Article #12 >>>>> Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Educatiion Throughout the United States

The Demise of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Vacuity of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and the Return to Unabashed Intellectual Corruption in American Public Education

As soon as No Child Left Behind legislation was passed (2001) and implementation began (2002), the education establishment and politically purchased left of center politicians in the Democratic Party moved to undermine the effort to establish logically sequenced, measurable academic standards.

Predictably, hordes of students failed to demonstrate grade level proficiency in mathematics, reading, and science;  and many schools theretofore considered to be good or even excellent were identified as failing due to dismal results revealed in disaggregated data.  

When this happened, teachers unions such as the Minneapolis Federation.of Teachers (MFT), Education Minnesota, and similar local and state unions across the United States blamed the messenger, claiming that NCLB and standardized tests (objective assessments) were at fault, rather than curriculum, teacher quality, and skill remediation (or lack thereof) in failed schools.

Then former NCLB supporters among Republicans began to receive political pressure of their own, from constituencies lamenting loss of local control under NCLB;  and from voucher proponents contemptuous of public education and having no interest in the necessary overhaul in curriculum and teacher quality.  

Thus did forces of tbe left and of the right work with antipodal impact to terminate No Child Left Behind.  Early in the Obama administration, states were offered opt-out under the new Race to the Top program from NCLB, with the opportunity to submit aternative plans for ending differential results by income and ethnicity.  In Minnesota, this induced development of the intellectually corrupt North Star Accountability System that included the inept, ludicrously named Regional Centers of Excellence.

But the race was to the bottom, there was no accountability under the North Star, and there was no regional excellence pertinent to public education in Minnesota.  

In 2015, the United States Congress voted to replace NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), another mere proclamation with no correspondence between appellation and fact.

After the evanescent hope offered by the standards movement and NCLB, public education in 2021 remains a travesty, the United States a nation at risk.