

Promise of No Child Left Behind falls short after 10 years - tokenadult
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-01-07/no-child-left-behind-anniversary/52430722/1

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tokenadult
The Education Next blog includes some thoughtful responses to the tenth
anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

[http://educationnext.org/five-thoughts-about-nclb-on-its-
ten...](http://educationnext.org/five-thoughts-about-nclb-on-its-tenth-
anniversary/)

Like the blog author, Michael Petrilli, who notes that the trade-offs build
into the law were real from the beginning, "Personally, I’d prefer a policy
that aims for more balance: achievement gains across the performance spectrum,
not just at the bottom; and a more holistic view of what it means for students
to be well educated. Literacy and numeracy are (obviously) not enough."

AFTER EDIT: Other comments here write about the funding level for some of the
federal government inducements to school change at the state level that were
built into the No Child Left Behind Act. To be sure, the act never promised
that the federal government would pick up the full tab to fund the state
school system of any state, or anything near that. The United States federal
government devotes substantial resources to K-12 education through various
programs, but the main funding of primary and secondary schooling in the
United States has always come from local and state governments.

<http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html>

(A FAQ prepared by the previous administration)

<http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/role.html>

(A FAQ prepared by the current administration)

<http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66>

(Current National Center for Education Statistics page on spending for public
elementary and secondary schools)

If states are in earnest about raising student achievement, they could of
course target the larger amounts of money they spend on activities that are
best evidenced as activities that raise student achievement. To do that, of
course, the states would have to have some kind of reliable data on what
activities of their school systems best raise achievement, which is part of
what NCLB was about.

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tbeseda
A related documentary, "Waiting for Superman", is available on Netflix Watch
Instantly.

I found it very well produced and informative, if not a little bias (nature of
the medium) and a bit disheartening.

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quanticle
The problem with No Child Left Behind wasn't the testing. It's that it was an
unfunded mandate. The Federal Government was requiring the states to do
something, but at the same time not providing the resources to do it with.
Given that, can we really be surprised that NCLB was a failure?

This criticism, by the way, isn't new. Opponents of NCLB were (correctly)
bringing up the "unfunded mandate" charge when the bill was still in
consideration.

~~~
skore
Yes, it was underfunded (not 'unfunded' - it's just that there weren't
additional funds injected for it), but that still doesn't make the testing
part a good idea. What you end up, even if the resources are there, are pupils
who pass tests, not necessarily pupils who are fit for a job or even for life.
Pupils who pass tests are not necessarily what you want to boost your economy.

~~~
anamax
There are bad tests.

However, we have a problem. Most of us would like kids to get as much
education as possible given the money we spend. Very few of us are willing to
spend money on "education" that doesn't actually educate kids.

So, how do you propose we figure out how to spend money on education?

If your answer is "spend more", my question is "how do I know what I'm getting
for said money?"

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dctoedt
OK, so NCLB wasn't a perfect-from-the-start solution. Few initiatives of that
scale ever are. Time for a pivot, not for going back to the bad old days.

~~~
cantastoria
But a return to the "bad old days" is exactly what the education establishment
wants. I think the reporter here buried the lede. This was the most
interesting paragraph for me:

 _"People were stunned because they were always led to believe that things
were going fine in this particular school. And the fact of the matter was, for
huge numbers of students that was not the case," Miller said. "That led to a
lot of anger, disappointment. That led to embarrassment. In many instances,
the schools were being held out as exceeding in their mission, when it fact
they were failing many, many of the children in those schools."_

Test scores are hard to argue with so they repeat this "teaching to the test
is bad" mantra endlessly. Of course, when they start talking about other
countries school systems as being better what's the first metric they cite?
Test scores. I have yet to here an alternative way of measuring performance
that didn't amount to "trust us".

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ams6110
Massive federal program falls short of goals. Astonishing.

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thewileyone
NCLB was designed to fail from the get-go.

