No Child Left Behind May End, But The Industry It Spawned Is Here To Stay
George W. Bush’s signature education reform turned standardized testing into a multi-billion dollar industry. But with change approaching, those making money from the system say the good times will continue.
At the center of what is gearing up to be the biggest political battle over American education in decades, leaders across the political spectrum are calling loudly for the end of the test as we know it. Standardized testing was shaped by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act into a central pillar of the American education system — a federal mandate on which the fate of low-performing schools rested.
But the 13-year-old No Child Left Behind is in the process of being dismantled, and lawmakers’ first priority is to to change the standardized testing regime. They plan to remove many of the high stakes attached to tests, slash the number of exams students must take each year, and even, under some proposals, eliminate No Child Left Behind’s central mandate, that students must be tested every year.
But the testing industry — a multibillion-dollar market built, in large part, on the shoulders of No Child Left Behind — isn’t worried.
Thirteen years after the law was enacted, widespread testing is so ingrained in the American education system the companies who profit from it see little threat from plans to remake elementary assessment. No matter what the federal government decides, experts say, states are likely to keep annual testing around in some form or another, likely with high stakes attached to them.
For the companies that rule the testing world — Pearson, which has a 40% market share in the industry, McGraw-Hill, and a handful of large nonprofits — No Child Left Behind is already an afterthought. They are riding the high of the huge revenue boost created by implementation of the Common Core standards, and expect demand to increase in 2015 as states and school districts look to develop new and innovative types of assessments and tools to analyze their students’ results.
Some experts said they even saw potential for the testing industry to see a boost from a new version of No Child Left Behind.
“I don’t see things changing for us much in terms of the size of our business,” said John Oswald, the vice president of Educational Testing Service, a large nonprofit test maker. With No Child Left Behind’s mandates over, Oswald said, “People are just going to be moving towards other kinds of testing.”
In 2002, when it was signed into law by George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind was unarguably a boon for testing companies. The law required new, different tests, and lots of them: enough for students to take a test every year from grades three through eight, and once in high school. The federal government pumped tens of millions of dollars into each state’s budget — from 2002 to 2008, annual state spending on tests rose from $423 million to $1.1 billion, according to the Pew Center on the States.
The money was used to develop a battery of data-rich tests that would be used to measure how many students in each grade were “proficient” in reading and math. Unlike in the years before No Child Left Behind, those tests suddenly carried consequences: Schools were graded based on whether they brought enough students up to proficiency each year, and could face increasingly dire consequences if they did not, including possibly being shut down.
A new version of No Child Left Behind would almost certainly remove the federal sanctions that made NCLB’s tests high-stakes for schools, which some see as a potential threat to large education and testing companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, said that education companies have long relied on the threats posed to schools that fail tests in order to sell test-aligned curriculum No Child Left Behind May End, But The Industry It Spawned Is Here To Stay - BuzzFeed News: