'No Child Left Behind': Background and Consequences

The following is by no means comprehensive, but it is intended to give a sense of some of the influences on NCLB (decades of national concern with the quality of education in the U.S., the supposed miracle in the schools of Texas in the 1990s), and some of its effects. I do not go into depth on the specifics of its implementation.

National Policy Climate

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a 2002 reauthorization of a 1965 piece of legislation called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Though NCLB was such a shock to the national education system that it was more like a revolution than a reauthorization, it nevertheless drew on concerns that had existed for decades. The difference was not the aim, but the implementation.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in its original form, was motivated by the recognition of an achievement gap in poor schools. Federal money, under Title I, was used to supplement state funding for schools. When a school was identified as having both high poverty and low achievement, a calculation would be done to determine how much Title I money would be given to that school (9/4/12 lecture notes, on an education class at Ohio University).

By 1980, there was plenty of evidence that the achievement gap was not closing, and was in some areas getting worse. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk led to increased concerns among teachers, politicians, and the public about the state of public schooling in the U.S. (Toppo, 2008). A desire to find top-down, evidence-based solution to academic woes has only mounted since. In other words, NCLB did not come out of the blue; it addressed long-standing concerns in predictably technocratic, quantification-oriented ways.

"Where all the children are above average" (Garrison Keillor)

NCLB expects that all students- literally, 100%- score 'proficient' (average) or higher on standardized tests by 2014. This suggests a basic misunderstanding of what an average is. Mandating that everyone be at or above average is statistically impossible, and that cannot be changed by any tweaking of the means or time allotted for achieving this goal. When there is a range of performance levels, the average of those performance levels will be higher than some, and lower than others. You cannot always bring desired outcomes into existence by demanding that they occur, particularly when the desired outcome is impossible by definition.

A Miracle in Texas?

Many people may not be aware that NCLB was based on "The Texas Miracle" and the schools of Houston in particular. That the nation's schools came to be modeled on those of Houston was unsurprising, given that the superintendent of Houston's schools, Rod Paige, was named secretary of education by George W. Bush. "Paige... had instituted a policy of holding principals accountable for how their students did. Principals worked under one-year contracts, and each year, the school district set strict goals in areas like dropout rates and test scores. Principals who met the goals got cash bonuses of up to $5,000, and other perks. Those who fell short were transferred, demoted or forced out." (Leung, 2009). Investigative reporting by 60 Minutes found that the impressive statistics of high test scores and low drop out rates were, in effect, falsified (Leung, 2009). Later, similar concerns about honesty on the part of administrators and teachers would come to light with NCLB as well.

A common complaint about NCLB is the tendency of teachers to teach to standardized accountability tests. According to Walt Haney of Boston College, who spent over two years on an extraordinarily comprehensive article about this supposed miracle, the same tendency was found in Texas after the introduction between 1990 and 1991 of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). "In the opinion of educators in Texas, schools are devoting a huge amount of time and energy preparing students specifically for TAAS, and emphasis on TAAS is hurting more than helping teaching and learning in Texas schools, particularly with at-risk students, and TAAS contributes to retention in grade and dropping out" (Haney, from the abstract). There is also evidence of negative effects of educational policies used in Texas on minorities (higher rates of failure, repeating the same grade, dropping out). Further, TAAS may be neither reliable or valid, and increases in TAAS scores have actually coincided with decreases in scores on a college readiness test. "Between 1994 and 1997, TAAS results showed a 20% increase in the percentage of students passing all three exit level TAAS tests (reading, writing and math), but TASP (a college readiness test) results showed a sharp decrease (from 65.2% to 43.3%) in the percentage of students passing all three parts (reading, math, and writing)" (Haney, abstract).

Textbooks, Tests, and Motivation

One of the first expectations of good research about even a subject of insignificance is that the student use multiple sources. No single source should have a monopoly on discourse- it is fundamentally contrary to intellectual integrity. Yet, whole subjects, taught for the 180 days of a school year, apparently do not merit the same extent of concern for variety of perspectives as a five-page research paper completed in a couple hours. In many classrooms, teachers can tell their students 'open your books' or 'turn to the text,' and know that they will understand what they are talking; this suggests that everyone in that classroom takes for granted that only one book will be used there. Why is this? According to many teachers, it is because the textbook they use includes everything the students will be tested on.

It is no wonder that there are concerns about NCLB narrowing curriculum, and diminishing the enthusiasm of teachers. Has anyone who has truly enjoyed thinking about things and learning things ever been motivated by wanting to prove themselves on an impersonal Scantron? I think motivation to learn is found in our curiosity about the material, and our connections to our teachers. If this is the case, then it is surely a poor indicator for the future of education that testing regimes encourage a view of education more preoccupied with tests than either interesting information, ideas, or discussion. NCLB is an impoverishment of education, rather than an enriching of it.

Reliance on textbooks is also problematic because it presents a unified, rather than a contested, view of the realities discussed. Do teachers who rely on textbooks care about non-hegemonic perspectives (e.g., perspectives that are not Eurocentric, patriarchal, classist, racist, and so on)? Some of them do, of course. Yet, they trust the authors of the textbooks they use to provide a neat cross-section of these views- a neatness which is often reductionist and marginalizing, and communicates none of the passion that is in them- and expect that this will suffice. This is naive, and a poor example to those they teach; not only are textbook authors fallible human beings, but reality is not so neatly pinned down. No one has a monopoly on reality, so why give someone a monopoly on the parameters of discourse within your classroom?

Unintended Consequences

One of the most basic, but undervalued, aspects of good decision-making is the regard for unintended consequences. Because it is hard to know the full ramifications of any course of action until some time has passed, it is wise to wait and see before attempting to make a would-be objective statement about whether or not that course of action is desirable; and, because it takes time for consequences to unfold, it is best to institute changes slowly and steadily, rather than all at once. (Perhaps human social structures, like human bodies, can undergo 'shock,' and the associated unpleasant and disorienting affects- certainly, many individual teachers felt shocked by NCLB!) Such prudence was not shown either in waiting to deem the educational reforms in Texas miraculous, nor in deciding to scale them up to the nation as a whole. Now that time has passed, it is clear that many of the concerns had about NCLB- for instance, the propensity to motivate dishonest behaviors by some teachers and administrators (for instance, see http://fairtest.org/nclb-boosts-temptation-cheat)- were evident, first, in the Houston schools on which it was based.

Citations

Leung, R. (2009, February 11). The 'texas miracle'. CBS News. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60ii/main591676.shtml
Toppo, G. (2008, August 1). 'Nation at risk': The best thing or the worst thing for education?. USA Today. Retrieved from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-04-22-nation-at-risk_N.htm
Walt, H. (2000). The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 41