To Leave No Child Behind Requires Social Science Discipline

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the nation’s blueprint for federal support of K-12 public education. The provisions of this 670-page law are administered by the U.S. Department of Education and provide the “roadmap” for congressional funding and federal efforts to implement programs authorized under this law’s earlier incarnation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Programs range from teacher training to improving student academic achievement (see February 2004 Footnotes “Vantage Point” and Michigan story on page 1 of this Footnotes issue).

The purpose of NCLB is “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and . . . proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.” The goal of improving public school accountability, student assessment, and academic achievement improvements is laudable.

Funding and Leadership Left Behind

However, public debate and news coverage about NCLB focus on controversial federally imposed provisions and point to chronic systemic problems. The purposes of NCLB are grand compared to past K-12 reform efforts, and because the law’s specifics clash with intricate, labyrinthine realities of 50 fiercely autonomous state education systems, many criticisms of NCLB have emerged (including sarcastic adaptations such as “No-Millionaire-Left-Behind tax reform”).

Countless high-profile lawmakers and policymakers as well as “in-the-trenches” education administrators and teachers who support the goals of NCLB understand its fundamental weaknesses and are reformulating NCLB. The political reality is that the law’s renewal could be delayed for another two to three years, causing local school systems to hobble along crafting compromises and accommodations until more well-thought-out provisions can be made law. This is bad timing for a nation obsessed with its international standings in math, reading, science, and other fundamental areas of student academic achievement and equal access to quality education.

Higher Education Left Behind . . . and Where’s Sociology?

With sociologists’ approach to studying broader structural factors in social outcomes, our discipline has much to offer the reformulation of NCLB, especially efforts to better align its K-12 goals with realities and trends in U.S. higher education. The Department of Education, however, is wary of soliciting input after several missteps and intense conflict with the higher education community on accessibility and accountability (see May/June 2007 Footnotes “Vantage Point”). Seeking additional routes to engage the higher education community, it is reaching out to disciplinary societies to discuss implementations affecting accessibility and accountability.

ASA and other disciplinary societies recently met, by invitation, with senior Department of Education policy staff to provide such feedback. ASA staff took the opportunity to explain the failure of NCLB to sufficiently integrate and align with higher education generally and the Higher Education Act, another bill making its way through Congress, in particular. At the meeting, we expressed concern about a growing evidence of the negative impact of NCLB on college- and university-level social science departments. Specifically, the NCLB legislation identifies 10 core subject areas (English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography). This enumeration is being arbitrarily misinterpreted (or selectively interpreted) by some states as not including sociology (and/or anthropology, psychology, political science) in the category of “science” or even in state-defined “social studies.”

NCLB required states to develop plans with annual measurable objectives to ensure that all teachers teaching in core academic subjects are “highly qualified” by 2005-06. State-level explicit omission of sociology as a recognized core area (within science) (e.g., Michigan) means that future K-12 teachers who majored in sociology will not qualify for the NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher” status when they seek certification to teach core science or social studies subjects. Combined with states’ fiscally driven tendency to teach primarily what is tested on NCLB-aligned state-wide exams, this situation threatens to accelerate the exclusion of our already too rarely taught science from K-12 curricula. It has the serious potential of establishing a negative feedback chain that ripples through higher education, causing teacher colleges and other education-oriented programs to marginalize sociology.

Selective exclusion of sociology (and other social sciences) from “science” is bad enough, but it also is inconsistent with the National Council for the Social Studies (see www.socialstudies.org) definition of “social studies” in curriculum standards, a resource used by state education departments.

A narrowed definition of social studies—a cohort of disciplines whose content is at the core of democratic idealism and the foundation of democracy—for teaching and assessment purposes weakens educational expectations and is one of the unintended consequences of NCLB. In K-12, if sociology is not tested, there is less impetus for it to be taught, leaving both sociology and students behind. The resulting K-12 curricular deficit cumulates through higher education and the workplace. This disconnect is one we would like the Department of Education and lawmakers to understand and fix.