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Education Official Defends No Child Left Behind

March, 2004

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Picture a business with 91,000 retail outlets, 3.7 million front-line employees, and48 million young customers. Now imagine that it has to operate in a heavily regulated environment that includes restrictive collective bargaining agreements, severe constraints on revenue streams, and high management turnover.

This is the operating environment for U.S. public schools today, yet many school districts remain open to reform, one of the authors of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program told a Stanford audience March 6.

But are they focusing on the right changes? Often superintendents are under such pressure to perform quickly—and have to answer to so many different masters—that they end up implementing "a lot of cosmetic changes that don't often get at the real problems of education," said Deputy Under Secretary Nina Shokraii Rees of the U.S. Department of Education, addressing the second annual Business of Education Conference held at the Graduate School of Business.

As an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, Rees helped draft the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind education blueprint, which mandates that each state set standards and measure every public school student's progress in reading and math in each of grades 3 through 8 and at least once during grades 10 through 12. If a school continues to perform poorly for three years in a row, the law says parents can transfer their children to higher-performing schools in the area or receive supplemental educational services, such as tutoring, after-school programs, or remedial classes.

Rees said she is baffled by recent political criticism of the act,since it was built upon reforms made by the Clinton administration and passed "with a pretty wide margin of support," including a vote from the Democratic presidential front runner, Sen. John Kerry. "This notion of annual testing in grades 3 through 8 was so we could see every year how much our funding was making a difference," she explained."We felt strongly that if you revealed inconsistencies in test scores, school districts would better target their resources." She said the law gives true educational innovators "the tools they need to go back to their school districts and argue for change."

In her current position, Rees leads the Education Department's newly created Office of Innovation and Improvement, which oversees the administration of approximately 25 competitive federal grant programs that support promising educational practices. Unfortunately, she said, the office's efforts to be "nimble and entrepreneurial" have been hampered by a lack of solid research on which educational reforms work best.

"Aside from the field of reading, we haven't really invested a lot of money to know if the school reforms we are currently implementing are effective at raising student achievement," she lamented. "We don't want to use our students as lab rats. But unless this nation starts to invest a little more in robust evaluations, it's going to be increasingly difficult for us to know what's working and what's not."

One exception is a recent study conducted by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative that showed frequent use of assessment data was the number one predictor of school success, Joanne Weiss of the New Schools Venture Fund told a panel on K-12 testing and assessment. Schools that frequently gather test data on their students and use it "consistently in a systematic way to make instructional decisions way, way, way outperformed everybody else," she said. "From a change point of view, we think [testing] is one of the places where all the pieces come together in a way that's going to have high leverage on the system."

John Katzman, chairman and CEO of the Princeton Review test prep company, cautioned that while standardized tests can offer"snapshots" of what's going on in a school, it's more important to think about the behavior they encourage. Students may concentrate on specific skills that lead to high scores and "miss a tremendous opportunity to learn Shakespeare," he said. High school juniors and seniors who take the SAT are "desperate to get high scores. You can have them learn whatever you want them to learn." Yet the SAT allows them to "punt with middle school math and some tricks," he said.

Linda Murray became superintendent of the San Jose Unified School District after a chaotic spell in the 1980s that included teacher strikes,financial troubles, and desegregation orders. She also is a proponent of"measuring everything and measuring it often." Yet the move toward standards-based education didn't come overnight, she said.

"It took about five years before the new board and I became confident that we had enough engagement with the community that we could really begin to raise standards and deal with issues of equity in a civil debate that would not polarize the community," she recalled. Today,she said proudly, the district has implemented the toughest graduation requirements in the state, with no increase in the dropout rate.

The conference, organized by the Graduate School of Business and the Stanford School of Education, included speakers exploring the rapidly changing world of post secondary education. Discussing entrepreneurs in higher education was Jack Larson, chairman, president, and CEO of the Career Education Corporation. Founded in 1994, the company has become one of the world's largest providers of private, for-profit postseason, with 78 global campuses offering degree and certificate programs in visual communication and design technologies, information technology, business studies, culinary arts, and health education. In fewer than 10 years, annual revenues have surpassed $1 billion, delivering a 2,150 percent return to shareholders.

"You just have to look for trends and walk into them in a big way," Larson explained of his successful business strategy. After 9/11, for example, the new focus on national security prompted him to invest in programs teaching criminal justice. When surveys showed more people eating out, he invested in well-known culinary schools, including the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. "Today," he said, "we train more chefs than anybody else in the world."

Another promising area for investment is international education. Jorge Klor de Alva, CEO and president of Apollo International Inc., offered an overview of his company, which focuses on providing affordable accredited education programs outside the United States. Today, it has over 150,000K-12 and higher education students, with operations in the Netherlands,India, Brazil, and Mexico.

Klor de Alva, who previously served as president of the University of Phoenix, noted that many developing countries have seen an explosion in the number of elementary and high school graduates in recent years, yet they offer very few options in higher education. State colleges and universities overseas tend to be highly regulated, traditional, overcrowded, and inflexible, while the smaller career and vocational colleges tend to be inefficient mom-and-pop outfits. In contrast, Apollo's popular proprietary schools teach international students skills that they can use immediately in the workplace.

—Theresa Johnston

—Lisa J. Vollmer