Professor Helen F. Ladd is professor of public policy and economics at Duke University.
In this paper, she analyzes the merits and demerits f No Child Left Behind and concludes that it failed in reaching the ambitious (and unrealistic) goal that all children would be proficient by 2014.
She calls NCLB “a deeply flawed federal policy.”
She writes:
“NCLB relied instead almost exclusively on tough test-based incentives. This approach would only have made sense if the problem of low-performing schools could be attributed primarily to teacher shirking, as some people believed, or to the problem of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as suggested by President George W. Bush. But in fact low achievement in such schools is far more likely to reflect the limited capacity of such schools to meet the challenges that children from disadvantaged backgrounds bring to the classroom. Because of these challenges, schools serving concentrations of low-income students face greater tasks than those serving middle class students. The NCLB approach of holding schools alone responsible for student test score levels while paying little if any attention to the conditions in which learning takes place is simply not fair either to the schools or the children and was bound to be unsuccessful.”
I hope that Professor Ladd applies her sharp analytical skills to reviewing Race to the Top.
At some point, we can begin to calculate the billions spent for 13 years of punitive test-based accountability.
Diane Ravitch's blog 