Congress is still debating the details, but it seems likely that there will be some major changes to the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind. Some modifications are warranted. But it would be a mistake to substantially weaken the educational accountability established by NCLB. Doing so would hurt the neediest kids most.
The fundamental principles of accountability -- that student achievement is worth measuring and that failing schools should be sanctioned – are as important today as ever. There are many great public schools. But some schools continue to systematically fail their students.
And the bad schools aren't distributed evenly. Kids in neighborhoods with lower average income and heavy minority populations are more likely to end up in an ineffective school than are wealthier, whiter students whose parents can afford private school tuition or can move to more attractive areas. Without the threat of accountability, there is little reason to suspect that such schools will pursue meaningful changes.
That's not to say that NCLB itself is flawless. It was an obviously imperfect scheme from the start. The law increased the role of the federal government in education to an uncomfortable level. Its requirement that every student reach proficiency by 2014 was always absurd. More important, but less well-appreciated, the law actually does a poor job of identifying ineffective schools. NCLB judges a school's quality by the percentage of its students with test scores above an arbitrary threshold – which is highly correlated with student backgrounds – rather than measuring the progress that its students make in a given year, which researchers consider to be a more accurate measure of the school's influence on educational outcomes.
And yet, despite its flaws, the best evidence to date suggests that NCLB has made schools better. A convincing recent study by Stanford University's Thomas Dee and University of Michigan's Brian Jacob found that NCLB produced substantial test score improvements. The gains were particularly meaningful among historically low-performing students.
The revised federal education legislation might return responsibility for accountability programs to the states. The good news is that many states and large school districts are perfectly capable of designing and implementing tough and effective accountability systems. In fact, many such as Florida and New York City ran such simultaneously with NCLB. The bad news is that some states will surely choose weak accountability plans.
In a 2012 paper, my co-author Joshua Cowen and I found evidence that New York City schools that were issued a failing grade under the district's accountability system responded by making substantial improvements the following year. Our results were similar to another study of New York City's school grading policy by Columbia University economists Jonah Rockoff and Leslie Turner in 2010.
But New York City's experience demonstrates how the anti-accountability sentiment is threatening even the most effective localized systems. Despite evidence that the policy has been effective, one of the first things that the de Blasio administration did upon taking office was to scrap the city's school grading system. The city now has a much weaker accountability policy that focuses on providing detailed information about several aspects of the school rather than identifying and sanctioning those that are low performing.
There are those on both sides of the political aisle that are frustrated with federal accountability through NCLB. But it is worth remembering the reason this bipartisan law came about in the first place: Strong accountability policies offer important leverage over schools that aren't adequately serving their students. The research suggests that today's schools are better off for expansive accountability. We should work to make accountability systems even better, not find ways to derail them.
This piece originally appeared in RealClearEducation