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This review has been accessed times since September 19, 2008

Sunderman, Gail. (Ed.) (2008) Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, & School Reform. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press Pp. 225         ISBN 978-1-4129-5788-5

Reviewed by Judith A. Green
Southern Illinois University

September 19, 2008

The 2008 Presidential Election could very well mark the end of the “cornerstone” of George W. Bush’s administration, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as we currently know it. From the time it was signed into law, a plethora of literature from a variety of venues has emerged to address specific aspects of the legislation, e.g. politics, funding, social justice, civil rights, historical perspective, accountability, policy, practice, and education reform. What distinguishes Holding NCLB Accountable from previous examinations of NCLB is its origin. The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, in partnership with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University sponsored the roundtable discussions on the No Child Left Behind Act that gave rise to the book’s concepts and suggestions.

Gail Sunderman, the editor, is a senior research associate in K-12 Education for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where she directs a five-year study examining the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. She is co-author of the book, NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field (2005) and has written or co-authored numerous publications and reports on NCLB.

Holding NCLB Accountable “elucidate[s] the challenges of improving NCLB by showing what needs to be changed in order to meet the goals of the law” (p. 8) and exploring the issue of holding the legislation accountable through a discussion of four themes that form the main parts of the book: accountability, evidence on how it is working, state level capacity for its implementation, and its impact on school reform. The chapters that support each part of the book present an exploration of specific aspects of the themes including figures and tables where appropriate.

Throughout the book, chapters address the implications that NCLB has for low-performing, low income, minority students; students with disabilities; and English language learners with a focus on achievement gaps based on special needs, race, and economics. Daniel Koretz submits that the relativity of test-based accountability programs is difficult to determine when considering the variability of score inflation between schools for students with low average achievement while use of the mainstream accountability system for English language learners (ELL) is deemed a greater problem for this particular population.

The expectation is that the ELL subgroup within schools will achieve the level of performance that defines AYP, just like the other subgroups. However, as soon as an individual ELL student gets to a point of scoring pretty well on the assessment, that student is likely to be reclassified as fluent English proficient (FEP).This contributes to the public perception that ELL students are subject to widespread failure, and it leads to negative views of schools with many ELLs. (p. 60)

In further consideration of the impact of NCLB on diverse learners, Kornhaber states,

Students in affluent, homogeneous schools will continue to have better access to school and classroom practices that are cognitively constructive. Thus, one logical consequence of NCLB’s accountability system will be that substantive opportunities to learn will continue to diverge—and may increasingly diverge— on the basis of wealth, race, and ethnicity. (p. 46)

The authors present several additional key threads that, while not addressed as persistently as that of diverse learners, appear consistently across most of the four themes and within a number of the chapters of the book: a need for a better, more realistic accountability system; resources to meet NCLB requirements; issues of equity; and suggestions/recommendations for improving or reforming NCLB.

The concept of equity is cited as one of the more positive elements of NCLB when considered from the perspective of combating the discrepancies “in school quality and in the opportunities afforded to students” (p. 21). Yet it is presented as the exact opposite when considering the issue of equity across states relative to funding, standards, AYP measures, and proficiency on state assessments. Specifically, “all students cannot possess proficiency in reading, math, and science and yet potentially lose proficiency simply by crossing state lines” (p. 45). However,

…a national goal of equal education opportunity cannot be realized by addressing only inequality within states. The reason is simple: the most significant component of education inequality nationally is not inequality within states, but inequality between states. This fact casts a long shadow over the ideal of equal opportunity. (p.103)

Another issue called into question through the exploration of interstate equality is the state’s capacity for implementing NCLB relative to professional development and support to schools and districts not making AYP. Contributors also consider how smoke and mirrors funding inhibits full compliance in each state.

While the law gave states modest funding for administration, it simultaneously imposed major new requirements. At the same time, program changes and the set-aside requirements offset much of the overall increases in funds states received. For the most demanding part of the law-the requirement that states provide additional support for low-performing schools and districts-the amount of funding appropriated under NCLB was insufficient and did not represent additional money but rather a reallocation of Title 1 funds, which reduces the funding that is available for other Title I activities. (p. 127)

The suggestions/recommendations offered by the editor and contributors of almost every chapter support many of their ideas for achieving accountability, equity, and school reform. Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, offers the overarching mantra of research, development and evaluation and supports it with recommendations of complementing in–school programs with out-of-school interventions, setting more realistic targets for improvement, using better metrics for reporting and rewarding performance on tests, and evaluating the performance of accountability systems seriously and routinely. He advises doing all that can be done to lessen the narrowing of instruction encouraged by test-based accountability and stopping the practice of taking score gains on high-stakes tests at face value.

Mindy Kornhaber, whose research focuses on educational policies, individual and human potential, and equity, asserts that modification to NCLB is the way to achieve an informative and cognitively constructive accountability system. Two of the specific language modifications she suggests are amending the language to include formative assessment and also to change the function of assessments whose use is consistent with professional and technical standards for reliability and validity from the primary means of assessing schools and districts to one of the means.

Resting the determination of school improvement on a single and simple measure of student performance and the use of the current AYP method of determining school quality are likely to narrow curriculum, diminish the importance of higher order learning, discourage implementation of fundamental improvements (so-called ‘second order changes,’ previously discussed), and lead to unfair assessment of actual contributions schools make to the academic achievement of individual students. (p. 185)

Kornhaber also suggested requiring states to develop certification and professional development programs “that enable teachers to acquire and use formative assessment competently in the classroom” (p. 54).

Linda Darling-Hammond recommends measurement and support of school success using a three-pronged alternative approach.

• Replace the counterproductive AYP formula with more instructionally useful state accountability systems designed to assess student progress through multiple measures, including performance assessments and student continuation in school;
• Evaluate gains using approaches that assess scores that encourage schools to push out low-scoring students;
• Appropriately assess the progress of ELLs and students with disabilities based on professional testing standards and “count” the gains of these students throughout their entire school careers. (pp. 170-171)

The suggestions were not without cautions against the creation of loopholes for teachers to game the system as in the case of increasing the use of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) as an audit measure in determining accountability. It could encourage some individuals to engage in various gaming tactics - inflating scores, teaching to the test – that are currently used for state assessments.

While it is debatable which assessment, NAEP or state test, is more appropriate for evaluating the effect of test-driven accountability policy, cross-examining the evidence from both measures should help. In order to determine whether test-driven external accountability policy, the hallmark of NCLB, works, we need to know how well the nation and states have improved the percentage of students meeting the standard before NCLB as well as after NCLB. (p. 88)

Holding NCLB Accountable clearly identifies the challenges and opportunities inherent in the current NCLB Act and proffers the thoughts, ideas, and findings of educators whose research interests are directly related to the themes that structure its organization: accountability, performance, capacity, and reform. Reality and improvement are two keywords that describe the focal point of the suggestions and recommendations for resolving the inadequacies of the NCLB Act of 2001. This book would be beneficial to P-20 educators, especially those engaged in activities associated with education reform.

Judith A. Green About the Reviewer Judith A. Green is an Associate Professor of Educational Administration at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has served in the field of education as a general and special education teacher, elementary principal, Director of Special Education, Assistant Superintendent, and Assistant Professor of elementary education. 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 | Reseñas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements | search ~