Learning from No Child Left Behind: How and Why the Nation’s Most Important but Controversial Education Law Should Be Renewed, by Hoover fellow John E. Chubb

The controversial No Child Left Behind program has generated much debate since its passage in 2002. Many have criticized it, but in Learning from No Child Left Behind: How and Why the Nation’s Most Important but Controversial Education Law Should Be Renewed, Hoover visiting fellow John E. Chubb defends the program. “The law has provided the nation with ambitious goals, concrete timetables, and potent remedies for raising student achievement and providing every American child a decent education,” says Chubb.

In his book, Chubb delineates the conclusions drawn by members of the Hoover K–12 Education Task Force after reviewing research on NCLB:

• First, the nation is making academic progress. Student achievement is increasing, after a generation of stagnation, especially for the disadvantaged students that NCLB sought most directly to help.
   
• Second, as students are learning, we are learning more as a nation about what truly works to raise student achievement.
   
• Third, although it would be premature to ascribe achievement gains directly to NCLB, it is safe to say that the principles on which NCLB is based provide an empirically sound foundation for serious school reform.
   
• Fourth, NCLB contains elements of unfairness, some of its provisions do not work nearly as well as they could, and at least one provision does not work at all.
   
• Finally, NCLB should be reauthorized but with major defects corrected.

In addition, the task force outlines ten lessons to be learned and recommendations for improvement. Those ten points and the analysis that supports them constitute a coherent proposal for continuing the improvement of public education.

John E. Chubb, chief development officer and cofounder of EdisonLearning, is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He has also served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and faculty member at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous books, including Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education (Jossey-Bass, 2009), with Terry M. Moe; Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child (Hoover, 2005); and Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (Brookings, 1990). Chubb has also served as an adviser to the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, state governments, and various education organizations. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and an A.B. summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis, both in political science.

Learning from No Child Left Behind: How and Why the Nation’s Most Important but Controversial Education Law Should Be Renewed
by John E. Chubb