Opinion Articles on NCLB

    • A Diminished Vision of Civil Rights, by James Crawford, Education Week, 6 June 2007
      "Despite its stated goals, the No Child Left Behind law represents a diminished vision of civil rights. Educational equity is reduced to equalizing test scores. The effect has been to impoverish the educational experience of minority students—that is, to reinforce the two-tier system of public schools that civil rights advocates once challenged."
    • What Every Parent, Teacher, and Community Member Needs to Know about No Child Left Behind, by Elizabeth Jaeger (June 2007)
      A detailed, devastating, and documented critique of NCLB and its perverse effects: "If NCLB is reauthorized with no major changes, virtually every school will be classified as failing by 2014. In the interim, even the best schools will scramble to meet the law's requirements, diminishing the amount of time and energy left for teaching and learning."
    • Evaluating 'No Child Left Behind,' by Linda Darling-Hammond, The Nation, 21 May 2007
      "Lagging far behind our international peers in educational outcomes--and with one of the most unequal educational systems in the industrialized world--we need, I believe, something much more than and much different from what NCLB offers. We badly need a national policy that enables schools to meet the intellectual demands of the twenty-first century. More fundamentally, we need to pay off the educational debt to disadvantaged students that has accrued over centuries of unequal access to quality education."
    • Why the No Child Left Behind Act Is Unsalvageable, by Eric Shaps, Education Week, 9 May 2007
      "Much of the talk in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act’s reauthorization is centered around two contentions: that the federal law needs only some tweaking to be made right, such as shifting to a “value added” or “growth” method of charting progress; and that, once tweaked, it must be fully funded to be effective. ...
      "The intentions behind the legislation may be good, but no amount of tweaking will fix several fatal flaws. In part, these flaws are inherent in the law’s unrealistic goals, which, because they can’t be met, set schools up to fail. And in part, the flaws are inherent in the law’s basic strategy for realizing its goals: high-stakes testing. That strategy ignores the primary reasons for the inequities that schools are supposed to redress, and also causes collateral damage of several kinds."
    • A Test Everyone Will Fail, by Gerald W. Bracey, Washington Post, 3 May 2007
      "Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers. ... The [NAEP proficiency] levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called 'unreasonable' results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations. ... So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The 'Leaders and Laggards' report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future -- and you can control them."
    • Empowering Those at the Bottom Beats Pushing Them from the Top, by Carl A. Cohn, Education Week, 25 April 2007
      "Since the No Child Left Behind law’s passage, educators willing to occupy [the] middle ground of praising its principles while pointing out its practical flaws have been guaranteed the educational equivalent of a 'swiftboating.' Their motives are questioned. They are attacked as pro-union or anti-accountability and criticized for placing the needs of adults ahead of the needs of children. ... These attacks [have] allowed those in charge to portray themselves as the defenders of children, to justify any means to promote their model of improving student achievement, and to view their critics through the same apocalyptic lens of good and evil that has characterized many of our recent national debates."
    • Classroom Caste System, by David Keyes, Washington Post, 9 April 2007
      "Written five years ago to reduce the "achievement gap," the No Child Left Behind Act has in fact created a gap in American education. Its pressure to raise test scores has caused many schools to give poor and minority students an impoverished education that focuses primarily on basic skills."
    • Reauthorizing No Child Left Behind: Recommendations by the Institute for Language and Education Policy, March 2007; en español
      "NCLB is only one among many possible approaches to accountability. It has established a top-down, prescriptive, arbitrary, inequitable, and punitive system that blames under-achievement on educators alone, while ignoring the effects of poverty, funding disparities, racial segregation, and other non-school factors known to have a major impact on educational attainment. The key question that Congress must answer in reauthorizing NCLB is whether this approach is effectively advancing the law’s stated goals or whether it is doing more harm than good for the children it purports to help."
    • No Poem Left Behind? by Erica Jacobs, The Examiner (DC), 19 March 2007
      "One of the hidden classroom casualties of the No Child Left Behind law is creative writing. Research papers? Check. Thesis statements and five-paragraph themes? Check. Literature? Check. Creative Writing? It’s not on the test — so who has time? ... Sometimes I hope that if I shut my eyes, this testing obsession will disappear, and we can return to the business of providing the very best educational experience possible, as defined by the schools and not the government."
    • Bush Faces Revolt on No Child Left Behind, by Robert Bluey, Human Events, 19 March 2007
      "Conservatives on Capitol Hill have openly rebelled against President Bush’s signature education initiative." Republican-sponsored legislation seeks "to reduce the federal government’s role in education and eliminate the bureaucracy resulting from No Child Left Behind. ... Given the weakened political position of conservatives, it might not appear that [the bill] has much of a chance. But five years of No Child Left Behind has left even the law’s former supporters apprehensive about reauthorizing it in its present form -- much less plowing even greater sums into the program 'as is.'”
    • The Zero Percent Chance of 100 Percent Success, by Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post, 15 March 2007
    • "Behind that rhetorically brilliant title [of No Child Left Behind] was a strategically brilliant plan to transfer huge sums of taxpayer money to the private sector through vouchers and the takeover of public schools by private corporations. Teddie Kennedy blocked the vouchers but compromised by permitting them to be replaced by Supplemental Educational Services. The SES deliver only a meager $2 billion of public funds each year."
    • High-Stakes Testing Is Putting the Nation at Risk, by David C. Berliner and Sharon L. Nichols, Education Week, 12 March 2007
      "We believe that [No Child Left Behind], now in its sixth year, puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of empirical and theoretical work, along with conversations with hundreds of educators across the country, have convinced us that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. If the title were not already taken, our thoughts on this subject could be headlined 'A Nation at Risk.'”
    • Confessions of a 'No Child Left Behind' Supporter: An Interview with Sandy Kress, Education Next, March 2007
      "I believe strongly that virtually all youngsters ought to be performing at grade level each year. There are a small number of students, such as the severely cognitively disabled, who will not perform at such a level, and the law should recognize these challenges. But for the cognitively able who start school in our country (the vast majority of our students), there is no reason they can’t all be at grade level each year." No wonder NCLB is such a mess. One of its leading architects – the White House point man on education in back 2001 – is obviously confused about the concept of "grade level." While for noneducators the term may connote meeting grade-level expectations, in a statistical and, more importantly, a legal sense, it means "average" or "median" – i.e., scoring at the 50th percentile. In other words, for all kids to be at grade level, all kids must score the same!
    • Counties Know Best How To Test, by Carole Puckett, Washington Post, 11 March 2007
      "It is the child, not the school system, who will break down crying when faced with an inappropriate test. It is the child, not the school system, whose self-esteem is destroyed when he sees his peers finishing quickly and easily as he is given all day to complete a test that makes no sense to him. It is the child, not the school system, who misses physical education, music, art and recess as he is allowed unlimited time to finish a test that involves metaphor, double negatives and long reading passages that are printed out of context."
    • Education at Risk, by Tamim Ansary, Edutopia, March 2007
      "We hear a lot these days about the catastrophic state of American public schools. According to pundits' dire pronouncements, our kids supposedly compare terribly when ranked academically against all others in the world. Politicians ask us to take a stand: Are we for, or against, school reform? ... [But] it's never really a choice between supporting or rejecting school reform. It is, or should be, a choice between this reform and that reform. Yet today, a movement that stretches back several decades has narrowed us down to a single set of take- 'em-or-leave-'em initiatives. How did this happen?"
    • Critics Say No Child Left Behind Report Misses Real Problems, by Livia Gershon, New Standard, 6 March 2007
      Perceptive critique of the Aspen Institute–Gates Foundation report on NCLB. "The Commission brought together a group of like-minded people who believe that the top-down, sanction-based system is the way to improvement."
    • The More Local Education Gets, the Better Off It Is, by Eugene Hickok, Dallas Morning News, 6 March 2007
      In a dizzying about-face, this former Bush Administration official has turned against NCLB: "It's time for federal policymakers to admit they cannot fix public education. Even with the ramp-up in federal spending, Washington accounts for only 8 percent of the funds spent on local education. Congress is but a small, minority shareholder in the public education system, and it ought to start acting the part."
    • Leave Behind a Bad Idea, by the Editors of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 5 March 2007
      "No Child Left Behind is a horrible law that should be killed before it can do any more damage to American education. That’s the message that should be strongly conveyed to President Bush, who was in southern Indiana on Friday to speak in support of reauthorizing the act. Unfortunately, he will probably be told only of ways to 'fix' the five-year-old legislation, which has enough bipartisan support to limp along forever, creating the dangerous illusion that accountability has been brought to our schools."
    • The Center for American Progress: Progressively Regressive? by Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post, 4 March 2007
      Merciless critique of "Leaders and Laggards," a report by the CAP and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce claiming that a majority of U.S. students "are not proficient in either reading or mathematics." Bracey demonstrates the absurdity of this statement, based on arbitrary NAEP proficiency levels, by noting that not a single country in the world has a majority of students in the proficient category. In Sweden, ranked highest in the world in reading proficiency, 2/3 of students would be deemed "not proficient" if judged by NAEP standards.
    • Talking Points on No Child Left Behind and English Language Learners, by James Crawford, February 2007; En Español
      "It is now clear that the No Child Left Behind Act has been a failure for ELLs. While the law’s system of “holding schools accountable” has brought increased 'attention' to these students, the effects have been more harmful than beneficial. By relying on arbitrary achievement targets and invalid assessments, NCLB cannot make accurate determinations about school quality. Moreover, the high-stakes nature of its accountability system has had perverse effects that contradict everything we know about best practices for ELLs."
    • Debate: Dianne Piché vs. Michael Petrilli vs. Joel Packer on NCLB, EdSpresso, February 2007
      This politically instructive exchange, sponsored by the right-wing Center for Education Reform, pits representatives of the Citizens Committee on Civil Rights, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and National Education Association. It illustrates three distinctive viewpoints on NCLB reauthorization.

        Piché: "NCLB is working better than one might expect, given the fierce opposition in states like Virginia and Connecticut, along with some school districts, school administrators and teachers unions. Despite all the whining about the law, however, NCLB is supporting and prodding educators across America to take the teaching and learning of all students more seriously than ever before. ... [I]t is making the education establishment uncomfortable, pushing the adults in the system to work harder and smarter and to confront their own racism and other biases, whether subtle or otherwise."
        Petrilli: "At the end of the day, the federal government has very little power to make anyone do anything against his or her will. When it comes to creating new choices for parents, closing down failing schools, laying off ineffective teachers, or adopting a content-rich curriculum that works, Uncle Sam’s bark is bigger than his bite (see here). ... The Reading First brouhaha is a perfect case in point. While I believe the program is starting to get results ... the political backlash that resulted from having federal officials involved in curricular decisions probably means that it’s just not feasible. ... Uncle Sam should keep its 'what works' agenda to researching interventions and sharing information, not mandating particular curricular approaches in return for funds. It’s just not tenable."
        Packer: "A major part of the problem with NCLB is that it was developed with little input from frontline educators – teachers, paraprofessionals, and local school administrators. Its numerous federal mandates (a study by the Department of Education Inspector General found “588 … compliance requirements within Title I, Part A of the NCLB Act..”) are a command and control mechanism that fails to recognize the diversity of our 90,000 plus public schools and more than 40 million students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, states and schools are expected to spend 6,457,586 burden hours and $135.9 million to comply with the paperwork requirements of NCLB." Unlike the other debaters' arguments, Packer's are supported by links to numerous studies – very useful

    • Beyond No Child Left Behind: Two New Reports Will Shake up U.S. Education System, by Cynthia G. Brown, Center for American Progress, 22 February 2007
      "To my mind, NCLB is the federal government’s primary instrument today in the battle for education equity. The law goes well beyond the legal and legislative struggles for equal educational opportunity of the 1960s and 1970s, with which I was deeply engaged, and sets forth a national goal of equal results against a standard of proficiency and with the acknowledgement of an even higher standard of advanced learning." A revealing elaboration of the "liberal" case for NCLB.

    • Talking Sense on NCLB ... But Is Anyone Listening? by George Wood, Forum on Education and Democracy, 20 February 2007
      "Is anybody paying attention to what those closest to our children—parents and teachers—are saying? Given the hoopla around the Aspen Institute’s report on NCLB one wonders. Called “NCLB on Steroids” by our friend Monty Neil at FairTest and a “surge strategy” by John Merrow at the Merrow Report, the commission calls for 75 improvements to the law—best summed up as just more of the same. Gerry Bracey points out that in just over 200 pages of text the words ‘require’, ‘requirement’, or ‘required’ is used 452 times! Even Chester Finn, who in the past has supported such mandating of school behavior, has said the report “fixes a few flaws but mostly piles new mandates on top.”

    • Tommy & Roy: Domestic Shock and Awe on the Education Front, by Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post, 18 February 2007
      "Here they come, ex-govs Tommy Thompson and Roy Barnes, with a 231 page report that describes a gargantuan expansion of what isn't working. The states sought flexibility; Tommy and Roy strait jacketed them. ... I searched with Adobe Reader and found that the words require, requires, required, or requirement(s) occur 452 times between pages 11 and 220."
    • Fool Me Twice: No Child Left Behind Again, Only Worse, by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael Petrilli, National Review Online, 14 February 2007
      The NCLB Commission's "sprawling 200-page report, capped with 75 separate recommendations, proffers solutions to almost every problem ailing U.S. education. What it doesn’t do is sketch a coherent vision for NCLB version 2.0. ...
      "This approach to NCLB reform ignores the big lesson of the past five years: It’s hard enough to force recalcitrant states and districts to do things they don’t want to do; it’s impossible to force them to do those things well. By deploying enough regulations, enforcement actions and threats of monies withheld, Washington may coerce compliance with the law’s letter. Yet when it comes to the hard, messy work of improving schools (and teachers, principals, etc.), compliance doesn’t cut it."
    • Schools Alone Cannot Conquer Racial Divide, by the Editors of the Nashua Telegraph (NH), 11 February 2007
      "The irony of the No Child Left Behind law is that it puts all the burden on schools to improve performance, while failing to acknowledge that many students arrive at school every day ill-prepared to learn because of conditions the schools cannot affect. If closing the achievement gap were truly a national priority, as stated by proponents of No Child Left Behind, the battle would go well beyond curriculum. Better staffing for remedial language programs, special training for teachers in dealing with underachieving students, and incentives to recruit more Hispanic and black teachers would be part of that equation."
    • No Classroom Left Alone, by Jennifer Rubin, The American Spectator, 9 February 2007
      "Advocates of small government and local control of education really got their comeuppance with George W. Bush. Lulled into a fog by the rhetoric of 'compassionate conservatism,' those who liked the old grumpy, small government variety of conservatism were mortified to see the federal government extend its reach into every classroom in America. Not even LBJ could have imagined No Child Left Behind."
    • No Gimmick Left Behind, by Scott Lily, Center for American Progress, 8 February 2007
      "Skeptics of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” proposal believed from the outset that it was nothing more than a cynical ploy to give Bush credentials as an education advocate on the cheap. ... For 2007, the president proposed a funding level that was less than 6 percent above the levels in place when No Child Left Behind was signed into law. That was less than half of the increase needed to just keep up with inflation. What’s more, during the period enrollment in elementary and secondary schools grew by more than one million students."
    • No Child Left Behind Needs More Reasonable Standards, by the Editors of the Oakland Press (MI), 4 February 2007
      " All students are individuals and need to be treated as such. Some excel in math and science and some in English and social studies. Setting minimum standards for all students not only seems impossible but it also seems wrong. ... As simple as this process should be, No Child Left Behind seems to be complicating the educational process, not improving it. For these reasons, the federal initiative needs to be over-hauled - ASAP."
    • No Child Left Behind Needs Big Changes, by Deb Wilner, OpEdNews.Com, 31 January 2007
      "While proponents claim NCLB will narrow the achievement gap, it has the perverse effect of undermining the education of poor and minority students most. When 'achievement' is defined as performance on a standardized test, those students who historically perform poorly on standardized tests are the first targeted for instruction on nothing more than how to pass them, and their schools the first targeted for unproven high stakes sanctions.
      "Though key Democrats and business leaders have expressed support for NCLB, many of the incoming freshmen legislators ran campaigns critical of NCLB, and some of the remaining conservative legislators are wary of the federal intrusion into what has traditionally been an area of state and local control. The debate for them and everyone needs to be reframed from how to 'fix' NCLB to how to radically redefine the central idea of accountability."
    • Letter to Rep. George Miller, by the National Council of Churches, 22 January 2007
      "While we emphatically support the stated goals of NCLB...we worry that the law has undermined education for our nation’s most vulnerable children in big city districts. ... NCLB fails to honor children’s growth and accomplishments, increases pressure on schools to push out low-scoring adolescents into GED programs or focus only on children whose scores are close to the passing rates, narrows the curriculum by reducing time for the arts and the social studies, and overly punishes special needs children and English Language Learners."
    • Should NCLB Be Retained? by the Editors of the Daily Herald (UT), 19 January 2007
      "The No Child Left Behind Act, which comes up for reauthorization this year, is largely a failure. ... [It] was supposed to improve education by letting the public see which schools are succeeding and give parents a choice. In reality, the law has imposed an inflexible, underfunded testing regimen on states that has made otherwise good schools look like outright failures."
    • No Child Left Behind Needs Local Flexibility, by U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), Corpus Christi Caller Times, 17 January 2007
      "Education is a function that is best left mainly to parents, teachers and local school boards. As we reauthorize NCLB, we should pursue ideas to reinforce local control of innovation, even while ensuring accountability in the results."
    • Reality Left Behind, by the Editors of the Bradenton News Herald, 12 January 2007
      "Certainly, it is a noble goal to commit to leaving no child behind, academically. But it is almost criminal to set up a system that expects students to perform at the same levels regardless of their differences and then condemns those schools not meeting that level without exception. ... The failure label that attaches to both students and teachers as a result of NCLB can be more harmful to future academic success than the factors that caused failure in the first place."
    • Schools Aren't Broken, But the Way We Measure Success May Be, by Charles Paolino, Home News Tribune (NJ), 12 January 2007
      "What's broken is the lens through which public authorities look at the education of kids. It's a lens with a narrow focus that doesn't permit bureaucrats to see that setting performance standards in school, without seriously addressing economic and social issues that the best teachers in the world are helpless to control, is a method sure to fall short of its goals."
    • A Better Return on Education Dollars, by Marilou Johanek, Toledo Blade, 12 January 2007
      "You have to wonder if free thinkers like Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein would ever have survived in environments where attention spent on individualized instruction is replaced with timed test rehearsals to boost overall test scores."
    • Law Should Be Changed, Not Thrown Out, by the Editors of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (CA), 12 January 2007
      NCLB "points out a problem - i.e., some students not gaining a sufficient education - but doesn't provide a solution, or even the tools to solve it. And the punishments the law metes out, of replacing entire teaching staffs and taking over schools, won't readily accomplish the goal of helping children learn."
    • Illusions and Reality of No Child Left Behind, by Fannie Flono, Charlotte Observer, 12 January 2007
      "NCLB has fostered a "teaching to the test" atmosphere that has helped make tests the goal rather than one strategy to reach the true goal -- student learning. Teachers complain about it. Students complain about it. And tests haven't brought the desired results. ... But it's not too late to develop a strategy that puts more students on the road to proficiency. It will require, though, giving up illusions and embracing reality."
    • Don't Renew NCLB; It Doesn't Fix Inequity, by Joseph M. Shosh, Allentown Morning Call (PA), 11 January 2007
      "Money that Congress authorized in 1965 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to help close the funding gap between poor and rich schools is today spent disproportionately on testing and test preparation — not teaching and learning. As a result, a lowest common denominator test preparation curriculum is pushing the excellence out of our public schools."
    • The Wrong Kind of Bipartisanship? by Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute, 11 January 2007
      "The 'good law, uneven execution' narrative has obvious appeal for its designers, on both the Right and the Left: they get to avoid meaningful scrutiny of the law while blaming bureaucrats, state officials, or the Department of Education’s previous management for any problems. Pleased to see a bit of goodwill in Washington, and not really understanding the tangled mass that is NCLB, reporters seem inclined to accept this happy tale."
    • Back to the Drawing Board for NCLB, by the Editors of Rethinking Schools, Winter 2006-07
      "The nation needs an expanded federal role in education and many programs authorized by NCLB/ ESEA need to be sustained and improved. The real task will be to transform NCLB from a 'test and punish' law into a credible reform effort that provides urgently needed resources to tackle complicated issues of educational inequality, school accountability, and school improvement."
    • Leaving My Lapel Pin Behind: Is No Child Left Behind's Birthday Worth Celebrating? by Michael Petrilli, National Review Online, 8 January 2007
      Former Bush administration official says he's no longer a True Believer in NCLB: "The anecdotes (and increasingly, evidence) keep rolling in of schools turning into test-prep factories and narrowing the curriculum. ... I’ve gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair."
    • Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' – The Gradgrind Method, by Sherman Yellen, Huffington Post, 26 December 2006
      "You only need to read Charles Dickens's Hard Times and you will see the NCLB method as practiced by Mr. Grandgrind, that horror of sadistic educational practice. ... No Child Left Behind is our 21st century form of beating education into a child who is filled with infinite possibilities for thought and creativity, the creativity that keeps a society moving ahead. It's time we show some of the mercy to children that we show to ourselves, not only for our children's sake but for our future as a country."
    • The Goals of Education, by Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen, Phi Delta Kappan, December 2006
      "American schools should be held accountable for results. But an accountability system consisting almost exclusively of standardized tests is a travesty and a betrayal of our historic commitments. ...Today, we are a long way from establishing an accountability system that is true to American traditions and to our contemporary goals for public schools. We could move toward such a system, but NCLB is taking us in the opposite direction."
    • No Child Left Behind Needs a New Push, by Peter Schrag, Los Angeles Daily News, 24 December 2006
      "As seemed evident from the start, the federal mandate on schools to get students in all ethnic, economic and educational subgroups to full proficiency is a near impossibility, especially for learning-disabled students and immigrants who have been in U.S. schools for three years - or perhaps five years - or less."
      • Letter to the Editor, by Stephen Krashen, 28 December 2006
        "National test scores confirm that NCLB has not helped poor children. The gap between children from high-income and low-income families is the same as it was before NCLB."
    • Teachers Subjected to Outrageous Tests, by Sue Adams, Arizona Daily Star, 18 December 2006
      "Teachers are now required to pass a test in order to be deemed sufficiently qualified for a job they have been performing for possibly 10, 20 or more years. ... The No Child Left Behind legislation and subsequent state mandates are driving many quality mathematics teachers from a profession that is already extremely understaffed."
    • Growing Resistance to 'No Child Left Behind,' by Monty Neill, The Pulse, 11 December 2006
      "Though NCLB’s serious deficiencies didn’t rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns in the recent elections (there was a lot of competition!), there has been no shortage of voices in the growing national chorus calling for NCLB reform."
    • Things Fall Apart: No Child Left Behind Self-Destructs, by Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post, 9 December 2006
      "... as the law enters its fifth year, even its supporters can no longer ignore that the law is imploding."
    • A Catch-22 for Language Learners, by Wayne Wright, Educational Leadership, November 2006
      "It defies logic, it's self-contradictory, and it sets expectations that are impossible to attain. Welcome to NCLB's Limited English Proficient subgroup." Even Sandy Kress, one of the law's chief architects, has conceded that it wasn't designed to address the situation of English language learners. Those who drafted the legislation simply believed that ELLs had to be "included somehow" in NCLB's accountability system – even if that means testing them in a language they don't fully understand.
    • Leave 'No Child' Behind, by the Denver Post, 17 November 2006
      "No Child Left Behind - the ill-advised, one-size-fits-all federal education plan - needs a major overhaul when the new Congress convenes in January. The law, widely described as having the best of intentions, won overwhelming approval in the shoulder-to-shoulder days after Sept. 11. But most states have struggled with its nettlesome mandates and unreasonable expectations. ... Rather than smashing the cornerstone of President Bush's education-reform plans, Congress should work with the White House on a slimmed-down, healthier version of the law."
    • Overhauling NCLB, by Monty Neill, Rethinking Schools, Fall 2006
      "It's time to mobilize for an education law that actually improves schools." Astute political analysis of what's in store for NCLB reauthorization by the executive director of FairTest.
    • No Child Left Behind Needs Surgery, by Jim Ray, The State (Columbia, SC), 22 October 2006
      "Unrealistic timelines have forced a blizzard of testing and test development. Students are being tested by instruments that have been poorly developed or erroneously scored. ... The law is under siege nationally and is foundering as the deadline for reauthorization nears. If Congress reauthorizes it, minor surgery will not suffice."
    • Rationing Education, by Jennifer Booher-Jennings, Washington Post, 5 October 2006
      "The stakes for schools are enormous. So it isn't surprising that many educators game the system by reaching first for the low-hanging fruit, the students closest to passing. Dubbed the 'bubble kids,' because their scores put them on the bubble of the passing mark, these students give schools the biggest bang for the buck.... Many schools have rationed out practically all of their resources to these students. Meanwhile, the lowest-performing students, the 'hopeless cases,' languish."
    • Left Behind by 'Reformers', by Juan González, New York Daily News, 27 September 2006
      "This summer, Department of Education officials in Washington ordered all public schools to give immigrant children who have lived in the U.S. as little as a year the same standardized English Language Arts assessment tests as native-born pupils. ... The White House endured enormous political pressure to end the immigrant exemptions from major national Hispanic organizations like National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Many veteran teachers, however, believe the national Latino leaders are acting more like politicians than educators."
    • Many Children Still Left Behind, Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 September 2006
      "The problem with [the Bush Administration's] optimistic assessments is that they overstate the accomplishments being attributed to the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law. ... Diverse school districts cannot relent in their efforts to make sure that all students succeed. But it seems clear that it will take far more than a piece of federal legislation to close a stubborn achievement gap rooted in a potent mix of class, race, neighborhood, culture and history."
    • Expectations + Rigor = Promising Results, by Margaret Spellings, San Francisco Chronicle, 26 September 2006
       "Five years ago, America raised its standards with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Its mission – to bring all students up to grade level or better in reading and math by 2014 – is planting the seeds that will grow into a new generation ready to compete with the world. Its formula is simple: high standards plus accountability plus resources equals results. ... We are beginning to see those results. And soon the world will, too."
    • Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform, by David C. Berliner, Teacher's College Record, June 2006
      "This analysis is about the role of poverty in school reform. Data from a number of sources are used to make five points. First, that poverty in the US is greater and of longer duration than in other rich nations. Second, that poverty, particularly among urban minorities, is associated with academic performance that is well below international means on a number of different international assessments. ...Third, that poverty restricts the expression of genetic talent at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. ... Fourth, compared to middle-class children, severe medical problems affect impoverished youth. This limits their school achievement as well as their life chances. ... Fifth, and of greatest interest, is that small reductions in family poverty lead to increases in positive school behavior and better academic performance. It is argued that poverty places severe limits on what can be accomplished through school reform efforts, particularly those associated with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The data presented in this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations’ school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty."
    • Ten Moral Concerns in the Implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, by the National Council of Churches, April 2006
      "Several years into No Child Left Behind’s implementation, as its hundreds of sequential regulations have begun to be triggered, it is becoming clear that the law is leaving behind more children than it is saving. The children being abandoned are our nation’s most vulnerable children—children of color and poor children in America’s big cities and remote rural areas—the very children the law claims it will rescue."
    • Does the No Child Left Behind Act Improve Schools and Increase Educational Opportunity, by Harold Berlak, Education Policy Studies Laboratory, April 2005
      "Because there is no evidence to support the claim that standardized tests are a valid and credible measure of academic achievement, these tests are a particularly invidious form of structural racism lending the cloak of science to policies and practices that have denied, and are continuing to deny, persons of color equal access to educational and job opportunities."
    • The Changing Face of ELL Literacy Practices under No Child Left Behind, by Michelle Adam, ELL Outlook, November - December 2004
      "No Child Left Behind has hurt English language learners tremendously," according to UCLA professor Kris Gutierrez. "ELLs don't get to use their native language so their learning is limited, and the kinds of skills they are learning are reductive. They are receiving an impoverished curriculum. ... By reductive, I mean that there is an emphasis on the acquisition of autonomous skills such as vocabulary, decoding, and phonics, instead of making these skills a part of a larger menu within a literacy program. They are not engaging students in meaningful texts and learning."
    • Talk Tough, But ... Put the Money Where Your Mouth Is, by Jack Jennings and Nancy Kober, Washington Post, 3 October 2004
      "The law's basic goals are the right ones. As we know from the Center on Education Policy's NCLB study, the majority of state and local officials are trying hard to meet its demands. But the Bush approach of emphasizing sanctions over support has fueled a backlash among state leaders and educators charged with making the act succeed."
    • The Seven Deadly Absurdities of No Child Left Behind, by Gerald W. Bracey, NoChildLeft.Com, October 2004
      "To some, NCLB has always been yet another Bush administration Orwellian Double Speak program. It aims to increase the use of vouchers, increase the privatization of public schools, reduce the size of the public sector, and weaken or destroy the teachers unions (two Democratic power bases). It contains enough inherent absurdities, though, that people of all political stripes should welcome a speedy revision or demise."
    • No Child Left Behind: Misguided Approach to School Accountability for English Language Learners, by James Crawford, Center on Education Policy Forum on NCLB, 14 September 2004
      "By setting arbitrary and unrealistic targets for student achievement, this accountability system cannot distinguish between schools that are neglecting ELLs and those that are making improvements. As achievement targets become increasingly stringent, virtually all schools serving ELLs are destined to be branded failures. The inevitable result will be to derail efforts toward genuine reform. Ultimately, a misguided accountability system means no accountability at all."