing in the discussion of what should come next for the federal role in education – both its aims and the mechanisms to support them. This work, along with that of other legal scholars I have discussed, helps to form that foundation. The biggest criticism of their proposal from conservative circles will undoubtedly be that it unrealistically defies the traditional, definable “bright lines” of the ESEA and expands the federal role too far into the realm of opportunity to learn. The challenge they pose, though, is to ask what the current bright lines (and lack of theory behind them) really have wrought against the backdrop of poverty and inequality. Thinking through how legislation ought to be crafted to support a stronger federal role in capacity-building and a less punitive role in school accountability is a very productive direction.

It is perhaps too easy to look at such an ambitious new theoretical blueprint for the federal role and point out, as I have here, the too-limited administrative capacity and budgets, and the inevitable political hurdles that would have to be cleared to fulfill them. What is vital is that we have them and deliberate about them.

References

DeBray, E. (2006). Politics, ideology, and education: Federal policy during the Clinton and Bush administrations (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).

DeBray-Pelot,E. & McGuinn, P. (forthcoming, 2009). The new politics of education: Analyzing the national educational policy landscape in the post-NCLB era. Educational Policy.

Gordon, R. (2005, June 6). Class struggle: What Democrats need to say about education. The New Republic.

Jennings, J. (1998). Why National Standards and Tests? Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Liu, G. (2006). Education, equality, and national citizenship. 116 Yale Law Journal 330.

McDonnell, L. (2005). NCLB and the federal role in education: Evolution or revolution? Peabody Journal of Education 80:2, 19-38.

McGuinn, P. (2006). No Child Left Behind and transformation of federal education policy, 1965-2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

McPartland, J. & Jordan, W. (1999). Older students also need major federal compensatory education resources. In G. Orfield and E. DeBray (Eds.), Hard Work for Good Schools: Facts Not Fads in Title I Reform (Cambridge, MA: Civil Rights Project at Harvard), pp.102-110.

National Governors Association (1993). The Debate on opportunity-to-learn standards. Washington, DC: Author.

Nichols, S. & Berliner, D. (2007) Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Rebell, M. & Wolff, J. (2008). Moving every child ahead: From NCLB hype to meaningful educational opportunity. New York: Teachers College Press.

Robinson, K.J. (2007). The case for a collaborative enforcement model for a federal right to education. 40 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1653.

Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Sunderman, G., Kim, J., & Orfield, G. (2005). NCLB meets school realities: Lessons from the field. Newbury Park, CA: Corwin Press.

Valenzuela, A., Ed. (2004). Leaving children behind: How Texas-style accountability fails latino youth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

West, M. & Peterson, P. (Eds.) (2007). School money trials: The legal pursuit of educational adequacy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

About the Reviewer

Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot is an Associate Professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy in the College of Education, University of Georgia, and Associate Director for Policy of the Georgia Education Policy & Evaluation Center. She received her Ed.D. in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2001. Her major interests are the implementation and effects of federal and state elementary and secondary school policies, and the politics of education. Dr. DeBray-Pelot served as program analyst in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), United States Department of Education, from 1992 to 1996. She is author of Politics, Ideology, and Education: Federal Policy during the Clinton and Bush Administrations (Teachers College Press, 2006), which analyzes the politics of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 106th and 107th Congresses. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman ~ ER home | Reseņas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements | search ~