Trick or treat: new ecology of education accountability system in the USA

Abstract

This study tracks American states’ policy choices under the No Child Left Behind Act and explores their consequences for student achievement. Using the path analysis of relationships among state‐level policy input, context, and outcome variables, the study portrays a Halloween‐like ‘trick‐or‐treating’ game between the federal and state governments in the new ecology of the test‐driven education accountability system. States that chose the ‘trick’ path with a calculative policy negotiation and manipulation strategy made significant gains on their own state assessments but not on the national assessment. In contrast, states that followed the ‘treat’ path with a faithful policy implementation for funding strategy have not yet brought about significant gains on either the national or state assessments. The first‐generation accountability states with a prior history of high‐stakes testing tended to employ both strategies at the same time. However, neither effective illusion nor ineffective implementation serves the goal of long‐term, sustainable academic improvement. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Keywords:

• high‐stakes testing
• accountability
• NCLB
• assessment
• federalism
• policy analysis

Notes

1. If schools in need of improvement continuously fail to meet their AYP targets, they are subject to subsequent stages of sanction and intervention under NCLB: (1) school transfer, (2) supplementary education service, (3) corrective action, (4) restructuring (first year), (5) restructuring (second year). The percentages of schools at each of those five intervention stages as of 2007–2008 (based on 2006–2007 testing) are relatively smaller than the percentages of schools identified for improvement, but those rates also vary widely from state to state (see Council of Chief State School Officers Profiles of state accountability systems [Online database] at http://accountability.ccsso.org).

2. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 mandates that states accepting Title 1 funding must participate in NAEP. Title 1 funding provides an incentive to ensure that state and local agencies provide students with the opportunity to participate in NAEP if their school is selected as part of the representative sample.

3. Standardized path coefficients are indicative of effect sizes, showing how much the dependent variable would change in standard deviation unit as a result of one standard deviation unit change in the independent variable. Based on the guidelines of effect size interpretation by Cohen (1988), the values of .10, .30, and .50 are deemed small, medium, and large effects, respectively.

4. According to the NSBA (2006), Congress has continued a steady decline in fully funding NCLB, shifting a greater portion of the cost of compliance with adequate yearly progress and supplemental services, for example, to local school districts and states. Since 2001, funding for Title I has increased by roughly 45%. However, these increases were offset by rising costs due to enrollment increases and school programming that is needed to ensure students will meet the requirements of NCLB (e.g., class‐size reduction, summer school, and professional development of teachers). Further, the cost to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals, as required by NCLB, continues to grow.

5. This positive relationship reflect current federal rule about the AYP stating point. Under NCLB, states with adequate data from 2001 to 2002 were required to use those results to determine their starting points for establishing AYP targets in reading and mathematics. As required by statute, starting points were to be the higher of the percentage of students at the proficient level in (1) the state’s lowest‐achieving subgroup, or (2) the school at the 20th percentile among all schools based on enrollment, ranked by the percentage of proficient students. In most states, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level in the school at the 20th percentile became the AYP starting point for the state (LeFloch et al. 2007).

6. There were more case where states attempted to choose the option of voice rather than exit. Numerous state legislatures have drafted resolutions to call for full funding and/or requested fixes or waivers in meeting the law’s requirements (Communities for Quality Education 2008). In some extreme cases, this led to legal actions. In 2005, the State of Connecticut sued the US Department of Education over insufficient funding and support from the federal government to help the state meet the testing provisions of NCLB (Connecticut v. Spellings). A few states attempted to opt out of NCLB without success. In 2008, the Arizona state Senate panel failed to pass a bill that would have the state opt out of the federal No Child Left Behind program (The Arizona Republic, 4 April 2008). However, the state’s withdrawal would be contingent on the Arizona Legislature backfilling whatever money the state would lose from not participating in the federal program. Since Arizona receives about $600 million a year from the federal program, the idea of NCLB opt out is not viable.

7. One may suspect that the two‐year time frame is too short to capture the impact of NCLB on student achievement, if any. However, a supplementary analysis extending the time period of NAEP gain scores to four years (2003–2007) does not change the finding on the insignificance of relationships between NCLB implementation index and NAEP proficiency gains (b = −.05 in reading; b = −.03 in math).