The merger of reality, accountability
By the government's own reckoning, Elgin area schools are getting better fast. But by that same reckoning, most of them are still failures.
The dichotomy must surely leave the administrators, teachers, parents and students of Elgin Area School District U-46 with conflicting emotions of both pride and frustration. And, neighboring school districts should be ready to share in that conflict as some already have for eventually they'll all be in the same boat.
The reason: The steadily escalating expectations of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. By 2014, that law requires every student in the nation to meet certain standards of math and reading skill, and because it is fundamentally impractical to think that every student in any given school district will meet the standards, it's only a matter of time before the unrealistic tide of failure No Child Left Behind set in motion overwhelms every school.
The Obama administration introduced last March its own initiative aiming to bring a greater sense of reality to the dictates of No Child Left Behind. The new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is not without problems of its own, but situations like that in which U-46 finds itself emphasize why it's so important that our measures of success for schools be revised.
To some extent, the new proposal suffers from a similar affliction as No Child Left Behind. In insisting that by 2020, the United States will rank first in the world in the percentage of students who complete college, the law essentially follows that beloved government practice of passing along problems to the future. But along the way, it still promotes an important tenet of the No Child Left Behind movement: accountability.
We may well debate what defines a "troubled" school, what percentage of such schools should be put on a warning status and even what consequence they should be warned is coming. And no doubt the debate over such issues and other specific provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will continue to be debated in education circles over the next year. But where we should all agree is that a new process must allow educators to measure their success and both encourage and require them to constantly build on it.
It's one thing to commiserate with U-46 and other schools stuck with the stigma of failure even in an atmosphere of steady and demonstrable improvement. But it's also easy to consider that that improvement might not have occurred if the schools didn't have clear benchmarks to shoot for and a good reason to shoot for them.
The trick is establishing benchmarks that are achievable and consequences that are productive. The new proposal advances the search for such measures and consequences. Hopefully, it will also allow schools that achieve noteworthy improvements to celebrate them without guilt.