Charters proved to be the stepping stone to vouchers, persuading parents they school was a consumer choice.-z

Education advocate Meg White writes about one of the worst ideas of our time: Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan have teamed up to support a revival of No Chid Left Behind and Race to the Top.

They might as well call their effort, “Make failure great again!”

If it didn’t work the first time, do it again.

Both programs shared a common strategy: Test and punish. George W. Bush’s NCLB created a singular focus on standardized test scores as the measure of schools. Educators were told that they must raise scores every year or face dire consequences, including turning the school over to a charter organization or private management; firing and replacing teachers and the principal; closing the school.

The unintended consequences: teaching to the test, once considered unethical, became the norm; narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, reducing time for history, civics, science, recess, and the arts; cheating. Testing became the goal of schooling, rather than a measure.

Duncan’s Race to the Top dangled big cash rewards to states if they adopted his program: evaluate teachers by the rise or fall of student test scores; fire teachers who don’t raise scores: adopt the Common Core; enact laws to permit charter schools.

Together, these two federal programs thoroughly demoralized the teaching profession and caused enrollments in teachers’ colleges to plummet. They crushed the joy of teaching and learning without achieving their goals. Teachers were unjustly fired. Charter schools were opened by for-profit entrepreneurs, as well as grifters and profit-seeking corporations. The charter industry boomed but also burst, as charters closed almost as frequently as they opened.

NCLB required that every school must ensure that every student reached “proficiency” on standardized tests, a clearly impossible goal, by 2014.

Race to the Top blamed teachers and schools for low scores. Duncan wanted the public to know how terribly the schools were doing. He counted on the adoption of Common Core and the spread of charter schools to produce a huge jump in test scores.

On the very last day of the Obama administration, the Department of Education quietly released an evaluation admitting that Race to the Top had failed to achieve its goals.

Meg White writes:

Two former U.S. education secretaries—one Republican and one Democrat—argue that the federal government needs to stop just handing out money for public education and start demanding real results. Margaret Spellings, who served under President George W. Bush, and Arne Duncan, who served under President Barack Obama, have offered their collective ideas on how to strengthen public education, many years later.

Under their proposed plan, the federal government would provide funding to states, pay for scientific research on how kids learn best, and ensure test scores are made public so schools cannot hide poor performance. State governments would be responsible for setting high standards and choosing the actual teaching methods without lowering the expectations to make their states look better. Spellings and Duncan refer to the success in Mississippi, saying, “Mississippi’s historic gains in student test scores since 2013 does not come at the expense of any other state. Instead, it’s a chance for those states to learn from and build on Mississippi’s progress (edweek.org).

Regarding the Mississippi miracle, I wrote about this earlier this year. Much controversy surrounds the increase in test scores.

Their bipartisan plan outlines several goals for every state to ensure student success from early childhood through graduation. First, they suggest schools focus on early learning by giving every child access to high-quality preschool and ensuring they can read well by the third grade. Second, middle schoolers need to learn practical skills, specifically finance and technology. Finally, for future preparation, high schools must provide access to advanced classes so that every graduate leaves with a clear path to a job, trade school, or college, regardless of their family’s income (edweek.org).

Critics, educators, and policy experts argue that this approach is fundamentally flawed because it heavily relies on strategies that failed under initiatives like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT). When federal funding is tied to standardized tests, schools face tremendous pressure to meet those numbers. This forces teachers to teach to the test. Consequently, this dynamic narrows the curriculum, systematically pushing out untested subjects like history, art, music, and physical education (edweek.org).

To avoid losing federal money or facing public embarrassment, many states historically responded by lowering their testing bars so more students would technically pass. This creates a false illusion of progress where state data looks positive, but independent national audits show that actual student performance has stagnated or declined.

If they are serious about research on how children learn best, they will see that it is not scripted curricula or one-size-fits-all literacy programs.

This strategy has failed because it treats low achievement strictly as a bureaucratic problem that can be solved with goals and data, completely ignoring any socioeconomic inequalities that can predict a child’s success. It does nothing to address underfunding in low-income districts, food insecurity, unstable housing, or the widespread teacher shortages caused by low pay and poor working conditions. 

Imposing top-down mandates from Washington ignores the challenges of different communities, and strips local educators of the flexibility they need to build tailored solutions for their students. Hiring uncertified and inexperienced teachers does not support strong pedagogy for students who need good teachers.

Spellings and Duncan conclude, “This is a moment for national leadership. We call on the president, Congress, governors, and education leaders to put student achievement back at the center of the nation’s agenda. Washington should provide the direction, research, and transparency. States should set high expectations and act when schools or students fall short. Parents should hold all of us accountable for results(edweek.org). This is a repeat of the failed policies of NCLB and RTTT.

NCLB and its strict test-based accountability system created unintended consequences that damaged public education. The law included an outrageous expectations that 100% of American students achieve academic “proficiency” in reading and math by 2014, which was statistically impossible.

No Child Left Behind was built on the mistaken belief that low test scores stemmed entirely from ineffective teachers or indifferent administrators who required threats to improve. By focusing on classroom performance, the policy overlooked the systemic, out-of-school challenges that directly hinder student success—including chronic poverty, food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and massive funding disparities between school districts.

Race to the Top pressured states to alter their education policies for a share of $4.35 billion in grants, but ultimately failed to improve student test scores. This failure stemmed first from a rushed adoption of the Common Core State Standards. The initiative forced states to tie teacher job security to standardized test scores using unproven statistical models. States made unrealistic promises to turn around failing schools in four years, yet the federal prize money amounted to a mere 1% of state education budgets—far too little to execute such massive structural overhauls (economicpolicyinstitute.org).

Ultimately, RTTT repeated past policy mistakes by relying on a narrow, data-and-testing approach that hyper-focused on classroom metrics while completely ignoring the actual out-of-school drivers of the achievement gap, such as deep childhood poverty, food insecurity, and unequal school funding (economicpolicyinstitute.org). If Congress seriously considers data on charter schools, vouchers, and Educational Savings Accounts, they need to look at their high cost and lack of success in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. It didn’t work there, but depending on where you get your news, there were miraculous gains in test scores. 

Two former secretaries of education who initiated failed programs, are again suggesting ideas that didn’t work, and again do not address the extrinsic issues students face before they ever get to school. 

These are my reflections for today.