NCLB, perhaps the most significant federal policy relating to K–12 public education, requires each state to create a standards-based accountability system that includes three components: (1) academic standards, (2) assessments to measure student mastery of the standards, and (3) consequences to encourage improved performance.

NCLB makes significant demands on states, districts, and schools. However, the law also gives educators a great deal of flexibility in how they reach NCLB goals. The success of NCLB is therefore partially dependent on how districts and schools implement the law and what policies and strategies these entities rely on to improve student achievement.

The ISBA study was designed to examine what strategies states, districts, and schools are using to implement SBA and how these strategies are associated with classroom practices and student achievement in mathematics and science.

The ISBA study was structured as a set of three state-specific case studies; we collected longitudinal data from California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania each year for three years from the 2003–2004 school year through the 2005–2006 school year. This monograph is an update of Standards-Based Accountability Under No Child Left Behind (Hamilton et al., 2007), which was based on data from the 2003–2004 and 2004–2005 school years of data collection.

The companion monograph contained detailed information about the attitudes and actions of superintendents, principals, and teachers in each of the states, and it drew a number of general conclusions. In that monograph, we found that the accountability systems enacted in response to NCLB differed in important ways across the three states, including the content of their academic standards, the difficulty of their performance standards, and their systems for support and technical assistance.

Despite these differences, districts and schools responded to the accountability systems in broadly similar ways. For example, principals reported similar school improvement efforts focusing on aligning standards, curriculum, and assessments; providing extra instruction to low-performing students; and using test results for instructional planning.

Teachers enacted these initiatives in their classrooms and generally felt the changes benefited students. However, teachers also reported narrowing the curriculum toward tested topics and focusing on students near the proficient cutoff score, and some complained of lowered morale among their peers and lack of alignment between tested goals and their local curriculum materials. ... (From Summary)

Visit Pain and Gain: Implementing No Child Left Behind in Three States, 2004-2006 Download Page

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Brian M. Stecher, Scott Epstein, Laura S. Hamilton, Julie A. Marsh, Abby Robyn, Jennifer Sloan McCombs, Jennifer Russell, Scott Naftel
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation

Published 2008 by the RAND Corporation
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The Future of NCLB
This study suggests that NCLB has led to distinctive accountability systems in each state—different standards, different assessments, different support and assistance strategies— although each was derived from the same federal legislation and has the same set of consequences. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act should recognize that this variation exists and develop policies accordingly. In some cases, new regulations may be needed to reduce or eliminate differences—e.g., to make proficiency in reading and mathematics similar across states.

This study found a number of attitudes and behaviors associated with the overall level of student proficiency in the states. In other cases, it may be appropriate to relax rules to give states additional flexibility. This study suggests that school improvement efforts might be more effective if they were responsive to local conditions. Rather than imposing a fixed set of choices that apply when schools fail to achieve AYP for a given number of years, improvement efforts should be customized to address the specific causes of the failure and the capacity that exists locally.

There is also a lesson for SBA in general. Educators have become comfortable with the underlying SBA theory of action—set clear goals, develop measures, and establish consequences to encourage educators to achieve them. They are not comfortable when the implementation of that theory seems inconsistent with their local situation—e.g., when the standards do not match their local curriculum, when the proficient level seems unattainable for many of their students, or when their school is judged against targets that feel unattainable. It would seem that engaging educators in the development or refinement of the SBA framework (e.g., the reauthorization of NCLB) would be a good way to attempt to bridge this gap.

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