On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law.
Thus began an unprecedented federal intrusion into state and local education.
The law was sweeping in imposing federally mandated annual tests from grades 3-8.
No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year.
The law mandated that every school must achieve 100% proficiency by 2014 or face increasingly onerous consequences, culminating in being privatized, taken over by the state or closed.
The law made appeals to research repeatedly, but there was no research whatever for its claim that pressure and punishment would ever produce 100% proficiency nor was there any evidence for the “remedies” it proposed.
NCLB was a hoax buil on a lie. The lie was Bush’s campaign claim that there had been a “Texas miracle,” the result of annual testing and accountability. We need only look at Texas’s middling standing on NAEP to see that there was no miracle. The hoax was the law itself, which threatened punishment to those who could not meet impossible goals and offered remedies that had never produced results for any district or state.
Today marks a sad day in the history of American education, when politicians proclaimed that they knew how to fix America’s schools.
They didn’t, and a new era of test abuse, failure, hubris, profiteering, consultants, and other ways to defund the nation’s public schools began.
The spirit of this failed law animated Race to the Top (President Obama said publicly that his RTTT was built on the foundation of NCLB) and survives in the current Every Student Succeeds Act, which continues to require annual testing and gives the Secretary of Education the power to review state plans for compliance with federal law.
NCLB was a noon for the testing industry and consultants but a tragedy for students and teachers. Teachers lost autonomy. Students lost the arts, recess, history, and the love of learning for its own sake. Test scores became the purpose of education.
The restoration of the promise of public education will begin when we have a President and Congress who expunge the legacy of this dreadful law from the books.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I labored under this law and saw full-length works of literature disappear in favor of excerpts. Anthologies linked with test prep, parasitic consultants, and the belief that technology would save us all, which of course cost a fortune, were other follies. Of course, the honors/AP students didn’t have to endure that–a case of the rich getting richer. No one addressed student poverty because it was so much easier to blame teachers. This was a spectacular failure on so many levels, and no one will admit what a disaster it was. The same people who promoted it failed upward. The are still around, working for Laurene Jobs and the like.
The Wall of Shame:
Walton Family, Koch Brothers, Eli Broad, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Sam Brownback, Betsy DeVoss, Don ald Trump, John King, Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel.
Please add to this list.
Barack Obama
people are loath to admit that it was Obama’s RttT which most directly and viciously went after “bad” teachers
I recently met a very smart woman in the publishing business (not the ed sector). I tried to explain the continuity between Bush and Obama on education, the seamless match between NCLB and RTTT. She refused to believe it.
Michael Bloomberg
Beautifully said, Ms. Watter!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
This has been the worst law in the history of education. It created a system that was more concerned about numbers and looking good than students learning. Two years ago people made a big deal out of 84% of high schools students graduating. They were just pushed out the door to make the numbers look good. Most of those 84% left HS less prepared for career, college and military service than any time in our history. NCLB has been a complete disaster.
With you on that one.
The signing of NCLB was a day of infamy. It marked the beginning of churn and burn syndrome in education. It put teachers, students and schools on a treadmill of test, punish, blame and scapegoating from which we have not fully escaped.
“a new era of test abuse, failure, hubris, profiteering, consultants, and other ways to defund the nation’s public schools began”.
No-Corporation-Left-Behind. “Murdoch has called education “a $500 billion market in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Duncan’s chief of staff said/”But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”
” Students lost the arts, recess, history, and the love of learning for its own sake.” Witnessing colleagues and children struggle to comply with the demands of this disastrous law was heartbreaking.
And also on this day, The hunters of Kentucky and the volunteers of Tennessee defeated General Packenham at the Battle of New Orleans (fought a full month after the war was over because news traveled slowly). This prompted the writing of “The Eighth of January,” a fiddle tune to commemorate the victory. Along with “The Hunters of Kentucky,” it sung the hero Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1828, for better and for worse. So it goes with politics.
A day that lives in infamy. It lives in the suffocating, stultifying, trivializing effects on our curricula and pedagogy, day in and day out. Enough.
End high-stakes standardized testing now.
I remember an interview that Geo. Bush gave years ago after he signed NCLB. He said it didn’t require middle class parents to do anything–put all of the work burden on others. He felt that was very smart politically for him.
The killer quotation for me was when Bush said, during his reelection campaign, “I solved the education problem on my first day in office.”
“On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law”
A day that will be added to the historical wall of infamy.
So we must be the smartest country in the world by now . I think I am getting sick again.
MAGA MASA MARA MAWA*
Make America Great Again
Greater than the rest
Make America Smart Again
Smarter with a test
Make America Race Again
Race to tippy top
Make America Wretch Again
Wretch until we drop
not to be confused with the town in New Jersey,
Say MAGA MASA MARA MAWA ten times fast
Trump’s MAGA battle cry, with help from his DEPLORABLE followers, will be the end of the United States if he wins the 2020 election, because, with Trump still in the White House for four more years, he will have time to completely dismantle our Constitutional Republic and replace it with the Trumpty Dumpty Dynasty.
Should have been called “No Politician Left Behind” because political careers (and bank accounts) were built on it.
Wow. A whole generation of school children have lived with the atrocities of standardized testing and other inappropriate measures of so-called success. A whole student generation. There are no students who can say they remember life before this currently in our schools.