2/25/2008
Stephanie Liddle and Scott DeBurgomaster, Opportunities to Fail: Structural Inequalities of No Child Left Behind
In this paper, we investigate whether the disaggregation provision under The No Child Left Behind Act has an unequal effect on making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for otherwise similar schools with different demographic compositions. We argue that this law distributes opportunities to fail across schools in a way that systematically disadvantages large, demographically diverse schools which run a higher risk of failure because they must pass more requirements than otherwise similar schools with small or less diverse student bodies. We use school-level data from Washington State’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to test our expectations. These data include various measures for all regular, public elementary, middle, and high schools in Washington during the 2004-05 school year. We model the probability that a school meets AYP standards as function of the number of disaggregation requirements a school faces under NCLB and other school-level characteristics, such as performance, school type and size, student-body composition, class size, and the presence of highly qualified teachers in schools. We find that NCLB’s disaggregation requirements distribute opportunities to fail unequally across schools such that large and demographically diverse schools face more requirements than smaller and less diverse schools. The more requirements schools face, the less likely they are to make AYP, even controlling for other influential school characteristics. Furthermore, a large share of schools that failed to make AYP missed by only requirement. There were two major stumbling blocks for such schools: math proficiency for low-income students and attendance/graduation rates.
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