Professor Helen Ladd is one of the nation’s most distinguished economists of education; she holds a chair at Duke University.

In this article, she reviews the federal program No Child Left Behind.

The first conclusion one could draw was that the Congress and President committed a fatal flaw by putting the federal government in charge of all educational policy, a function normally left to the states. Whether the Secretary was Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan, or John King, their assumption was that they were in charge of education across the nation.

She begins:

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 reauthorization of the Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, represented a sea change for the federal government’s role in k-12 education, a function reserved by the U.S. Constitution for the states. Prior to that year, the federal government had relied primarily on the equal protection clause of the Constitution to promote educational opportunity for protected groups and disadvantaged students and had done so in part with Title 1 grants to schools serving low-income students. Although it accounted for only 1.5 percent of school budgets in 2000, Title I funding served as the mechanism for the federal government to use NCLB to put pressure on all individual schools throughout the country to raise student achievement. While a state could have avoided the pressure of NCLB by foregoing its share of Title 1 funds, none chose to do so.

Under NCLB, the federal government required all states to test every student annually in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school in math and reading and to set annual achievement goals so that 100 percent of the students would be on track to achieve proficiency by 2013/2014. Each school was required to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward the proficiency goal and was subject to consequences if it failed to do so. This AYP requirement applied not only to the average for all students in the school, but also to subgroups defined by economic, racial, and disability characteristics. Consistent with our federal system, states were to use their own tests and to set their own proficiency standards. The act also required that all teachers of core academic subjects be highly qualified, defined as having a Bachelor’s degree and subject-specific knowledge.

No state met the goal of 100% proficiency.

Her data suggests that NCLB did not improve student test scores and that gains registered after its passage continued pre-existing trends. After reviewing other studies, she concludes:

The overall test score effects of NCLB are clearly disappointing. Moreover, its positive effects on certain subgroups in some grades and subjects were far from sufficient to move the needle much on test score gaps. Such gaps in NAEP scores remained high in 2015.

She notes that NCLB had some positive components, like generating mountains of data and disaggregating scores for different groups.

However:

Despite these positive elements, the law’s use of top-down accountability pressure that was more punitive than constructive represents a flawed approach to school improvement. Three specific flaws deserve attention.

Its Narrow Focus

An initial problem with the test-based accountability of NCLB is that it is based on too narrow a view of schooling. Most people would agree that aspirations for education and schooling should be far broader than teaching children how to do well on multiple-choice tests. A broader view would recognize the role that schools play in developing in children the knowledge and skills that will enable them not merely to succeed in the labor market but to be good citizens, to live rich and fulfilling lives, and to contribute to the flourishing of others (Brighouse et al., 2016).

Research both on NCLB, as well as some of the state-specific accountability programs that preceded it, has shown it has narrowed the curriculum by shifting instruction time toward tested subjects and away from others. A nationally representative survey of 349 school districts between 2001 and 2007 shows that schools raised instructional time (measured in minutes per week) in English and math quite significantly while reducing time for social studies, science, art and music, physical education, and recess (McMurrer, 2007; also see National Surveys by the Center on Education Policy; Byrd-Blake et al., 2010; Dee & Jacob, 2010; Griffith & Scharmann, 2008). This narrowing of the curriculum undermines the potential for schools to promote other valued capacities, such as those for democratic competence or personal fulfillment.

Further, NCLB has led to a narrowing of what happens within the math and reading instructional programs themselves. That occurs in part because of the heavy reliance on multiple-choice tests that are cheaper and quicker to grade than open-ended questions that would better test conceptual understanding and writing skills. In addition, test-based accountability gives teachers incentives to “teach to the test” rather than to the broader domains that the test questions are designed to represent. Evidence of teaching to the test emerges from the differences in student test scores on the specific high stakes tests used by states as part of their accountability systems, and test scores on the NAEP, which is not subject to this problem (see Klein et al., 2000, for a comparison of Texas test scores on NAEP and the Texas high stakes tests).

NCLB also encouraged teachers to narrow the groups of students they attend to. Various studies document, for example, that the incentive for teachers to focus attention on students near the proficiency cut point has led to reductions in the achievement of students in the tails of the ability distribution (Krieg, 2008; Ladd & Lauen, 2010; Neal & Schanzenbach, 2010).
Unrealistic and Counter-Productive Expectations

A second flaw is that NCLB was highly unrealistic and misguided in its expectations. Even if we set aside its 100 percent proficiency goal as aspirational rhetoric, the program imposed counter-productive expectations in a variety of ways.

Recall that one of the goals of NCLB was to raise academic standards throughout the country. Given that the U.S. lodges responsibility for education at the state level, federal policymakers had to permit individual states to set their own proficiency standards. The accountability provisions of the law meant, however, that if a state chose to raise its standards without providing the additional resources and support needed to meet those standards, the result would be greater numbers of failing schools. Hence, it is not surprising that instead of states raising their proficiency standards, some states reduced them. Among the 12 states for which they had data starting in 2002/2003, Cronin et al. (2007) found that seven had lowered their proficiency standards by 2006 and declines were largest in states that had the highest initial proficiency standards. The authors also found a huge amount of variance between states in the difficulty of their proficiency standards.

The program was unrealistic as well in that many schools simply could not meet the requirements of AYP and hence were named and shamed as failures and made subject to sanctions. This requirement differed across schools and states depending on the state’s proficiency standards and the timetable it set out for the schools to meet the goal by 2013/2014. In many cases, states defined the time path so that it would be more feasible to meet in the early years than in the later years. The net effect was a rising failure rate over time. By 2011, close to half of all schools in the country were failing, with the rates well over 50 percent in some (Usher, 2015). Something is clearly amiss when half of the objects of accountability, in this case individual schools, are not in a position to succeed.4

With Congress not able to reach consensus on how to modify or update ESEA between 2007 and 2015, the requirements of NCLB remained in force, leading to the untenable situation in which most schools would eventually be failing. To avoid this situation, the Obama administration intervened in 2011 by offering waivers from certain requirements of NCLB to states that requested them. A key element of the waiver agreements was a shift of focus of accountability away from test score levels to a greater focus on the growth in student test scores or progress in reducing achievement gaps. While this shift represents a sensible change, it did little to counter the narrow focus and top-down nature of NCLB. By 2015, 43 states had received waivers from the most stringent provisions of NCLB (Polikoff et al., 2015). Although the waivers were necessary to stop the rise of school failures, the fact that the Obama administration had to work outside the Congress is another undesirable outcome in that it sets a bad precedent for future policymaking.

A final counterproductive effect of NCLB has been its adverse effect on teacher morale and the harm it could be doing to the teaching profession. Although researchers and policymakers frequently point to teachers as the most important school factor for student achievement, evidence shows that NCLB has reduced the morale of teachers, especially those in high poverty schools (Byde-Blake et al., 2010). Further, clear evidence of cheating by teachers in some large cities, including Atlanta; Chicago; and Washington, DC, even if limited to small numbers of teachers, indicates the magnitude of the pressures facing some teachers under high stakes accountability of the type imposed by NCLB. Low teacher morale matters in part because it may well increase teacher attrition. Although we do not have much direct evidence on how NCLB affects attrition, we do know that the approximately 8 percent attrition rate of teachers in the United States is far higher than that in many other countries (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016) and that reducing the rate would substantially mitigate concerns about projected teacher shortages and the costs of teacher turnover.

Perhaps its worst flaw was that it implied pressure but not support. Punishment but not encouragement or help.

Here is a good capsule summary of a valuable analysis:

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.

Inform yourself. Read this very readable and important study.

Let’s hope that legislators read it.