No Child Left Behind: What Worked, What Didn't
Cross your fingers.
Congress is trying to do something it was supposed to do back in 2007: agree on a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's not controversial to say the law is in desperate need of an update.
The ESEA is hugely important, not just to our nation's schools but the social fabric. It pours billions of federal dollars each year into classrooms that serve low-income students. When President Lyndon Johnson first signed it in 1965, he declared the law "a major new commitment of the federal government to quality and equality in the schooling that we offer our young people."
The ESEA is supposed to be updated every few years but hasn't been rewritten since 2001, when another Texan, President George W. Bush, famously renamed it No Child Left Behind. Bush took Johnson's original vision, to help states level the playing field for students living and learning in poverty, and added teeth.
"We're gonna spend more money, more resources," Bush said at the time, "but they'll be directed at methods that work. Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work."
Those methods included a sweeping new federal system of testing and accountability — as strict as it was controversial. The message to states was clear: We don't trust you to do the right thing by your most disadvantaged students. Schools that fail to educate all kids should be fixed or closed.
With its emphasis — obsession, critics would say — on standardized testing, the law became unpopular among many teachers and parents and technically expired in 2007. But it's on the books until it's replaced.
Now, the challenge for lawmakers is figuring out what — if any — of Bush's tough-love methods worked. This week, NPR is trying to do the same.
Bush's tough-love approach was motivated by the sense that states weren't doing enough to fix their low-performing schools. NCLB created a new role for the federal government: Tough Guy. Right now, the House and Senate don't agree on much, but they do agree that the Tough Guy routine didn't work.
The recent bills crafted by both chambers — and that must now be reconciled — leave it to the states to decide what to do about struggling schools. That includes how to fix them and whether or when to close them.
But at least one researcher thinks the law, like the classic Tough Guy, is a little misunderstood. And that parts of the law did work.
"NCLB is usually regarded as a sledge hammer, but it's actually fairly complex and fairly nuanced," says Tom Ahn, who teaches at the University of Kentucky.
Ahn has a Ph.D. in economics and writes papers with titles like, "Distributional Impacts of a Local Living Wage Increase." In short, he's an unlikely guy to have written one of the go-to studies on NCLB. But he did. And it's an eye-opener.
A few years ago, Ahn and his colleague, Jacob Vigdor, wondered: In spite of the controversy, did No Child Left Behind do some good? Did it improve low-performing schools? For answers, they studied the schools of North Carolina, though what they found can be applied just about anywhere.
How It Worked
Under NCLB, schools were judged on something called Adequate Yearly Progress. The goal was to get every child to grade-level in reading and math by 2014. It was an No Child Left Behind: What Worked, What Didn't : NPR Ed : NPR:
