Large Mandates and Limited Resources: State Response to the No Child Left Behind Act and Implications for Accountability
Introduction
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) places extraordinary responsibilities on state education agencies by requiring them to play crucial roles in implementing the federal mandates and by reversing the traditional relationship between the federal and state agencies from one of federal aid and incentives in grant programs to one of federal requirements for producing unprecedented educational gains under pressure of serious federal sanctions. Since states establish the legal framework for educational requirements and policy, have sweeping authority over public schools, and traditionally have played a central role in administering many federal grant programs, this is not surprising. Because this authority has depended on legal rather than an administrative framework to achieve its aims and the federal resources are modest, the law provides a test of the capacity of state educational agencies to impose dramatic educational changes and administer sweeping sanctions reaching many schools and districts. From a civil rights perspective these issues are especially important since NCLB places responsibility on the states for both sanctioning and reforming the schools were minority students and teachers are concentrated when many states have not historically had a positive relationship with these schools.
NCLB rested on the assumption that state educational agencies would have the capacity to implement all of the requirements called for in the law and the ability to provide the support and technical assistance necessary to help low-performing schools and districts. Supporters of the law argued that federal policy should provide the leverage to change how states allocate their resources and that an outcome based reform strategy would create the professional and political incentives for states to marshal the federal and state resources necessary to respond to the accountability incentives. The law itself provided only modest resources and paid little attention to how the state role would need to change if the ambitious educational goals were to be achieved. One of the interesting aspects of this study was the finding that state administrators did their best to obey the law, at least by implementing the data collection and testing requirements and the market-based sanctions. But when confronted with the much more ambitious goals of ensuring large-scale educational changes and providing support to low-performing schools, the states were much less adept and the resources were few.
The aim of this study was to examine how states are meeting the law’s requirements and if they reallocate resources in ways that will meet the law’s ambitious educational goals. This research was designed to test the assumption that state capacity was adequate and that reallocation of existing resources would suffice to meet the NCLB requirements. Two types of capacity are critical to understanding states’ abilities to implement NCLB: (1) human and financial resources available to the state and local agencies, including expertise in a broad range of areas; and (2) organizational capacity, including the systems necessary to meet the data management and testing requirements and the formal and informal organizational networks between state and local authorities providing technical assistance and support to local districts and schools. We pay particular attention to the knowledge base and existence of suitable interventions for improving performance in low-performing schools that would allow state administrators to do what the law requires since the history of state failures on a much smaller scale make it difficult to understand how the states could meet these challenges and raise concern about the resulting policies and practices for minority schools and districts.
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