Recommendations on High Schools from the Commission on NCLB

The long-awaited report of the Commission on No Child Left Behind was issued yesterday, and it was filled with recommendations on how to improve the controversial law. High schools, previously sheltered from the penetrating reach of NCLB, could, if the commission's recommendations were adopted, face increased accountability. Among the commission's recommendations: to require districts with large concentrations of struggling high schools to develop and implement comprehensive, districtwide high school improvement plans; and to require states to create and implement a 12th grade assessment.

Certainly the nation's high schools need an overhaul. The graduation rates are abysmal, and students are entering the job market and higher education too often ill-prepared. If properly supported by ample technical assistance and, yes, funding, required comprehensive high school improvement plans could be a significant aid in reforming high schools. But another state-developed assessment? Please, no.

Let me add that NCLB has brought about some positive change. Beyond asserting a level of federal control not hitherto seen, its insistence on measuring the progress of each school, each district, and each state, and ensuring that low-income students, students with disabilities, LEP students, and students from other minority groups are also making adequate progress, is very positive and long overdue. But its tendency to rely on "scientifically based research" and quantitative data to the exclusion of other valid forms of inquiry and its allegiance to the core subjects (really just Math and Language Arts) has turned education into a cold, lifeless shell. Achievement can be measured in other ways, and learning can happen, indeed thrive, beyond math and reading.