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The federal No Child Left Behind Act passed Congress in December 2001 by votes of 381-41 in the House and 87-10 in the Senate.  Signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002 it has become the subject of ongoing controversy, including attacks by Democrats who helped draft it and voted for it.

1965's Elementary and Secondary "Education Act had a few dozen pages but NCLB was 1,100 pages. That's reason enough to have voted against it.   Clearly, few if any members of Congress understood it.  Since legislation results in regulations far more voluminous than the law itself, maybe no one knows the law as it is being implemented.

Consider some of its time provisions.

Two years: Low-performing schools fail to improve will receive additional federal aid. If they still do not improve, low-income students are eligible for funds for tutoring or transportation. In the meantime, of course, students continue to be left behind.

Three years: schools are to ensure that students with limited English skills are proficient in English after three consecutive years of attending school in this country.

Four years: states are to insure that all teachers are qualified to teach in their subject area.  As of June 30, 2006, beyond the four year deadline, not one state met that requirement.

More than four years have now elapsed.  As was written here in the SchoolReport commentary of January 1, 2002 regarding achieving those goals,  "With all due respect, that won't happen either. Write it down."  The same will be true of the goals for the remainder of the 12-year program.  If it lasts that long.  It's up for renewal next year.

Other targets in the law include:

Six years: If scores fail to improve in a school, staff changes are authorized.

Most of the students in grades 7-12 in 2001 are already gone and more will leave before the staff change provision kicks in. Today's teachers will be here for up to 40 years or more.

Twelve years: schools must close the gaps in scores between wealthy and low-income students and between white and minority students and are required to have all students proficient in reading and math.

All students?  Forgedaboutit!  Reduce the gaps? Possible. Close the gaps? Impossible.

  Already, school districts are fudging the figures.  Allowed some leeway in setting annual targets many districts have set very low ones for these early years but call for large gains in the final year or so, gains that have no chance of being realized.

The law also permits districts to not count test scores of minorities if they have a limited number.  As a result the Associated Press reported six months ago that the test scores of nearly 2,000,000 such students are not even being counted.  No child left behind?

States are to identify "persistently dangerous" schools.   Cleveland says it doesn't have any, which may be news to most residents of that city.  But then Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. say they don't have any either.  What Cleveland does have is less than 10% of 4th and 8th-graders proficient in reading, and at least 35% of the schools failing to make its goal of Annual Yearly Progress (AYP). Here, too, it has company elsewhere.

By the end of the projected 12 year program all 2002's 48 million public school students will be gone, along with millions of others who start after 2001but who will drop out before the twelve years are over.

Remember that former President George H.W. Bush held an education summit in 1990 that drew up a half dozen goals to be achieved by 2000. It isn't that all weren't achieved. It's that none of them were. But the ten years allowed virtually all of those at the summit the time to leave the offices they then held.

President Bush will leave office in January 2009, and many of the members of Congress who voted for the NCLB law have already left office and many more will be gone when the NCLB act terminates.

When, like Goals 2000, the overpromised but underachieving NCLB legislation falls far short of the promises, who will be accountable?

No one.

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"By mandating that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2013, No Child Left Behind is setting public schools up for another embarrassing failure." Ronald A.Wolk, "99.9 Percent Bunk" Editorial, TEACHER Magazine, October 2006

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Copyright 2006 David W. Kirkpatrick
108 Highland Court,
Douglassville, Pennsylvania 19518-9240
Phone: (610) 689-0633