As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.
The article Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind" is authored by Bruce Fuller, Joseph Wright, Kathryn Gesicki, and Erin Kang, and is one of four featured works published in the current issue of ER'a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Educational Research Association.
Bruce Fuller, lead author and professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the strong advances in narrowing racial and income-based achievement gaps seen in the 1990s have faded since passage of No Child . "The slowing of achievement gains, even declines in reading, since 2002 suggests that state-led accountability efforts well underway by the mid-1990s packed more of a punch in raising student performance, compared with the flattening-out of scores during the No Child era," he observed.
We are not suggesting that No Child has dampened the earlier progress made by the states," Fuller said. "But we find no consistent evidence that federal reforms have rekindled the states earlier gains. Federal activism may have helped to sustain the buoyancy in children s math scores at the fourth-grade level, seen throughout the prior decade."
The researchers pushed beyond earlier studies by tracking progress in both state and federal test scores in 12 diverse states, going back to 1992 in many cases. This approach captured the generally positive effects of maturing state-led accountability programs in both reading and math, gauged by state officials and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Using this longer time span as the baseline, annual changes in student performance generally slowed after 2002, as gauged by state and federal testing agencies, and the earlier narrowing of achievement gaps ground to a halt (NAEP results), according to the study.
The university team focused on 12 states, including Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. They selected these states because they are demographically diverse, geographically dispersed, and were able to provide comparable test score data over time.
Following passage of the No Child law, federal reading scores among elementary school students declined in the 12 states tracked by the researchers after climbing steadily during the 1990s.