The Tennessean: Spellings warns against dismantling ‘No Child’ law

Bush education secretary worries new proposal will hurt minority kids

Oct. 13, 2011

Former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a leading enforcer of the federal No Child Left Behind law, says she worries a proposal to dismantle that system would be a step backward for the nation’s 50 million students.

Spellings was a headliner at a Chamber Education 2020 speaker series in Nashville on Wednesday. Tennessee was one of the first states to ask the Obama administration for freedom from some of NCLB’s measures.

Learning gains among poor, disabled and minority children under NCLB might seem modest but represent thousands of kids who could be lost in the shuffle under a new plan, Spellings said. That plan would require states to evaluate teachers regularly, plus produce college and career readiness plans for students and measure their learning gains.

NCLB awarded schools and districts pass/fail status based on standardized test scores of all student groups.

Spellings, appointed by President George W. Bush, heads her own company and serves as a senior adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She spoke with The Tennessean about her concerns:

You were in charge of implementing NCLB from 2005 to 2009. What do you think of the new administration’s dismantling of the law by allowing states to opt out of its accountability and funding requirements?

I certainly understand Secretary (Arne) Duncan’s frustration with Congress in not getting a reauthorization.

The law does need to be perfected and updated from what we’ve learned in the last 10 years or so. However, I think there are two problems. He’s going beyond the bounds of the statute. NCLB doesn’t say anything about participating in national curriculum standards or pay for performance or any of those sorts of things. … It’s really not his authority to provide these quid pro quos in exchange for regulatory relief.

Do you think because NCLB had a target goal for all kids to reach — and now with the current proposal to measure students by growth — maybe the expectations will lower for those subgroups? Is that the big concern?

Well, yeah. The administration’s initial authorization proposal, and likewise what Sens. (Tom) Harkin and (Lamar) Alexander proposed, basically says poor and minority kids not in the 5 percent lowest-performing schools get a free pass.

Basically, NCLB really does describe the policy. There’s no child left behind whether you are in suburban schools or rural schools and not just if you are in the most chronically underperforming schools in our inner cities.

What elements of NCLB worked and what didn’t?

I’m a big what-gets-measured-gets-done kind of person, and that is the whole genius of NCLB. When we start taking pressure off the need to educate poor and minority kids, it will go away. How do I know that? Because we tried that for 40 years. We are about to revert backward, put money out, talk a good game and hope for the best. The biggest improvements we’ve seen in the last 10 years in education have been in the subgroups that NCLB called for. And even school administrators will often grudgingly admit we have to pay attention to kids we never paid attention to before.

In higher education, you launched a national policy debate and action plan to improve accessibility, affordability and accountability in the nation’s colleges and universities. Are the doors open any wider?

I think the subject has been raised in more vigorous ways. I’m pleased we are having the conversations that we never had before, but we are a long way from doing it. We’ve made — in some ways — progress on affordability because Pell grants have gone up fairly substantially, but likewise so has tuition. We are doing a very poor job of getting adequate completion rates, especially for minority students in and out of college.

Contact Julie Hubbard at 615-726-5964 or jshubbard@tennessean.com.