NCLB's Critical Design Flaw and the Lesson to Take
by Frederick M. Hess • Jun 5, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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So, looks like we're getting back into NCLB reauthorization mode. I laid out some of the broad context on Monday. While nobody is thrilled with NCLB, there are concerns that the Senate Republicans are going to go too far in "retreating" from the appropriate federal role. Today, I want to set aside for the moment philosophical arguments about the federal role, and talk about the design problems of NCLB, and why it's essential that any vision for reauth steer clear of repeating those.
Checker Finn and I argued six years ago in Education Next that NCLB's critical flaw was its pie-eyed, overwrought ambition. As we wrote, "NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a shaky basis for policymaking, rather as if Congress asserted in the name of energy reform that America will no longer need to import oil after 2014 or fought crime by declaring that by that date all U.S. cities would be peaceable kingdoms."
All the same, we were not unsympathetic. We wrote at the time: "NCLB's backers can legitimately argue that they had already spent nearly two decades asking state and local officials and education leaders to address mediocre school performance and stubborn race- and class-linked inequities... In that light, the passion-drenched unseriousness infusing NCLB is forgivable, even honorable. And NCLB indeed has virtues: it