Don’t blame George W. Bush for what President Obama did to public schools
President Obama applauds as former president George W. Bush arrives on stage at the dedication ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, April 25, 2013. (REUTERS/Jason Reed)
There are few people today who would argue that the now-defunct 2002 No Child Left Behind law, however well-intentioned, was not severely flawed — at best. The chief education initiative of president George W. Bush ushered in an era of high-stakes standardized testing by mandating assessments and intervention at schools with low test scores, an agenda that led to a severe narrowing of curriculum and the labeling of schools that were doing just fine as failing. When President Obama signed No Child Left Behind out of existence last week, putting his signature on the new K-12 law of the land, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, there wasn’t a great deal of lamenting over its demise.
To mark the day, Obama gave a speech in which he said:
“The measure replaces No Child Left Behind, the 2002 law that amplified Washington’s role in U.S. classrooms and launched a national system that judged schools based on math and reading test scores and required them to raise scores every year or face escalating penalties. No Child Left Behind was also created with strong bipartisan support, but over time its test-based accountability became widely seen as overly punitive and unrealistic.“The goals of No Child Left Behind were the right ones — high standards, accountability, closing the achievement gap, making sure every child was learning. But in practice, it often fell short. . . . It led to too much testing during classroom time, forced schools and school districts into cookie cutter reforms that didn’t produce the kind of results that we wanted to see.“The new law erases that system and instead lets each state develop its own methods for judging school quality.”
Obama was letting his administration off the hook. While NCLB did lead to too much testing and cookie-cutter reforms, it was his own education secretary, Arne Duncan, who took NCLB’s inherent problems and amplified them. While the new law does eliminate some of the worst provisions of NCLB, it also goes a long way to rebuking the U.S. Education Department’s micromanagement of education policies in a way that even No Child never attempted to do.
It was the Bush administration that expanded federal involvement in Don’t blame George W. Bush for what President Obama did to public schools - The Washington Post: