The Importance of No Child Left Behind: Part I (What the Law Says and How it Applies Beneficial Pressure for Accountability)

No Child Left Behind is the most important piece of education reform legislation to go into effect during the last 30 years. Today I begin a series of articles that will address issues raised by No Child Left Behind.

There is so much misinformation about No Child Left Behind that it is important to review the reformist thrust with which the implementation of the legislation has put pressure on the public schools to be much better than they are. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s the poor performance of the public schools in the United States by comparison with many systems in East Asia and Europe provoked a discussion as to how to meet the crisis. No Child Left Behind grew out of a movement on the part of many reformers for standards-based education, whereby students at each grade level are tested to determine who is and who is not functioning at grade level, particularly in math and reading.

The legislation was proposed by President George W. Bush in June 2001 and signed into law in January 2001 after coauthors in the United States House of Representaives (Democrat George Miller and Republican John Boehner) and the United States Senate (Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Judd Gregg) oversaw overwhelming approval (384-45 in the House, 91-8 in the Senate). The law is the prevailing version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that first went into effect during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. The essentials of the law are the requirements that data on student progress must be disaggregated to indicate performance of students according to ethnicity, gender, economic status, national origin, and special needs. Effectively 95% of all students in each category must meet certain minimum academic standards or a school is put on notice that it is not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

If a school is not making AYP, it gets a year to improve its program. For each school that for the second year in a row does not make AYP, a school district must offer the opportunity for each student at such a school who so chooses to move to another school. A third year of failure to make AYP dictates that free tutoring must be offered. The fourth year of failure to make AYP requires that free tutoring must continue, and the school is notified that it will face restructuring if student performance does not improve. The fifth year of not making AYP results in notification that planning must commence for restructuring or closing the school, and by the sixth year of failure the restructuring plan or closing goes into effect.

What has happened, then, with this legislation is that schools that have failed so many of our students year after year for as long as anyone can remember have had a harsh light of publicity cast on them. Huge numbers of schools have been pressured to make moves to improve the educational quality for all students, regardless of ethnicity or economic status. A few schools have succeeded in improving significantly, but most have not. The latter situation is not surprising given the mediocrity of so many teachers and the lack of a coherent curriculum throughout the K-12 years.

All of this predictably makes teachers' unions and other entities of the education establishment extremely uncomfortable, which is how they should feel when faced with public recognition of their failure to offer an education to all students worthy of a democracy.


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Please stay tuned for succeeding parts on the importance and reformist thrust of No Child Left Behind.