Harvard professor criticizes education policy

by Alexandra Rogers

Thursday, February 8, 2007 00:00

Criticizing the No Child Left Behind Act, a Harvard University professor Wednesday made his pitch to University of Wisconsin students and faculty on the need to reform the nation's education policy.

Dr. Richard Elmore also spoke about his research involving the impact of educational structure and current public policy on education.

Elmore said he is deeply concerned about public education and the problems that have and will continue to be caused by problems in the system.

"I worry about the kind of social inequalities we've generated by not working on the problems of local schools," Elmore said.

Julie Underwood, dean of the UW School of Education, said she appreciated an outside perspective on the issues of education policy.

"These are national public policy issues that everybody should know about," Underwood said.

Elmore, who has done research in a wide variety of educational structures and situations and published two books about school reform and accountability, spoke critically about the No Child Left Behind Act. He pointed to the decision of the policy makers to ignore research surrounding the field of education while making the decision.

NCLB was put into place by President George W. Bush in 2001, and the federal law aims to improve performance in the U.S. educational system. The policy aims to promote and increase the standards of accountability for states, school districts and schools. The implementation of the policy itself, as well as its current and future levels of effectiveness, has generated controversy among educators, researchers and the general public.

The policy shows consistent design flaws, according to Elmore, who said 25 percent of schools are not classified correctly under the current program. Elmore introduced the design flaws in NCLB as "that of which we do not speak."

Elmore also criticized policy makers for setting a standard of performance that is "infeasible" and failing to back that standard up with any plausible or strong solution. NCLB fails to accomplish its goal of setting a higher standard of accountability, Elmore said.

Peg Arnold, retired school counselor and community member, said Elmore reiterated thoughts that many people shared and agreed the NCLB policy leaves much to be desired.

"It's a terrible situation we're in," Arnold said.

According to Elmore, the situation is very beneficial for policy makers who escape criticism either way under this policy.

"If schools fail, [they] generate credit by blaming the educators, which is a popular sport," Arnold said. "If schools succeed [they] generate credit by claiming responsibility for their success."

The No Child Left Behind Act has set a goal for standard levels of performance in public schools by the year 2014 — a goal Elmore said is implausible. He said the failure of the policy, and the reaction of its makers, will be "interesting."

Elmore said it is likely, if voting on the policy is postponed until after the election, that some major changes in the policy could take place.

"We could do a lot of things to make the policy work better," Elmore said.