What’s next for No Child Left Behind? by Vic Sensenig

The No Child Left Behind Act expired in 2007, five years after its enactment, but has remained intact in the absence of a replacement law. The Department of Education has begun granting waivers to most of the 50 states, releasing them from some unattainable annual targets while waiting for Congress to fix the law. The delay in reauthorization has been widely blamed on the heightened partisan gridlock of the last two years, and some commentators have pinned hopes for better legislation on a potentially less rancorous 113th Congress (Resmovits 2012). At the same time, media accounts describe the waivers as “whittling down” or even nullifying NCLB (Rich 2012).

President Obama voiced ambivalence about NCLB in his 2008 presidential campaign and has offered states “flexibility” in meeting the law’s demands. But a look at NCLB’s origins challenges both the notions that reauthorization would dramatically alter the law and that the waivers represent a substantial deviation from the current policy regime. This policy response of using waivers as a patchwork, temporary fix for flawed legislation looks more like a consistent extension of a the multi-layered, complex law—a fitting addition to this “kludgey” region of public policy.

In computer programming, a “kludge” is a backward compatible patch for software problems, which can accumulate to produce hugely complex programs like Microsoft Windows. Steven Teles (2012) applies the term to rickety and complicated public policy, coining the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the proliferation of the murky, time-consuming systems that characterize much of the public sector, including the way we invest for retirement, pay taxes, and fund education.

In computer programming, a “kludge” is a backward compatible patch for software problems, which can accumulate to produce hugely complex programs like Microsoft Windows. Steven Teles (2012) applies the term to rickety and complicated public policy, coining the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the proliferation of the murky, time-consuming systems that characterize much of the public sector, including the way we invest for retirement, pay taxes, and fund education. “Kludgey” policy has many hidden and indirectly distributed costs and presents a threat to democracy by making it easier for organized interests to obscure the profits extracted from state spending.

According to Teles (2012), the “kludgey” nature of education policy is largely due to the intermixing of federal and state responsibilities. Federal K-12 funding has increased since the 1960s, but school districts do not receive money directly. Instead, federal money goes to states through an assortment of small programs. Constituencies form around individual grants, creating a supportive coalition for federal funding but limiting the federal government’s ability to address equality of educational opportunity in a concerted way. The total amount of federal aid is modest, but it is a useful tool in enforcing legal mandates.

No Child Left Behind was a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which broke with the entrenched notion that the federal government had no business in education. ESEA used federal funds to force desegregation and improve education for poor children. In an early analysis of this law, Bailey and Mosher (1968) described the intensification of federal aid and influence on locally managed education as necessarily complex. In their view, local control protects pluralism and encourages grassroots participation, and the federal influence corrects for the potential myopia of local administration. The complexity created by the interweaving of federal and state responsibilities is functional.

In contrast to this sunny view, Rhodes (2012) describes how, in the federal education policy that followed ESEA, “new federal initiatives were layered atop—rather than displaced—a diverse, highly decentralized education system” (3). This resulted in a “churning, haphazard style of development in education” (3). Piggybacking on ESEA’s categorical grants, NCLB tied aid to detailed demands on states and localities for testing and accountability, but left the development of standards to the states. As Rhodes argues, “ESEA’s embeddedness in the politics of education made it an inviting vehicle for federal standards-based reforms” (146). These reforms did contain a new set of priorities around standards, testing, and accountability, but the entrepreneurs who advanced them, including business and civil rights advocates, faced formidable institutional constraints. In response, these entrepreneurs elected to build on rather than replace existing programs and hesitated to question existing budgetary items.

This is where the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top initiative and subsequent NCLB waivers come in. Race to the Top used federal education stimulus funding as leverage to ensure states’ compliance, reaffirming the NCLB approach of using ESEA assistance to promote standards-based reform. The waivers have the same purpose and are handed out on the condition that states, among other things, adopt college and career ready standards. Far from nullifying NCLB, the waivers are simply another tool used for the same end—the promotion of standards, testing, and accountability. In addition, Obama’s policies add another layer to the “kludgey” interplay of federal and state responsibilities, pushing states to adopt common standards, which are claimed not to be national standards but wholly the initiative of governors and other state-based actors. While the waivers have time limits, in the absence of reauthorization of NCLB, they could well be institutionalized.

President Obama’s education policy actually demonstrates the resiliency of No Child Left Behind, for better or worse. NCLB’s ambitious scope and aggressive federal role announced the arrival of a new education policy regime in which accountability eclipsed concern for equity (McGuinn 2006). It relied on a bipartisan consensus around standards-based reform and required dramatic shifts in the positions of both political parties. The policy paradigm at the heart of NCLB would need to be altered before any kind of sweeping, transformative reauthorization of the law could occur. There is little indication that the consensus that resulted in NCLB is waning or that a coalition is forming around a new policy regime.

Education policymaking is determined by the construction and maintenance of durable policy regimes and characterized by patchwork, layered, piggybacked legislation that few fully understand and nobody completely likes.

Education policymaking is determined by the construction and maintenance of durable policy regimes and characterized by patchwork, layered, piggybacked legislation that few fully understand and nobody completely likes. In arguing these points, I may seem to take an overly strong position that there is “nothing new under the sun.” To the contrary, the story of NCLB represents what Bailey and Mosher call “the bargaining processes of a democratic polity” (207). Rhodes points to “the enduring tension between Americans’ yearning for national leadership and their celebration of political pluralism and local control” (2-3). Teles (2012) similarly attributes the complexity of policy mechanisms to an ambivalence in public opinion. Americans are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal, he argues, believing in the myth of small government but expecting government to deal with public problems (6). In other words, we disagree with each other and often contradict ourselves.

In fact, the “kludgey” policy that we have very much reflects a deep-seated American ambivalence about autonomy and accountability, self-reliance and mutual aid.

Teles’ insight into American political culture and ideology make clear how unlikely his ultimate policy recommendations are. Arguing for a “one problem, one government approach,” he writes, “In education, either we should considerably nationalize education or cut the complicated web of education finance and regulations altogether” (8). In fact, as he has argued, the “kludgey” policy that we have very much reflects a deep-seated American ambivalence about autonomy and accountability, self-reliance and mutual aid. A more just and humane reauthorization of NCLB is possible, but the improvements will likely be incremental and bound to historical precedent.

References

Bailey, Stephen K., and Edith K. Mosher. 1968. ESEA: The Office of Education Administers a Law. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

McGuinn, Patrick J. 2006. No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Resmovits, Joy. 2012. “No Child Left Behind Reauthorization Debate Likely To Continue In Obama Second Term.” Huffington Post, November 19. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/no-child-left-behind-reauthorization_n_2161498.html.

Rich, Motoko. 2012. “‘No Child’ Law Whittled Down by White House.” New York Times, July 6. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/education/no-child-left-behind-whittled-down-under-obama.html?pagewanted=all.

Rhodes, Jesse H. 2012. An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of No Child Left Behind. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Teles, Steven M. 2012. “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy.” New America Foundation, December 10. Retrieved from http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/kludgeocracy_the_american_way_of_policy.