The Legacy of No Child Left Behind
After years of intense public pressure to improve the quality of education, on January 23 of 2001, President Bush proposed a plan to Congress to improve the standards of America’s failing primary and secondary education systems. The plan would reauthorize Lyndon B. Johnson’s, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) with a forceful new piece of legislation. Fast-forward a year, and on January 8, 2002, President Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the largest and most far-reaching piece of federal education legislation of the young twenty-first century. With bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate, the country was optimistic that its children would finally receive the education they deserved as citizens of the world’s leading power.
On December 10, President Obama signed a new reauthorization of ESEA into legislation, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This law was met with great fanfare and press coverage, known as the act that replaced the failed No Child Left Behind. The questions remain of what the United States has learned from the failure of NCLB, and how ESSA will correct these shortcomings.
To begin, one must examine the legislative history of No Child Left Behind. The story of modern education policy in America begins with Lyndon B. Johnson’s storied “War on Poverty.” As a tenet of this metaphorical war, K-8 education became one of the focuses of the Johnson administration, ushering in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Every five years or so, the U.S. Congress would continually renew, or reauthorize, this legislation, relegating Johnson’s education policy to a backburner of obligatory renewal. Fast-forward to 2001 – the Bush administration – during which it became crystal clear that the education situation in the country was dismal.
No Child Left Behind was conceived in the wake of public outcry over the poor state of education and flew through both the House and Senate with rare levels of bipartisanship. The main objectives of NCLB were to guarantee that our students were performing above average in three major subjects: English, mathematics, and science. To confirm that students were indeed learning these subjects, federal legislators placed an inordinate amount of focus on standardized testing for grades 3-8. Schools were required to demonstrate “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), a diagnostic measurement designed to reveal which schools were in most need of resources and were not performing at national standards. Each year, schools were required to show that at least 95 percent of the students performed at national standards, or that there was significant improvement from one year to the following. Schools were required to demonstrate progress if they wished to be eligible for federal funding for further education measures. The Federal Department of Education, with access to the $55.7 billion dollars allocated for education spending, provided that funding.
It is widely believed that the few positive aspects of NCLB were limited to specific schools and did not create broader change. NCLB increased accountability significantly within individual schools, mainly through the use of regular reporting of standardized testing scores and report cards for the parents. In addition, through centralizing the academic standards, it held the federal government, specifically the Department of Education, responsible for the successes or failings of the project. NCLB also contained a provision on quality of educator that required all teachers, tenured and not tenured, to have both pedagogical knowledge and subject knowledge. Teachers were also evaluated against the test scores of each group of students, required to demonstrate progress. While this aspect itself was viewed as a flaw of NCLB, the concept of evaluating teachers against federal standards was lauded as a worthy goal. Overall, however, NCLB was viewed as a decisive failure, most often because of its focus on standardized testing. Understandably, legislators decided that to measure standards on a national scale, a quantitative method of measuring academic progress would be the only way to regulate schools. Unfortunately, the disproportionate focus on standardized testing introduced a host of issues that degraded the already failing school system.
Critics cite the main issue that NCLB created was the concept of “teaching to the test.” A part of the act regarding AYP reads, “(iii) results in continuous and substantial academic improvement for all students” and “(iv) measures the progress of public elementary schools, secondary schools and local educational agencies and the State based primarily on the academic assessments described in paragraph (3)”. The assessments referred to in “paragraph (3)” are those that each state designed to be the markers for the success of their students. Many school officials and board of education directors interpreted this to mean that federal funding would only be allocated to schools that demonstrated AYP, and by extension, progress on standardized testing. School administrators and state officials deemed that any subjects that were not tested on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other standardized tests were unimportant to general education. Across the board, funding was cut from subjects such as art, history, and foreign languages because of the pressure to show higher standardized testing scores. Even within the core subjects, certain topics were cut out of school’s curriculum to maximize time in the classroom preparing for the national exams. In one extreme case of standardized test pressure, eleven school officials in Atlanta were convicted in 2014 of fabricating standardized test data to pass the federal standards.
The rigorous federal standards also caused many schools, especially in urban neighborhoods, to close down because they failed to demonstrate the yearly progress required for federal funding. Though many schools showed considerable progress throughout the duration of NCLB, due to the fact that they didn’t meet the quantified “acceptable” mark according to the legislation, many of these schools were closed. Students in the area were then required to be bussed to schools much further from their residences, creating more problems within the urban education system. Many of the schools that lost funding were viewed in their respective communities as bastions of primary education; others were some of the few high schools that kept students going.
The largest criticism, however, came from many state educators after viewing the results of NCLB. Viewing the rate of progress before NCLB in comparison to the rate during NCLB, it is clear that there was minimal change between the educational progresses of each school. Viewing the legislation through a critical lens, the libertarian political scientist Charles Murray stated, “The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.” The law was doomed for failure from the beginning because instead of measuring progress as improvement, the federal government viewed progress as a blanket statement that required all students to meet a certain threshold.
Obama’s new legislation, the Every Student Succeeds Act, looks to correct many of the failures of NCLB, namely the centralized educational standards. In 2011, Arne Duncan, under the Obama administration, looked to correct many of the issues with NCLB by handing out waivers to states that showed considerable progress but did not meet the NCLB standards. ESSA looks to build on these waivers by limiting federal control and returning much of the power to the states. Though during passage it was viewed as a victory for conservatives, the law passed through both the House and the Senate with large bipartisan support – unusual in our current political climate.
ESSA mainly focuses on correcting the “onesize fits all” model of NCLB by asking states to develop individual standards for their students and focus on developing the schools that each state decided were most in trouble. In addition, it allows to states to pull back on the standardized testing pressure by increasing the involvement that the states have in creating the standardized tests while also viewing other non-testing data, such as graduation rates and workforce readiness equally with test scores. State-held accountability for education also allows for the regulatory mechanism of parent networks and teachers to more easily hold local and state officials responsible for individual schools.
Comparing the two legislative bills, it’s clear that ESSA looks not to replace NCLB, but rather build on the mistakes of centralized educational standards. The Every Student Succeeds Act is not perfect, but by returning much of the power to the states, the Obama administration demonstrated understanding that improving the education system requires more than a one-size-fits-all option – it is a nuanced issue better handled by individual states than a large federal piece of legislation.