In January of 2002, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which penalizes or rewards schools based on students’ performance on standardized tests. Nearly seven years later the questions surrounding this controversial legislation are as pressing as ever. Does No Child Left Behind make the grade?
By Dennis Van Roekel, a 23-year teaching veteran and longtime activist and advocate for children and public education, Van Roekel is president of the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. As NEA President, he leads the nation's largest labor union and advocate for quality public schools.
From the beginning, the National Education Association offered widespread support for No Child Left Behind’s goals— raising student achievement for all students, closing achievement gaps among various groups of students, and ensuring that every child has a quality teacher. Yet, while NCLB has the right goals, the law remains fundamentally flawed and severely underfunded.
NCLB is based on a test-label-punish approach to schools and signaled a drastic shift from earlier interpretations of the federal role in education. The law established top-down, one-size-fits-all, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates with rigid, unrealistic deadlines. The federal government demanded outcomes from schools without providing the inputs, like sufficient funding, which created an $86 billion gap between promised and actual funding.
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