This year marks the 12th anniversary of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act. In addition, 2014 is the deadline set in the federal law for all students to show proficiency in math and reading.
That bold ambition went away as the federal government retreated from what many deemed No Child’s pie-in-the-sky goals, and the Obama administration granted states, including Georgia, waivers from the law.
In opting out of No Child, Georgia isn’t bound by the law’s mandate that all students be proficient in math and reading this year. Instead, Georgia created a performance index that measures students’ readiness to attend college or begin a career after high school.
The 12-year anniversary has sparked discussion of the legacy of No Child Left Behind.
Despite the law’s obvious failings, many people applaud its laser focus on low-performing students, and for making some inroads with those students in math.
For example, researchers Thomas Dee and Brian Jacobs analyzed state-level data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The pair isolated the impact of No Child by comparing test-score changes across states that already had school-accountability policies in place prior to the law and those that did not.
The study found that No Child led to significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders and rises in 8th graders’ math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups. However, the study found no evidence that No Child increased reading achievement in either grade.
The law also wins praise for mandating transparency. It forced schools and states to collect and release data on how every student and school performed. No longer could schools mask failure by citing average student performance. Now, schools had to isolate and report performance for all students, including poor and minority young people.
That data binge led to the drive now to evaluate teachers on how much “value” they add to a student’s academic growth based on test scores. And the law’s emphasis on standards that all children should meet laid the groundwork for the new Common Core State Standards.
But critics said No Child hindered flexibility and innovation and spurred a test-based system that narrowed curriculum and, in the case of the Atlanta Public Schools, pushed dozens of educators to tamper with test results to avoid sanctions.
Last week, the Fordham Institute held a panel on the 12th anniversary of No Child Left Behind in which the reviews were generally favorable.
The improvement seen in math performance showed “there was some slack in the system, there was low-hanging fruit that schools could harvest,” said Matthew M. Chingos, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy and co-author of “Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities.”
Why did progress in math stall? It’s easier to achieve initial gains than to maintain continual improvement, said Kathleen Porter-Magee, senior adviser for policy and instruction at the College Board and a Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow at Fordham.
The failure to move the needle in reading was likely because of teaching it in a vacuum, according to the panel.
Mike Petrilli, Fordham executive vice president, said the attitude was, “social studies and science can wait until once kids learn to decode and get those reading comprehension skills. Schools thought they were doing the right thing with the approach of, ‘We are going to concentrate on reading and teach everything else later.’”
Porter-Magee said, “You are not going to make gains in reading comprehension with isolated reading skills. … Once you learn how to read and decode, you need to learn content and vocabulary to deepen your skills.”
“We’ve made some real progress in recent years on high school graduation rates,” Petrilli said. “I’d be hard-pressed to think of a trend that has gone the wrong way in the last 10 years — lower drug use, lower teenage pregnancy, lower smoking. If NCLB is leading to adverse consequences, I don’t see it in the data, yet.”
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