The USDOE announced a couple days ago the six states approved for “differentiated accountability” plans (Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio). The purpose of the program according to the Department is to “assist those states by targeting resources and interventions to those schools most in need of intensive interventions and significant reform.” Targeting resources to the neediest of needy schools clearly makes sense, but I share Mike’s concern relative to how this program might loosen the pressure on suburban schools in particular. One of the key flexibilities under the new program is that “the state clearly defines its process for categorizing  schools” and from the looks of it, each pilot state is absolutely elated to do so.

Recall that under the current NCLB system, if a school fails to meet AYP two years in a row, it is labeled “in need of improvement.” Since all subgroups of students must also meet AYP benchmarks, that’s meant that many “successful” suburban schools—previously judged to be so based on aggregate student performance—now find themselves “in need of improvement” when one or more of their ESL, special education, Latino, etc. populations don’t make adequate gains.

The Differentiated Accountability program essentially gives states permission to develop kinder, gentler labeling systems for these suburban schools and others. In Maryland, Indiana, and Illinois, for example, it’s out with the “in need of improvement” label and in with the “focused needs” and “comprehensive needs” labels. Schools that make AYP in the “all students” subgroup but not in one or more of the other subgroups are “focused needs” schools, while schools that do not meet AYP for their “all student” subgroup are comprehensive needs schools. Many suburban schools, then, rid themselves of that nasty in need of improvement label. The implication is that they just need to “focus” a little more. After all, according to USDOE, they are “just missing the mark.”

Read a couple of the state press releases from the pilot states and it’s easy to see that the states are just as eager to craft new labels for schools as they are to craft new policies for them to help students. In Maryland, for instance, schools in their first three years of improvement are now in the “developing stage.” In Florida, schools in their first four years of not making AYP are in “preventive” improvement.

To be fair, there are other (unsurprising) changes that states have proposed in this new program (like switching the order of when the tutoring and choice provisions are offered to struggling students). But the power in a name ceases to amaze me. The public attention (and yes, bad press) that suburban schools sometimes receive for not meeting the academic needs of their special student populations is a welcome spotlight. The in need of improvement label is the scarlet letter they understandably wish to banish. But there’s a difference between a label that provides a more precise school description intended to better funnel resources and one that attempts to sugarcoat matters when schools fail needy students. I want to give states the benefit of the doubt and say they are simply doing the former. But my cynical side says let’s not forget that “developing,” “focusing,” and “preventive” schools still need improvement too.

As a fellow insect-themed edu-blog, we feel a certain kinship with our friends at BoardBuzz, produced by the National School Boards Association. But the Buzzers went bust with their analysis of our recent high-achieving students study. Let’s tackle their misstatements, one by one:

Contrary to the thinking that high achieving students have been left behind, the report actually found that high achieving students (those scoring in the top 10 percent on NAEP) have been making similar gains on NAEP over the past 20 years. BoardBuzz hardly thinks that’s being left behind. On the other hand, low achieving students (those scoring in the bottom 10 percent) have been making 4 times as many gains on NAEP since NCLB was enacted compare to before.

Ah, watch those apples-to-organges comparisons, NSBA. Yes, if you go back to the early 1990s, the progress of low and high achievers looks roughly the same, at least in some subject-grade combinations. But upon closer inspection the story is very different. Basically the 90s were quite good for high achievers (particularly in states without accountability systems); the post-2000 years have been quite good for low achievers (perhaps due to NCLB). The story since 2000, though, is straightforward: anemic gains at the top versus dramatic gains at the bottom. No, our top students aren’t doing worse, but is their “languid” progress (Tom Loveless’s word) good enough in today’s competitive world?

Then the Buzzers say:

If you had listened to Fordham you would think the achievement of high achieving students remained flat or even declined but this simply is not the case. Would we all like to see greater gains from all our students? Of course. There is always room for improvement, but that does not mean that high performers have been neglected.

But anyone who reads our report, or even our summary in last week’s Gadfly, will encounter statements like this: “The performance of high achievers is unimpressive at best. Their scores haven’t fallen, mind you. But neither have they risen much.” So I’m not sure who the Buzzers are “listening” to. Regardless, what we learn from our national teacher survey (part of the study) is that teachers are neglecting their top students, and feel guilty about it. I understand why, institutionally, the NSBA wants to engage in happy talk about how well the public schools are doing, but we need to face these tough choices in an honest way. School boards should know that lots of teachers feel pressure to spend all of their time on the lowest-performing students and that high achievers aren’t getting the attention they deserve. That needs fixing, pronto.

Finally,

BoardBuzz has heard a lot that schools have been forced to focus on only those students right below or above proficiency, so called bubble kids, at the expense of their low and high performing students to raise their proficiency rates since high achievers would reach proficiency anyway and low achievers weren’t likely to. Fortunately the report shows that this appears to be untrue.

Well, not so fast. Our Proficiency Illusion report from last year found that most states are defining “proficiency” as the 20th or 30th percentile nationally in reading and math. Several states aim even lower—around the 10th percentile. So the lowest-achieving students might be the “bubble kids,” since state standards are set so embarrassingly low.

And with that, I’m going to take a break—not just from the high-achieving students issue, but from education policy. See you on July 7^th.

Video footage from the panel discussion of Fordham’s recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind, is now online for your viewing pleasure:

High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

5:30 - Tom Loveless, Brookings Institution
19:05 - Steve Farkas, Farkas Duffett Research Group
33:25 - Josh Wyner, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
41:15 - Ross Wiener, Education Trust
48:30 - Question & Answer

Download:
Tom Loveless’s slideshow
Steve Farkas’s slideshow

Speaker bios

We assiduously avoided putting a nerdy kid on the cover of our high-achieving students report. (We skipped the nerdy goggles too.) But now I’m thinking that pictures of any of these nerds would have made nice cover art, too (well, save for the one of Al Gore).

Fordham hosted a panel event this morning about our recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. (Video will be available shortly.) As the moderator I’m biased, but I thought it was a great conversation among study authors Tom Loveless and Steve Farkas and respondents Josh Wyner (of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) and Ross Wiener (of Education Trust).

Among the more contentious points of debate was whether our teachers have to choose between focusing on their low achievers or their high achievers, or whether through the magic of “differentiated instruction” they can reach everybody exactly where they are. (I think by the end there was almost-unanimous support for grouping students by ability—”the red birds and the blue birds”—as a way to solve this riddle.)

But the heart of the discussion was whether “closing achievement gaps” should be the only objective of our education system. Josh, for example, made an eloquent plea for greater attention for high-achieving students who are also poor, and suggested that a new NCLB focus on closing the “advanced achievement gap” along with the “proficiency gap.” That’s fine, but doesn’t that still leave out most of the nation’s high achievers who, let’s be honest, aren’t poor? Don’t we care about them too? Or do we revert to the argument that “affluent gifted kids will take care of themselves”?

This is a big decision. Maybe, on equity grounds, it’s right to focus almost obsessively on the education of poor and minority students, particularly because they, on average, are so, so far behind everyone else. But taken too far, that approach transforms public education into a welfare program. And just as turning Social Security into a program for the poor would erode public support, so too would doing the same for public schools. Are some policy advocates begging middle-class families to pull their students out of public schools?

Here’s a simple principle: at the least, schools should be expected to help all students make a year’s worth of progress over the course of a year—even students that start school in September two or three grade levels above. And we should reserve our greatest praise (and perhaps rewards) for schools that accelerate the progress of all of their students and help each one reach his or her full potential. And that principle should apply to all of our children, regardless of the color of their skin, the size of their parents’ pocketbook, or their zip code. Anything else strikes me as unfair, unkind—and politically unsustainable.

Our friend Greg Forster wrote a post last week about Checker’s and my National Review Online essay in which we report on the findings of Fordham’s high-achieving students study and argue that “excellence” (defined as the progress of our top students) is being sacrificed for “equality” (defined as the progress of our lowest-performing students or, in today’s parlance, “narrowing the achievement gap”). Greg thinks our evidence doesn’t back up our argument:

If the kids at the bottom are doing better while the kids at the top stay the same, is the whole population getting more excellent or less excellent?

Is the whole population getting “more excellent”? No, the whole population is making incremental progress. That’s surely good. But excellence is something else entirely. According to Webster’s, it’s the quality of being “superior, eminently good, first-class.”

Greg’s definition equates “excellence” with a narrowing of the achievement gap. That’s breathtakingly radical. Who knew that Greg had become such a lefty!

Update: My lefty friend Greg now calls me elitist.

The Des Moines Register weighs in on Fordham’s high-achieving students study and gets it exactly right:

Nicholas Colangelo, director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa, said revisions of the No Child law should provide more help to students at the high end and look at how to better measure their progress.

“One of the problems with No Child Left Behind is that it...made the [high-achieving] students invisible. This research is just bringing that out,” Colangelo said. “The answer is that we do not have the luxury of not having a better balance. We can’t have national policy on education that so strongly focuses on one population of students and pretty much ignores the other. What happens then is there is going to be frustration, and people are going to feel that public schools are not the place for high-ability students. I don’t see where the nation gains.”

Helping students across the board make academic gains is critical. The national conversation on education should pay more attention to this. It’s foolish to waste the potential of any American youngster.

Chad Adelman, Education Sector’s new policy associate, digs into our high-achieving students study and thinks he’s found a smoking gun. In particular, he has a beef with us looking at National Assessment of Educational Progress scores since 2000, instead of 2003:

But No Child wasn’t signed into law until January 2002. The first NAEP tests measuring its true impacts could not have been until 2003, represented by the dotted line.

When we make this correction, the claims in the report do not seem to stand up as well. The lower tenth of performers made gains throughout the chart, but especially from 2000 to 2003, where they gained 13 points to their high achieving peers’ six. Notably, this accounts for almost all the gain claimed in the Fordham report.

Chad, you’re right, though using 2003 as the starting point—more than a year after the law’s enactment—isn’t perfect either. Tom Loveless, author of our NAEP study, discusses this issue at length (see pages 18-20):

Another important consideration concerning time intervals should also now be apparent from examining the NAEP data. Three grade-subject combinations exhibit a consistent pattern, a straightforward story of narrowing gaps during the NCLB era—mostly the result of sharp gains by low-achieving students from 2000 to 2002 or from 2000 to 2003. But whether these years belong in the NCLB era is debatable. The starting point matters. Using the NAEP test immediately before NCLB’s passage as a baseline, as this study does, includes growth that may have nothing to do with NCLB. Selecting a later date—2003, for example—and arguing that the act’s accountability provisions could not have been implemented before then would lead to the conclusion that growth was much less during the NCLB era (although still statistically significant, as shown in appendix A), and that the gaps between low and high achievers were essentially unchanged. But it would also omit influence that NCLB may have had on NAEP scores during the debate and early implementation of the legislation.

Neal and Schanzenbach provide an example. In the fall of 2001, “with the passage of NCLB looming on the horizon,” the state of Illinois placed hundreds of schools on a watch list and declared that future state testing would be high stakes. If such actions influenced educators’ behavior and students’ test scores, an “NCLB effect” may have been registered in 2002. The bottom line is that there is no clear boundary between pre- and post-NCLB periods and no perfect way to delineate the NCLB era using the NAEP test years. Critics and defenders of NCLB alike can (and do) exploit this ambiguity to their advantage. The fairest approach is to point out the large gains in NAEP scores in the period around 1998-2003 and acknowledge that NCLB’s association with these gains is unknown.

P.S. Readers can see the long-term trends for high-achieving students by viewing the foreword to the report, where they are presented since the 1990s. As we wrote, “Looking at long-term NAEP trends for the top 10 percent, one spots a steady line inching ever-so-slowly upward from the early 1990s to today. Enter NCLB, and nothing changes. It’s ‘benign neglect’ in pictures.”

Speaking at lunch today, Secretary Spellings stated that it would be fine with her if NCLB were renamed the “Motherhood And Apple Pie” program. MAAP. Not bad.

What was bad, however, was her verbal embrace of the appalling Al Sharpton (along with Joel Klein, Roy Romer, Andy Rotherham, and sundry worthies), co-chair (with Klein) of the recently-announced “Education Equality Project”.

More on Sharpton here and here.

Over a year ago, when Secretary Spellings invited all states to apply for a new pilot program to use growth models in their accountability systems, she included  several requirements, one of which was “A growth model proposal must... ensure that all students are proficient by 2014.” This week’s Education Week commentary on growth models spells out some of the repercussions of that fateful requirement. In it, Michael Weiss clarifies the difference between status models, value-added models, and projection models (the latter used by most states participating in pilot).

I’ll pause now for the vocabulary portion of our lesson...

Status model: holds that schools must bring, say, a low-performing 3rd grader up to proficiency by the end of the year for the school to receive credit for her performance, regardless of initial achievement (i.e, the NCLB model).

Projection model: holds that schools receive credit if  learning gains are sufficiently large enough that a student appears to be on track to become proficient by say, 6th grade, regardless of initial achievement.

Value-added model: measures schools’ relative effectiveness by accounting for students’ initial achievement levels using multiple years of  test score data.

All three of these models are problematic. Folks don’t like the status model since it doesn’t take initial achievement into consideration. Essentially the same problem exists for projection models with the added challenge of having to estimate growth. Regarding the latter, Weiss cites the Florida example. That state assumed a linear trend for student growth (meaning students will continue gaining at the same rate of growth); when in fact, students’ development was curvilinear (meaning students made significantly smaller learning gains as they progressed through the grades, which is not unusual). Consequently, we’re told that Florida’s projection model identifies many students as on track to become proficient when they will actually not make it. Finally, there are problems with value-added models as well, like not adequately addressing missing data, among myriad other problems (see here and here).

Weiss explains that value-added models “are not allowed under the growth-model pilot program because they don’t adhere to the core principle of NCLB—to bring all students up to proficiency.” (Clearly this 2014 deadline is problematic for a number of reasons that scads of people have pointed out, so I won’t go there.) I was under the impression that this was the flexibility granted to the pilot states, but no, it’s flexibility with a big, fat string attached. Apparently I’m not the only to have made that assumption—we’re told most folks equate value-added models with growth in accountability systems. Not the case with NCLB.

The author hypothesizes that the reason that we haven’t seen big differences between the status models used in most states and the projection models used in the pilot states is because they both operate under the fixed-proficiency-target notion.

To be sure, we’ve all been bombarded with news about the magic and allure of growth models. Countless conferences have been convened on the topic. Yet, we’re still on a steep learning curve when it comes to understanding and using them wisely and appropriately. Weiss succinctly describes the tension among the models this way:

The dilemma over which measure of school performance to use highlights an inherent tension when designing an accountability system for schools, one between the desire to compare their relative effectiveness (value-added models) while simultaneously holding them accountable for bringing all students up to high achievement levels (status or projection models). Some people thought that the pilot program’s projection models were a happy middle ground. Unfortunately, projection models don’t address the essential tension between status and growth. They are just the same old status-model wine in a new bottle.

I appreciated how Weiss laid out the issue here. The assumptions behind the models and the methodological questions he raises are the right ones for us to be wrestling with. It boils down to the primary purpose of the model and how results will be used. He ends up saying value-added is the way to go, despite its flaws. I can’t say at this point whether I agree with him or not. I need to go to a few more conferences on it first...

Checker and Mike write on National Review Online today about Fordham’s latest report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind.

I’ve been enjoying the print media’s and blogosphere’s reactions to our new report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. Most of the commentary is entirely predictable. For instance, the Education Trust expresses discomfort with us even raising the issue. From this morning’s New York Times story:

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, which lobbies for policies to help close the achievement gap, said the gains by low achievers should be applauded. “My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence,” she said. “We need to strive for both.”

Susan Traiman, the Business Roundtable’s education policy director, goes a bit further:

We’re producing progress at the bottom, and we need to maintain that,” Ms. Traiman said, “but we need to ratchet up the performance of students at every achievement level if we’re going to be competitive.”

That’s exactly right. But the award for truth-telling goes to Eduwonk Andy, who acknowledges that educators, at least, have to make difficult choices about how to allocate their time and attention.

There is also a belief that schools can do everything at once: That they can close achievement gaps, raise overall achievement, stretch high performing students and help struggling ones all at the same time. As Rick Hess and I wrote in PDK in 2007 all of these pressures create an untenable situation for educators.

We put this directly to the teachers by asking them, when deciding how they spend their one-on-one time, which students they pick. Overwhelmingly, it’s the low achievers:

Everyone’s right that policymakers can tweak No Child Left Behind to create incentives for schools to pay attention to the top students and the bottom students (and everyone in between). A new version of the law could, for example, expect schools to help all of their students make progress over the course of the year (not just the ones below “proficiency”). It could give schools credit for helping more students reach the “advanced” level on state tests (though these still not be high enough). And it could allow out-of-year testing so that assessments could accurately measure how far above grade level bright students are—and could then determine whether or not they are staying well above grade level over time.

But teachers will still have to decide how to spend their time and attention. Right now, they are choosing to spend it on the low achievers, which is fine with Andy. I’d vote for a more “equitable” use of teachers’ time—giving it equally to all students, regardless of prior achievement. (And grouping students by ability, instead of age, would help a lot, and teachers think so too, according to our survey.) And the Education Trust would rather us shut up about this whole debate, because they know it will make parents angry to know that their children might be getting ignored due to NCLB’s incentives. But it’s a debate we should have, out in the open, rather than pretending that an obsession with closing the achievement gap comes without any costs.

Mike and Christina discuss Fordham’s new report on how high-achievers have fared as educators have turned their focus toward closing the achievement gap.

That’s the question posed by Fordham’s latest report, High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. (Check out the full report or the one-page summary.) It contains two separate studies examining the status of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind era. The first, by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, concludes that the nation’s top pupils have “languished” academically while the lowest-performing youngsters have gained dramatically. The second, by the Farkas Duffett Research Group, finds that most teachers feel pressure to focus primarily on their lowest-achieving students and neglect the high achievers, even though this offends their sense of fairness. Both studies make clear that if we want our top achievers to make progress, too, we’ll need to rethink NCLB’s accountability measures.

The report’s getting lots of attention in the media; see coverage from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, Education Week, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’ve been arguing lately that John McCain needs to distance himself from NCLB, because it’s unpopular with his base and, increasingly, with the general public. Plus, as I told Education Week, everyone knows that the law needs some reworking. Without saying so, he cedes the “mend it, don’t end it” line to Barack Obama—who can claim to be anti-NCLB and pro-school reform at the same time.

Well, forget about that. At a reporter roundtable we hosted this morning,* McCain education advisor Lisa Graham Keegan offered a glimpse at the Senator’s nascent education plan. To my ears, it sounds like a major departure from No Child Left Behind as we know it. And I wasn’t the only one hearing that. Let me rely on the reporting of real journalists. First, Michelle McNeil at Education Week’s Campaign K12 blog:

McCain... wants to move away from sanctions and instead use tutoring and public school choice as “opportunities” for children and families rather than as punishments for schools. And perhaps more importantly, he wants to make the aid available to families immediately without waiting two or three years. And maintaining the current sanction of restructuring schools at five years if they are failing to meet adequate yearly progress isn’t a priority for him, either. In addition, McCain will work more closely with governors to come up with other options for addressing failing schools, [Keegan] said.

And Maria Glod at the Washington Post quoted Keegan thusly: “The federal government cannot position itself continually as the bully in this. No more will we say that’s what 50 states are going to do, because he doesn’t believe that’s our best hope for improvement.”

Keegan also mentioned McCain’s interest in a growth model that would provide incentives to accelerate the performance of high achieving students, and she wouldn’t commit to keeping the 2013-2014 deadline for getting all students to “proficiency.” All this adds up to a major shift in policy (not necessarily the shift I had in mind, but still). 

However, the details are quite sketchy. The reporters pressed Keegan on the absence of a formal plan from McCain. She promised one was forthcoming (by back-to-school) but she also turned the tables on Obama. Referring to his proposal, released last fall, she said, “It’s very easy to write a detailed program for an old system.”

* We plan to host these roundtables monthly with a variety of newsmakers in education. We’re working with the Obama campaign to schedule a session with one of their k-12 advisors in July.

Education Week reports today that data collected from the states by the U.S. Department of Education show the percentage of core classes in the nation taught by highly-qualified teachers is around 94 percent for 2006-2007. The numbers for high-poverty schools are slightly lower, but still pretty high—illustrating once again that the gaping loophole in the teacher quality provision known as HOUSEE invites states to game the system. North Dakota, for instance, boasts a full 100 percent of its core-subject classes taught by highly-qualified teachers. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s 100 percent in high-poverty schools, low-poverty schools, elementary schools, and secondary schools—every single core class taught by a highly-qualified teacher who demonstrates content knowledge expertise.

Others have already spoken about this problem quite eloquently. And though we admit to spotting a silver lining in here for charter schools, the fact remains that these latest overinflated data are just downright silly. Barnett Berry at the Center for Teaching Quality says as much:

The way states define highly-qualified teachers and what counts and doesn’t count varies, ... rendering cross-state comparisons useless.

True, and the same adjective applies to the data themselves.

Here’s another analysis explaining why it’s “good politics” for the candidates to bash NCLB—something Senator John McCain has so far been unwilling to do.

It must be kiss-and-tell season, what with Scott McClellan’s recent riposte to the Bush White House, and now with former education department official’s Susan Neuman’s revisionist history as reported by Time:*

Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush’s first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda—a way to expose the failure of public education and “blow it up a bit,” she says. “There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization.”

I know and like Susan (we overlapped at the Department and worked on some issues together), but what a ridiculous statement. Of course “there were a number of people pushing hard for market forces”—like, say, the President himself. What Neuman apparently failed to realize when she agreed to serve was that she’d been asked by a Republican Administration--you know, the party in favor of vouchers and such. President Bush campaigned for school choice during his 2000 run—right out there in the open. But that doesn’t mean that NCLB’s focus on accountability was meant to soften up the country for vouchers. Nor is there any evidence anywhere that tough accountability leads to more school choice. The debates just aren’t joined that way.

Reading between the lines, I suspect the “number of people” she refers to as supporting “market forces and privatization” includes Gene Hickok, the former undersecretary who was her boss, and Bill Hansen, the former deputy secretary who was my boss. Yes, they support school choice, big time. That’s one reason why they served in senior positions in Bush’s Administration.

What was never clear was why Neuman, who obviously has no love for parental choice, nor had any management experience, was given the reins of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education—one of the largest and most important divisions in the education department, and one that, at the time, even had responsibility for choice and charter school programs. (We moved those to the Office of Innovation and Improvement when it was created in 2003.) Yes, she was a reading expert, but that is a slim reason to give someone such an important job.

Neuman and Hickok—who together chaired the department’s NCLB implementation team—clashed endlessly. And understandably: they saw the world and the task at hand completely differently. I can’t ever imagine Hickok saying this, for example: “Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids.” What defeatism. Yet that choice quote from Neuman is what closes the Time article.

So what’s the lesson for the McCain or Obama Administration? It’s simple: make sure you select people for senior appointments who share your policy agenda. It’s going to be hard enough to sell your education proposals to Congress and the American people. It’s more than a little crazy to have to sell them to your own staff, too.

* Some might say, wait, isn’t this the same Mike Petrilli who wasted no time criticizing the Administration when he left and “turned in his NCLB lapel pin” on the law’s fifth anniversary? Well, fair enough, except my beefs with NCLB and with the Administration tend toward the details, whereas Neuman’s disagreements are much more global. As far as I can tell, the one thing she agreed with was Reading First. As important as that was, that’s not nearly enough, not for the position she held.

From Ed Week: States that set easy targets during No Child Left Behind’s early years will now “have to make annual gains of 10 percentage points or more in the proportion of students scoring as proficient in those subjects....”

Or at least compassionate conservatism, of which NCLB is a cornerstone. So implieth Michael Gerson in this morning’s Washington Post.

One of Senator John McCain’s most attractive virtues is his willingness to stand on principle even in the face of adversity. He promoted comprehensive immigration reform even though his own party’s base hated it. He continues to support the Iraq War even though the public wants the troops out. Now, with his strong, almost-no-caveats embrace of No Child Left Behind, he’s got a twofer: he’s found a policy position opposed by his party’s base and the general public.

Such a position gives Senator Barack Obama all kinds of room to run. He can support the tenets of NCLB while criticizing its specifics, placate his teacher union base while offering reforms that paint him as a different kind of Democrat. And yesterday, in a major policy speech at the Mapleton Expeditionary School for the Arts (MESA), that’s exactly what he did. (Full text here, Washington Post Online coverage here; AP coverage here.) Here’s the beef:

I believe it’s time to lead a new era of mutual responsibility in education, one where we all come together for the sake of our children’s success. An era where each of us does our part to make that success a reality: parents and teachers, leaders in Washington and citizens all across America.

This starts with fixing the broken promises of No Child Left Behind. Now, I believe that the goals of this law were the right ones. Making a promise to educate every child with an excellent teacher is right. Closing the achievement gap that exists in too many cities and rural areas is right. More accountability is right. Higher standards are right.

But I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong.

We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind. We must provide the funding we were promised, give our states the resources they need and finally meet our commitment to special education. We also need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test. Recently, 87 percent of Colorado teachers said that testing was crowding out subjects like music and art. But we need to look no further than MESA to see that accountability does not need to come at the expense of a well-rounded education. It can help complete it - and it should.

And what was the McCain campaign’s response? His spokesman said:

While in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama has never spearheaded education reforms, which despite his lofty rhetoric, demonstrates his weak leadership on an issue that is critical to the economic strength of our country. It’s no coincidence that a leading education magazine [Education Week] noted that Senator Obama has made no significant mark on education policy.

That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?

Conventional wisdom (true in this case, I believe) says that Republicans that don’t talk about education don’t win elections. Senator McCain is going to have to offer a clear vision of his own on the issue, and if it has any chance of energizing his base or the general public, it needs to start with an admission that NCLB is far from perfect. Then he can strike back at his opponent. If you think “mutual responsibility” and parental involvement are such good ideas, Mr. Obama, why won’t you allow parents to choose a full range of options for their children, including excellent inner-city Catholic schools? In particular, why won’t you let low-income Hispanic families make these choices? What exactly would you do, from Washington, to a school once you declare it a failure? And just how many “resources” are enough to fix our schools? $550 billion a year isn’t enough?

Team McCain: Amateur hour is over. Get it together, or get ready for a sad November.

Anecdotal gripes that gifted children are not getting their needs met abound. Take this post from a gifted-education advocate that states: “Schools in America are not being evaluated equitably, and the gifted children are among the ones who are suffering” and “NCLB does not even talk about gifted and talented children—our country’s greatest natural resource.”

Flypaper readers will be happy to learn that we have an upcoming study titled “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB” written by esteemed Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless due to be released in the next month. As its title suggests, it will examine empirically how gifted students have fared during the NCLB era. Stay tuned to find out whether anecdotes and opinions about meeting gifted children’s needs have any relationship to their academic progress.

Clearly blogging is having a dumbing-down effect on my punditry. Though it is silly (”unwise”? “counter-productive”? “cynical”?) to expect 100 percent of students to attain proficiency and for proficiency to still mean something, as our friends in South Carolina recently discovered.

With overwhelming votes in its House and Senate, South Carolina is racing to revamp its state assessment system and, apparently, lower its standards dramatically. The Spartansburg Herald Journal says:

The change could drastically increase the number of schools meeting NCLB requirements. Currently, only students who score proficient or advanced attain the proficient level required under NCLB. Under the new system, those who score “met” or “exemplary” would qualify.

It’s a shame, but perhaps not surprising, as South Carolina currently boasts some of the toughest proficiency standards in the country. Its legislators are only reacting to No Child Left Behind’s perverse incentives. Secretary Spellings: are you willing to let go of the “100 percent proficient by 2014″ madness yet?

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story titled “No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite.” Not in Washington, D.C., it doesn’t.