The Insincerity of American Society with Regard to Attaining Educational Equity, as Considered in the Demise of No Child Left Behind

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he wanted to concentrate on a domestic agenda for which he vowed to apply conservative solutions in compassionate service to impoverished and other challenged populations often considered more politically responsive to programs of Democratic provenance:


In 2002---  as one of the few programs on the Bush domestic agenda that was not permanently deferred due to the exigencies of the 9-11 attacks---  the president oversaw bipartisan (Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner helped secure support) passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked; officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.


Consistent with President Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014. To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.


Very importantly, the data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories. Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutors, and restructuring for persistent failure. Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.


At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward. But within a half-decade came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program: Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.


As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment--- especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats. By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.


By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students. When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on the higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.


Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for an alternative program for achieving educational equity.


Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right--- and how we still wring our hands over persistent demographically indicated performance levels--- having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity.