Harsher NCLB Sanctions May Not Lead to Better Student Achievement
Report: Comprehensive Effort Needed to Improve Struggling Schools

By JASON WERNERS

As the No Child Left Behind Act's sanctions grow increasingly stronger for schools failing to make adequate yearly progress, a new study says those penalties alone will not solve the problem.

The report bases its conclusions largely on what it calls the "first generation" accountability systems of seven states and two large districts, all of which had some form of sanctions or corrective actions for schools that did not make the state's grade before NCLB.

Instead, the report recommends states and districts commit themselves to long-term, comprehensive reform efforts that concentrate on attracting and retaining quality teachers and administrators to staff chronically struggling schools.

In many cases, test score gains of students in schools on which the sanctions were imposed were minimal at best, though some did show marked improvement. The report, recently released by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, or CRESST, sounds a cautionary note for states and districts looking for sanctions to be a "quick fix" to schools that consistently fall short of test pass-rate goals.

Neal McCluskey, education policy analyst for the Cato Institute, backed the findings of the study, adding that every dramatic reform used to save a failing school adds more bureaucracy.

"The tendency has been for schools to have autonomy until something goes wrong, and then government goes back to the regulations," McCluskey said. "It's too easy for government to re-regulate."

Sanctions, pressure not so promising

A number of states started with tough-sounding words and deadlines when they implemented their accountability systems in the 1990s. But when it came time for the sanctions to take effect, many of them retreated, either by softening the consequences or not fully applying them.

For example, Kentucky changed its terminology for struggling schools from "in decline" and "in crisis" to "in need of assistance." And only 30 of the 90 lowest-performing schools in the state were required to accept state assistance, while for the rest it was optional.

In Texas, seven schools were subject to increased state supervision in 2002. Maryland, after five years of its accountability system, had taken over only four schools and assigned them to private management companies.

Increasingly, the emphasis shifted from pressure to support. The study says the political cost of slapping heavy sanctions on schools was a factor, but, "political costs notwithstanding, the pressure strategy is a double-edged sword and not as promising as originally perceived."

Instead, states and districts have learned that while pressure has some mileage, it is far more effective to support struggling schools.

"Such programs [for low-performing schools] place heavy emphasis on support and intervention, bolster the commitment of teachers to low-performing schools, and strongly motivate educators," the report says. "Such accountability systems set goals that are deemed realistic, use assessments that are educationally meaningful (i.e., deemed valid and fair), facilitate school evaluations that allow schools to see their contribution to the performance problem, offer suggestions on how schools can improve, and identify those barriers of performance that district and state policies are called to remedy."

No silver bullet

Several methods of applying pressure to schools have produced mixed results. Replacing most or all of a school's staff led to educators in that school who were "not necessarily of higher quality than the original teaching staff, and in many schools teacher morale plummeted," the study says.

For example, in New York City, the Schools Under Registration Review program had 50 schools reconstituted and more than a 10th closed. And yet by 2003 only about half, or 153, of the SURR schools had successfully exited the program, begun in 1997, the report says.

Philadelphia used private companies to take over 45 schools. Another 25 were managed by the district's Office of Restructured Schools. Preliminary data suggest that the district's own efforts were at least as successful as those of the private companies, according to a Philadelphia School District official.

"A variety of corrective action strategies have been tried by the examined systems, but none stick out as universally effective or adequately robust to overcome the power of local context," the report says. "Competence of provider personnel, intervention designs, political power of actors in the system, and district and site organizational capacity to absorb the strategies all strongly influence how a particular strategy will turn out."

The entire report, Corrective Action in Low-Performing Schools: Lessons for NCLB Implementation from State and District Strategies in First-Generation Accountability Systems, is available at www.cse.ucla.edu/reports/r641.pdf.