The Back Page
No Child Left Behind

by Dr. Roderick R. Paige
U.S. Secretary of Education

As one of America’s most respected big city superintendents, the new Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, has been an active member of the Carnegie Corporation of New York family of advisors. He shares the Corporation’s belief in urban school reform and served on the National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts run by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform which Carnegie Corporation supports along with other foundations. Dr. Paige was superintendent of the Houston Independent School District from 1994 and was an officer and board member before that. Houston was of 10 school district-community partnerships awarded a Carnegie Corporation Schools for a New Society grant in the summer of 2000 for high school redesign. Carnegie Reporter asked Dr. Paige to outline his priorities as he moves from Houston’s top school job to the nation’s.

Twenty years ago, my predecessor as Secretary of Education, T.H. Bell, created a commission to examine the state of America’s public education system. That commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, made us aware of the shocking and unwelcome truth that our country had become complacent towards mediocrity and failure in our public schools. A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, and sparked an “education awakening” among our educators and policymakers leading to the modern day movement for education reform. But almost twenty years later, we must ask what this education reform movement has accomplished.

According to statistics developed by the Department of Education and the National Center for Educational Statistics, today nearly 70 percent of our inner-city fourth graders are unable to read at even a basic level. Our high school seniors trail students in nearly every industrialized nation on international math tests. Nearly one-third of our college freshman must take remedial courses before they can even begin regular college-level courses. All these troubling facts persist despite twenty years of so-called “education reform” and ever-increasing education budgets at the local, state and federal levels.

The greatest failure of our public education system is evident in the growing achievement gap between disadvantaged and minority students and their peers. On the latest National Assessment of Education Progress in fourth grade reading, 73 percent of white students performed at or above the basic level, compared with just 40 percent of Hispanic students and only 36 percent of African American students. Students in inner-city schools are being denied the education they deserve and the education they need if they are ever to escape their troubled surroundings.

The time for “education reform” as we know it has ended. It is no longer enough to just tackle pieces of the problem while the greatest issues remain unaddressed. The time has come for a new approach to education—an approach that returns our public education system to the fundamentals of high standards, annual assessment, accountability, flexibility and expanded parental options.

These fundamentals form the basis for President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education plan. On their own, they can do little. But combined, they become the tools needed to plant the seeds of a new beginning for America’s education system.

The Achievement Gap
The federal role in education is a limited one. One of the things the federal government can and should do, however, is to provide additional support for the needs of disadvantaged students. The president’s plan proposes to do exactly that, by focusing on the inexcusable achievement gap that exists between students attending public schools across this country. Closing the achievement gap is also my foremost priority as education secretary, just as it was my objective for the Houston Independent School District when I was privileged to serve as superintendent there.

As a result of that experience, I know that the system-wide changes the president has proposed work. In Houston, the school board, administrators, teachers and parents attacked a persistent achievement gap by raising expectations, giving schools more support and expecting more from students. Over the next several years, we asked our students to take rigorous classes and made sure we tested their progress every year. And between 1994 and 1999, the proportion of students in Houston who passed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test rose from 49 percent to 74 percent, even as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students rose from 58 percent to 71 percent.

Because of the dedicated work of teachers, parents and local administrators, the Houston Independent School District was cited as one of the two most successful school districts in America at closing the achievement gap. And we can close that gap nationally, just as we did in Houston. States, school districts and schools must be held accountable for ensuring that all students—including disadvantaged ones—meet high academic standards.

Setting High Standards
The only way we can expect students to achieve is to set clear and high standards. For too long, we have made excuses for our schools and our students, particularly in inner cities. The result is that we sold those schools and their students short. Too many of us have been afraid to ask too much of these kids because we worry that they will fail. Worse, some of us have given up completely, and have convinced ourselves that children in disadvantaged environments can’t learn. The president has called this the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Children know when they are being sold short. The late educator Albert Shanker once asked a classroom of “average” and “below-average” scoring students, “What should we ask you to read?” One student raised his hand and asked, “What do the smart kids read?” Setting high standards for children is the only way to show them that we have confidence in their ability to achieve.

Already, many states are successfully raising standards for their students. In Colorado, they have set the standard at making sure every child in the state is a proficient reader by the end of the third grade. Kentucky requires school districts to develop plans for improving their schools by effectively using assessment data to determine where there are potential problems. Most states have already established standards for what students should know in reading and math, but the president’s proposal takes standards a step further by requiring that states also set challenging standards in history and science. Once high standards are set, there must be mechanisms in place to make sure students are meeting them.

Next page: Annual Measurement for Results

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