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Examining cut scores changes in Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, I concluded that the Arizona accountability exam had jumped the shark.  Far more significantly, one of the strongest supporters of the standards movement seems to have reached the same conclusion about the entire No Child Left Behind project.

Mike Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and former Bush administration education official, has written an extremely thoughtful and telling piece essentially throwing in the towel on No Child Left Behind.  More accurately, Mike has given up on the law but not its noble goals.  “I’ve gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion,” Petrilli wrote, “that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair.”  He goes on:

Here’s the crux of the matter: when it’s time for reauthorization, can we overhaul the law itself without letting go of its powerful ideas? Two other outcomes are more likely.  One is the tweak regimen: the law gets renewed but remains mostly unchanged, and we continue to muddle through, driving even well-intentioned educators crazy and not achieving the results we seek.  (This is the prediction of most "education insiders.") It amounts to ostrich-like stubbornness in the face of evidence that an overhaul is what’s needed.  The second is bathtub emptying: throw the baby out along with the murky water and give up on the law and its ideals.  Then we go back to the days when schools felt little pressure to get all of their students prepared for college and life and democratic participation, and we declare No Child Left Behind another failed experiment.

That would be a disaster.

Indeed it would.  In my book, however, the first option would be even worse than the second.  In the first scenario, we continue to pretend that NCLB represents a viable reform strategy that is going to improve the quality of the public schools.  In the second scenario, we at least no longer delude ourselves.

In both scenarios, public schools continue to mis-educate children on a massive scale, serving as generators of societal inequality.

Looking at standards based accountability from the state level, I’ve written about what I regard as the biggest hole in the top-down reform strategy: lowering of the cut scores state accountability exams.  Petrilli helpfully lists a number of other flaws.

Mike worries about us throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  I do as well, but it is important to note that this is already happening.  State passing standards for accountability exams are on a collision course with a student signing his or her name to the test.  As the push towards “100 percent proficiency” continues, the dumbing down will get progressively worse. 

Transparency, the baby in the bathwater, has been compromised in the process.  What’s the value of learning your child has passed an absurdly simple test, and that all of their classmates did so?  If you answered “not much” or “nothing,” then give yourself a gold star: you are 100% proficient in answering rhetorical questions.

Policymakers should embrace transparency as their primary goal in reforming state testing regimes and NCLB more broadly.  Lawmakers cannot make informed policy decisions in the absence of transparency, and citizens require it in order to participate meaningfully in the governance of public schools.  Finally, parents need transparency if they are to choose schools that match the needs of their children.

Some states may wish to soldier on with higher-than-average academic standards, in defiance of political gravity, in the belief that they will improve their schools.  Both of them should continue to do so.  NCLB is not required for that to happen, and it is clear that the federal government cannot force states policymakers to adopt such a strategy against their will. 

If the time has come to acknowledge NCLB as joining the large ash-heap of failed education reforms, the question arises: What now? Ultimately, accountability needs to come from the bottom up, not the top down.  NCLB was a well-intentioned but ultimately quixotic attempt at improving public schooling through a convoluted combination of testing and public-sector targeting. 

Assuming the continuing absence of a renaissance of enlightenment on education policy and federalism, a decent exit strategy to me seems to be to allow states to design their own accountability and sanction regimes through a charter state provision but to require public schools to deliver national norm referenced exams to students in return for federal funds. 

Bottom-up accountability–parental choice–ultimately represents a far more promising reform strategy: not a magic bullet, but a linchpin reform.  Higher education provides a chilling cautionary tale of non-transparent markets in education.  Give me (reliable) data, or give me death.

Dr. Matthew Ladner, a former director of state projects for the Alliance for School Choice, is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute.