No Child Left Behind: Facts, Results & Effects

A NCLB banner for top-acheiving schools

Background

Way back in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was undertaking a series of reforms aimed at improving American lives called the Great Society program. One focus of this was education, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was created to give the federal government a firm role in American education. One of the most significant parts of this was the very first section, called Title I, which provided federal money to help pay for the education of disadvantaged students. The goal was to ensure that lower income neighborhoods did not receive sub-quality education.

Fast forward to 2002. President George W. Bush, operating in a climate of sharp party division, managed to gain support for a massive update to ESEA called the No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB had rare bi-partisan support, and came out of national concerns that American children were not being educated at an internationally-competitive level. There were particular concerns in 2002 about places like China graduating students with a higher level of education than American children, particularly in math and science. When NCLB was signed into law, it was celebrated as a national triumph.

Bush signing the No Child Left Behind Act

What NCLB Does

The No Child Left Behind Act implemented new educational goals for American society, and placed a great deal of accountability on individual schools to see that these goals were met. While schools were not legally mandated to comply with the changes, any school that didn't would lose its Title I funding.

What NCLB asked was that schools bring their students up to proficient levels of education by the 2013-2014 school year, and that they demonstrated this to the government. It was up to each individual state to define proficiency, but strong pressure was placed upon implementing a system of standardized tests.

According to the law, school progress would be measured through a series of target goals identified as Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP. If all students' tests did not match these goals for 2 years, that school was deemed inadequate, and could face several sanctions. These ranged from being required to offer free tutoring to being shut down entirely.

Results

So, how'd No Child Left Behind turn out? When the law lapsed in 2015, no state had achieved 100% proficiency according to the standards set by the original act, and that revealed many concerns. NCLB was criticized heavily in between 2002 and 2015 for relying too heavily on standardized testing, as well as overemphasizing math and science, all of which skewed national curriculums away. The program was also severely underfunded, with Title I funding only reaching $14.5 billion of the $25 billion promised in the original act.

One of the biggest complaints among educators was that NCLB was applied uniformly across the states, with no distinction made between the populations of each school. Here's the problem: imagine there are two schools. One is in a well-to-do neighborhood where education is a priority, most students have private tutors and all are performing just barely below the NCLB target goals.

The other school is in an area where fewer parents are highly educated and children have greater financial pressures. These students are performing well below the target goals. Now, to continue receiving Title I funding, both schools must get their students to the same level of academic performance.

For the first school, reaching the target goal is easy. For the second school, students may exhibit much greater growth than those of the first school, but still finish just below the target goals. Under NCLB, it doesn't matter how much a student improves. If the students still reports as below the goals, that school does not meet the Adequate Yearly Progress and can lose its funding.

NCLB placed a large burden on individual teachers, many of whom criticized the program

These were just some of the criticisms against No Child Left Behind. Now, it should be noted that this program cannot be called a complete failure, and did lead to educational improvements in many areas. Still, it placed a great amount of stress on states, was widely unpopular among parents and educators, and featured many flaws in practical implementation.

In 2012, President Obama began phasing out NCLB by offering waivers to states, allowing them to opt out of portions of the program. NCLB was formally replaced in 2015 with the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act with hopes of improving educational reform. After all, education is still important.

Lesson Summary

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, a major expansion on the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act that gave federal assistance to schools through its Title I funding for disadvantaged students. NCLB implemented strict new target goals, and held schools accountable for fulfilling them through Adequate Yearly Progress reports. A school that was not deemed adequate risked loss of Title I funding. NCLB was highly criticized for over-reliance on standardized testing, as well as a uniform implementation that did not account for the degree of student progress. NCLB was phased out under the Obama administration, and fully replaced in 2015. So, how we educate our students is still a debate in American society. It may take a lot of work, but it is an important question.