When something unfair succeeds

The statistical targets in No Child Left Behind are absurd on their face. Steady improvement forever cannot happen, and expecting it is unfair.

However, I have to admit that the federal threat to sanction school systems for poor performance has stimulated significant progress and creativity. The very act of paying attention socially and politically has paid dividends that previous testing regimes (NAEP, for example) did not provide.

So, maybe I need to eat a little crow and reconsider some of my opinions. Maybe fairness is not a vital aspect of the shared goal of bringing everyone forward educationally. On the other hand, the Massachusetts Ed Reform Act of 1993 brought not just the MCAS but also new state funding to local districts, where NCLB did not, and that's one reason that Massachusetts scores first or second of all states on the NAEP.

It is still true that standardized testing is more limiting than a mythical true measure of educational success. But it works at the low end as a gross measure of progress, and that's where America has its greatest educational challenges.

This reminds me a bit of the basic skills movement in the 1970s. Even though the thinking behind that movement was simplistic and tended to dumb down the curriculum, it provoked public school systems to try at least to give their students those foundational abilities. And it did raise minority achievement.

Perhaps the best way to improve our urban public schools is to focus new programs on them periodically, and maybe the focus matters more than what exactly the ideology is. Of course, do this too often and someone's bound to resort to marketing to respond to a real problem. Oh, yeah, already happened - vouchers.

Update: It's statistically astute to start with the lowest achievers. Helping them can do the most to your average scores. But you'd better start young, and Boston has.