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No Child Left Behind: Pass or Fail? November 21, 2007 Renew, Revise, or Revile?
Pass or Fail? This fall, Congress begins reexamining the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to decide what changes to make to it during the upcoming reauthorization cycle. A wide array of interested parties, ranging from politicians to parents, teachers’ unions to the media, has taken a stance. Some call for massive changes; others claim, and produce numbers to support their view, that NCLB is on track toward its goal of leaving no child behind. In the Department of Education’s NCLB “report card,” released September 2007, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings emphatically asserts “NCLB is working.” That report highlights student gains in overall performance and maintains the achievement gap between African American/Hispanic students and their white counterparts is closing. The Path of Good Intentions NCLB was originally hailed as a shining example of bipartisan legislation, having been sponsored by the Bush administration and a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, including Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Judd Gregg (R-NH). Championed as a flexible and effective program, NCLB replaced the 1964 civil rights–inspired Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Under NCLB, each state, using its own set of standards, works toward achieving 100 percent student proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The act also seeks to ensure that all teachers are “highly qualified” and requires educators to have at least a bachelor’s degree, be certified, and have demonstrated proficiency in their subject areas. Along the way to demonstrating proficiency, schools are required to test students annually (in grades 3 through 8) and to report their results not only for the school as a whole but for subgroups based on ethnicity, gender, poverty, and special education needs. Districts and states then compile school-level data and report the findings back to Washington. Schools whose students fail to achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) face a cascade of federally mandated interventions by their districts, including initial federal support to overcome deficiencies, followed by sanctions should those efforts fail. Students at failing schools can relocate to another, higher-performing district or charter school or receive mini-vouchers that help procure additional academic support—options that very few families have used. If It Isn’t Broken . . . Although the U.S. Department of Education—with the endorsement of President Bush—continues to trumpet the success of NCLB, it concedes the plan could be improved and has outlined a proposal for strengthening NCLB, “Building on Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act.” This blueprint cites anecdotal evidence and statistics to demonstrate that NCLB is working but also recommends changes in areas where the act is falling short. For example, it suggests that middle and high schools offer more rigorous coursework and underscores states’ responsibilities for turning around underperforming schools and giving more options to children attending schools deemed “in need of improvement.” Many argue that it’s exactly the flexibility inherent in the act that accounts for its weak results. With states setting their own standards for academic proficiency, they have an incentive to lower academic standards and create easy-to-pass tests, thereby allowing more students, and schools, to attain AYP. Critics contend that, under such a system, high-achieving students are actually held to lower standards of achievement than before NCLB, whereas historically underperforming schools—many in impoverished inner-city districts—are often labeled failing even if their year-to-year progress is significant. Other critics state that 100 percent proficiency is an impossible goal and that more attention should be paid to individual gains, rather than aggregate, performance. Likewise, a growing number of educators and educational researchers worry that the NCLB-fueled race for federal approval and funds based on student attainment in math and reading skills leads to schools’ sacrificing a well-rounded education that includes history, physical education, social sciences, science, and art.
What Is the Future of NCLB? Few Americans and educators believe that NCLB, in its current form, will produce anything close to 100 percent proficiency by 2014. Given widening skepticism, sweeping changes to NCLB are in order if it is to survive. Exactly what changes should be implemented are unclear; with such profound differences of opinion over what exactly students should be learning and how to measure their progress, it remains, at least at the moment, impossible to determine NCLB’s future. —Michelle Bussenius, Editor
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Given all the conflicting opinions and data, many question whether NCLB is an ambitious and worthwhile plan that has the potential to increase overall student proficiency on a national level or no more than a well-intentioned, but ultimately unattainable, goal? Should NCLB be scrapped altogether? A recent, well-publicized poll (see graph below) indicates that less than 60 percent of Americans are in favor of the act but that nearly 75 percent are in favor of national accountability standards—the setting of which the current act assigns to individual states. 
