The latest TIME recommends that the federal government replace the 10-year-old No Child Left Behind law, and you’ll find plenty of reasons to criticize the legislation if you read the three-page article.
It’s important not to lose sight of one of the key reasons for NCLB’s failure to live up to its initial promise: States’ and local school systems’ efforts to evade the law’s accountability measures.
The bill passed with overwhelming support, 384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate. “You’re seeing government at its best,” [President George W.] Bush said at the bill signing. “We figured out how to put our parties aside and focus on what’s right for the American children.”
That support began to erode almost immediately. Eight months after the law was enacted, the Department of Education released its first list of failing schools. Nearly 9,000 schools were named–and not just the inner-city schools everyone expected to see on the list. By dividing the test results into subgroups, the law exposed achievement gaps at wealthy, suburban schools where high-flying majorities had long masked the low achievement of minority and special-ed students. “The law allowed us to get under the definition of what is good and ask the question, Is this school really good for all kids?” says Kati Haycock, president of the national policy group Education Trust. And as schools were labeled failing, states pushed back. “School systems spent a lot of time being defensive,” says California Representative George Miller, a Democrat, one of the lead authors of NCLB. “They got angry. They were embarrassed.” Then they got creative. By year’s end, Utah had removed some of the more difficult questions from its statewide exams, and Ohio refined its criteria for determining which schools were low-performing so that the number shrank from 760 to 200. These changes inspired other states to follow their lead.
Before he became a doctor (and wasn’t even playing one on video), Terry Stoops diagnosed key concerns about NCLB during a 2006 interview for Carolina Journal Radio/CarolinaJournal.tv.
