The 100 percent delusion?

Earlier this week, President Bush was adamant that there will be no compromise on  100% proficiency in NCLB reauthorization.

Frederick Hess and Chester Finn of the Fordham Foundation call that basic principle the law’s biggest problem. ”A sense of urgency and outsized aspirations is commendable, but there’s a world of difference between determination and delusion,” they write.

Tackling 100% proficiency is tricky; it leads to accusations that you don’t care if some children are left behind, and Bush and Spellings are quick to play that card. But as Finn and Hess argue, the trade-off for keeping the “100%” part of the equation is that “proficiency” becomes meaningless. State assessment systems that are working get broken, and eventually education reform isn’t about reforming anything anymore.

Hess and Finn call the 100% goal a “noble yet naïve promise,” but:

…[N]o educator in America believes that universal proficiency will, in fact, be attained by 2014, not, at least, by any reasonable definition of proficiency. Only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism and frustration among educators and a “compliance” mentality among state and local officials.

At its heart, today’s NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.

Can we have it all? Can we hit the 100%-by-2014 target and still say “at grade level” with our heads held high? Or, as Finn and Hess argue, will we find ourselves with “a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve”?

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