Given how unpopular the No Child Left Behind law has become, it may be hard to remember that it passed just over a decade ago with overwhelming bipartisan support. Advocates saw it as a way to hold schools accountable and provide workable standards of proficiency in education. But the intentions of the law are at odds with its actual results.
No Child Left Behind has created a great deal of bureaucratic headaches for teachers and administrators alike but produced little in the way of actual school improvement. The legislative language of No Child Left Behind stated that “[e]ach State shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year, all students … will meet or exceed the State's proficient level of academic achievements on the State assessments …." Well, it’s now 2015, and we’ve passed the law’s mandated 12-year mark. And all students have not met or exceeded the state’s proficient level of academic achievements on the state assessments.
We’re not even close.
Schools that do not meet the NCLB standards are designated to be either reorganized or closed. Given that this law has now demonstrably failed even by its own standards, perhaps it’s time to apply that same remedy to No Child Left Behind.
Yet there are reasons to be concerned as the Republicans in the 114th Congress gear up to do just that.
Many Republicans are wary of any federal role in establishing educational standards, and some think that a repeal of NCLB might give them the opportunity to strip out the federal role in education altogether.
But as this debate unfolds, we hope that legitimate ideological differences about which level of government should play what role in education do not cloud over our children’s right to have an educational system that is verifiably accountable. Often the complaints about NCLB — and now the furor over the Common Core — focus on frustrations over a regime of testing, the challenges of implementing curricular changes, different approaches to pedagogy and the role of socio-economics in educational attainment. These are all genuine frustrations that must be addressed.
As problems are addressed, no one should forget the concerns that motivated the initial enthusiasm for NCLB, namely a concern that we did not have adequate measurement of and accountability for our children's educational outcomes.
If our children are to achieve and compete throughout their lives, society needs the tools to know whether they are in fact developing the attributes and skills needed to participate fully in a high-productivity global economy. This requires that we have pedagogically sound standards against which to measure performance. This requires that we have transparency. All of that requires having uniform data to compare and analyze, which, despite its political unpopularity with certain groups, requires some sort of uniform standard.
NCLB needs to be revisited, but that process needs to be part of a process that keeps NCLB’s appreciation for verifiable accountability and transparency. If a repeal of No Child Left Behind is pursued solely to score a partisan victory, then we, as a nation, will have failed to learn from our mistakes.