No Child Left Behind:

The Federal Government’s Attack on Equality and Public Education

By David Hursh, Bonnie Whitney, and Kyra Hawn
Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester

On January 8, 2002 President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act into law with overwhelming congressional support.¹ The Act significantly transforms education from birth through adulthood. The most immediate and significant reform is the requirement that states develop standardized tests and assessment systems in order to determine whether schools are making “adequate yearly academic progress” (AYP). NCLB became law because it, like the standards, testing and accountability movement on which it builds, ostensibly aims to improve education, especially for those students who have historically been disadvantaged, including students of color and students living in poverty.

However, NCLB, while appearing to be a legislative attempt to improve educational opportunities for all students by setting up a system of objective assessments, instead represents a massive federal intervention into what and how we teach and assess. NCLB reduces educational discourse and practices to raising test scores and providing school choice, therefore eliminating discussion on how we develop schools that enable students from a wide range of cultures and abilities to succeed. NCLB overstates the problems in public education, blames the problems on incompetent educational professionals, and offers standardized testing, school choice and privatization as the remedy.

No Child Left Behind: solving social problems through standardized testing, accountability, and markets

U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, states that under “this new law, we will strive to provide every boy and girl in America with a high-quality education—regardless of his or her income, ability or background” (U.S. Department of Education, September 2002, p. 3). NCLB primarily aims to accomplish this goal by requiring that 95 percent of students be assessed through standardized tests aligned with “challenging academic achievement standards” in math and reading (U.S. Department of Education, September 2002, p. 4) initially in grades three through eight. By 2007-08 students will be tested grades three through twelve and in math, reading, and science. Each state is required to submit to the federal government a plan for how they will assess students, what is considered a demonstration of proficiency in math, reading and science, and how they will determine whether schools and districts are making “adequate yearly progress.”

If schools do not make adequately yearly progress for two consecutive years, they must be identified as “in need of improvement.” Students in those “schools must be given the option to transfer to another public school that has not been identified for improvement,” (U.S. Department of Education, September 2002, p. 6). Additional requirements are imposed for each successive year that a school fails to meet adequate yearly progress goals. These requirements include providing students with the option of obtaining “supplemental services in the community such as tutoring, after-school programs, remedial classes or summer school,” replacing the school staff, implementing a new curriculum, “decreasing management authority at the school level, appointing an outside expert to advise the school, extending the school day or year, or reorganizing the school internally.” Schools failing for five consecutive years must reopen as a charter school, replace all or most of the school staff who are relevant to the failure to make adequate progress, or turn over the operations either to the state or to a private company with a demonstrated record of effectiveness (U.S. Department of Education, September 2002, p. 6-8).

School districts failing for a fifth year must do one of the following: reduce costs; implement a new curriculum; replace personnel; establish alternative governance arrangements; appoint a receiver or trustee to administer the district in place of the superintendent or school board; or abolish or restructure the school district (U.S. Department of Education, September 2002, pp. 6-7).

Like other proponents of standards and testing, NCLB situates its proposal within a particular view of knowledge and research, arguing that the standards have been objectively determined and that standardized tests provide a valid and reliable means of assessing student learning. Such objective methods are required, they state, because teachers cannot be trusted to assess student learning objectively and accurately. The Parents’ Guide states that NCLB “will give them [parents and communities] objective data” through standardized testing (U.S. Department of Education, April 2002, p. 12). In fact, NCLB repeatedly ridicules teachers and teacher educators, asserting that teachers have often misled parents into believing that their child is learning when they are not and have fallen prey to “education fads,” “bad ideas,” and “untested curricula” (U.S. Department of Education, April 2002, p. 19).

Further, schools can only use federal funding to implement “lessons and materials backed by sound, scientific research [i.e. research using clinical trials]” and linked with objective, standardized tests. “No Child Left Behind ensures every child gets a solid and challenging curriculum aligned with rigorous academic standards.” (U.S. Department of Education, April 2002, p. 9). Consequently, almost all educational research is dismissed as unscientific.

NCLB promises to improve the education of all children through testing, accountability, and school choice and to provide objective information to parents regarding “which schools and districts are succeeding and why” (U.S. Department of Education, April 2002, p. 8). However, none of these promises can be fulfilled. Standardized testing is neither objective nor accurate and educational markets fail to improve education.

Substituting standardized testing and school choice for learning and local involvement in school improvement

Standardized testing is neither as objective nor useful as claimed. For example, students in New York are currently required to pass five Regents exams (one each in English, math, and science and two in social studies) to earn a high school diploma. The degree of difficulty for these exams has varied, in part, depending on whether the State Education Department wants to increase the graduation rate and, therefore, makes the exam easier, or wants to appear rigorous and, therefore, makes the exam more difficult. The passing rate for the exam can be increased or decreased simply by adjusting the cut score. Such manipulation can turn a low percentage of correct answers into a pass and a high percentage of correct answers into a failure. For example, in the recent “Living environments” exam, which is the Regents exam most often used to satisfy the Regents science requirement, students only needed to answer 39% of the questions correctly to earn a passing grade. Conversely, the exams for the advanced, non-required courses such as physics and chemistry have been made more difficult. 39% of students failed the most recent physics exam (Winerip, March 12, 2003). Moreover, the most recent (June 2003) Regents Math A exam (also, the exam students are most likely to take to meet the Regents requirement) was so poorly constructed that only 37% of the students passed statewide and the scores had to be discarded (Arenson, August 27, 2003, p. C-12). NCLB’s claim that standardized testing provides the objective assessment that teachers have lacked does not stand up to scrutiny. The best predictor of students’ future academic success continues to be their teachers’ prediction .

Second, whether a school is making AYP tells us little about whether a school is succeeding. For example, New York schools are not evaluated on whether their test scores are improving but whether their scores on required tests exceed a minimum yearly threshold that gradually increases over the next decade. Consequently, a school is considered to be passing as long as their scores exceed the threshold, even if their scores fall. Similarly, schools that begin with initially low test scores may be considered failing even if they significantly increase their test scores, as long as those scores remain below the threshold. Therefore, achieving AYP has nothing to do with whether a school’s test scores rise or fall, only on whether their scores for that year exceed or fail to meet the minimum threshold.

Because test scores strongly correlate to a student’s family income, a school’s score is likely to reflect their students’ average family income, not teaching practices or curriculum. Consequently, the largest percentage of New York’s failing schools are found in urban and poor school districts, with 83% of the failing schools in NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers (NYSSBA, March 19, 2003).

To NCLB’s testing requirements schools must demonstrate improvement for all disaggregated groups of students on all the tests, Florida added the further draconian stipulation that no school that has been assigned a grade of a D or F (per the annual rating of A through F) could meet AYP requirements, regardless of actual test scores. Not surprisingly, 90% of Florida’s public schools were designated as failing to meet AYP, and 100% of districts failed.

In New York, where urban schools with rising scores are likely to be “failing” to make AYP and suburban schools with falling scores are likely to be “succeeding” to make AYP, urban teachers working hard at improving their schools and demonstrating success are likely to be discouraged if not defeated. In Florida, with 100% of the districts failing, we might conclude that this is meant as a condemnation of the public school system.

Third, NCLB promises that students who are in failing schools will be able to move to successful schools. If we assume for a moment that designating a school as failing or succeeding accurately reflects the quality of the school (a significant logical leap), is it logistically possible for students to transfer from failing to succeeding schools? In districts where all the schools of a particular grade level are failing, the only school available would be in another district. If it is a rural school district, the distance to a “successful” school might be prohibitive.

Even when students can transfer to a school nearby, students have been reluctant to do so. Few parents and students seem to believe that a higher school aggregate test score ensures a better learning experience. Most students and their families prefer to stay where they are. James Kadamus, New York’s Deputy Commissioner of Education and a strong proponent of standardized testing and accountability, admits that few parents are interested in transferring their children to another school. “In general, parents don’t want to transfer out of their neighborhood school. They want to improve the school in their neighborhood” (NYSSBA, December 13, 2002).

Lastly, the pressure on schools to raise test scores has led to districts pushing out high school students who might lower the school’s aggregate test scores or increase the drop out rate. “Educators nationwide,” write Lewin and Medina, are waking up to the problem of pushouts. With the advent of high-stakes testing in dozens of states, and the fact that under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools with low graduation rates risk being deemed failing schools, school are facing real temptations to make their results look good by getting rid of low performers. (Lewin & Medina, July 31, 2003, p. 1)

Students are being pushed out of schools to raise test scores and, then, rather than being counted as dropouts, they are listed as having transferred to an alternative school or working on a Graduate Equivalency Diploma (Lewin & Medina, July 31, 2003, p. 1). Recent reports on the Houston public schools reveal that many of the high schools reported no dropouts, even in schools that reported 75% fewer seniors than freshman (Winerip, August 13, 2003). The pressure to raise test scores and to make AYP is resulting not in better education for many urban students, but in no education at all.

NCLB undermines parental, student, and faculty involvement in deciding what and how students should learn. Rather than having educators examine how schools can respond to the students and families in the community, attention shifts to how best to raise test scores so that federally mandated reforms do not need to be implemented. NCLB shifts the control of education from the local community to the federal government and, in the process, undermines teacher professionalism and student learning.

References Available On line.

(Footnotes)

¹ NCLB passed in the House 381-41 and in the Senate 87-10.

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