No Child Left Behind: 101

This is another post providing some background on education laws, so that I can discuss some very recent developments.

So, No Child Left Behind is widely viewed to have been originally enacted by Bush II in 2002.  The basic idea was to create standards-based accountability for K-12 nationwide.  The act mandated student testing every year from 3rd to 8th grade, and once in high school, to measure student progress.  Each year, a certain percentage of a state's schools must make annual yearly progress (AYP).  AYP means that this year's 5th graders, for example, test better than last year's fifth graders.  If a school doesn't make AYP, it is labeled "needs improvement"

The schedule of progress was defined as well - by the 2013-2014, all schools, in all states, are to be at "proficient" level.  If a school doesn't, then that school faces an escalating set of sanctions - tutoring, offering students school choice, etc. (each of which costs the states money) - and also puts federal funding at risk.

A couple of points about all that: First, NCLB was simply a reauthorization of an existing law - the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was first enacted in 1965 (So sometimes, you'll see NCLB referred to as ESEA.  Another example of ed law alphabet soup).  So, it wasn't something that Bush II just created out of thin air.



Second, yes, the NCLB imposes a bunch of testing and reporting requirements.  But reporting requirements weren't new.  And for the first time, states couldn't *exclude* all students with disabilities from reporting their pass/fail statistics.  Generally speaking, observers in the disability community view this as a good thing.   As the National Council on Learning Disabilities put it, NCLB meant that "special ed" kids were finally viewed as "general ed" students first. Students with disabilities were going to have to make progress - to achieve real goals, to meet national standards, and not just be shunted into a different reporting bucket with lower expectations.

NCLB is pretty darn controversial, and I don't really have the space to go into all the "cons".  At a high level, critics point to (a) expense of compliance, (b) the fact that failure to comply leads to punitive sanctions (perhaps not always the particular school's fault), (c) incentives for school districts to lie, or mis-report student testing (this is not hypothetical- this just happened in Atlanta), and (d) higher drop out rates of students that aren't meeting the wished-for standards.

So, like many things in this field, it's complicated.  On the one hand, holding schools accountable to a uniform set of standards seems to make sense.  It allows parents to compare schools on a more apples-to-apples basis, and incentivizes the states to take corrective action earlier.  NCLB has led to improved math and reading scores across the country. On the other hand, do the standards make sense?  Are they achievable in the time frames set forth in NCLB?  What if the school does not have the money to make the kind of changes necessary, because NCLB isn't fully funded?  Are local schools getting the kind of supports that would make achievement possible, or, are kids just taking test after test for no good reason?

In this recessionary time, the money issue is looming large.  This week, US Department of Education Secretary Arnie Duncan announced a plan under which states could apply for "waivers" from NCLB requirements.  A good thing?  We shall discuss.