Louis Freedberg
Nearly a dozen years after President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law, its deepest imprint may be its labeling of 90 percent of California’s schools serving poor children as failures.
That is the depressing conclusion to be drawn from the latest scorecard of how California schools have done on the impossibly high bar set by the law on a range of accountability measures.
It is by now well known that the law, whose purpose was to close the achievement gap, has failed to do so. While there have been some improvements in some states, the achievement gap, on average, between white and Asian students, on the one hand, and black and Latino students, on the other, remains far too high — between 20 and 30 percentage points on state tests.
What seems clear is that not only have many children been left behind, but so have many schools.
The 2002 law, now in its twilight years, imposed a set of rewards and sanctions intended to nudge, prod and shove schools and districts to do better, even if it meant removing staff, closing schools, or having the state take over schools and districts.
Instead, NCLB has deteriorated into an elaborate accountability system whose end result is to label more and more schools as failures, without giving them the resources to improve.
It’s true that the law also forced schools to keep track of how students performed on tests based on their racial or ethnic backgrounds and other characteristics. But the latest results released by the California Department of Education underscore the ineffectiveness of the law in achieving its primary goal. Only 8 percent of elementary schools, 4 percent of middle schools and 24 percent of
