It’s Been 20 Years Since No Child Left Behind. What’d We Learn?

Twenty years ago this fall, we kicked off the first new school year of the “No Child Left Behind” era. Back in early 2002, after close to a year of tendentious stop-and-start negotiations and just months after 9/11, sweeping bipartisan Congressional majorities approved the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act—the signature proposal of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

The law gave schools a dozen years to get 100 percent of their students to “proficiency” in reading and math. States had to develop plans showing how they were going to make that happen. Of course, they first had to define what “proficiency” meant and then adopt regular testing in reading, math, and science to see how students were doing (with results reported by race, gender, language proficiency, and more). School systems were given federal prescriptions on how to intervene in schools where too many students weren’t proficient.

There was a lot more to NCLB, of course. The thing ran hundreds of pages for a reason. But the upshot was a massive upheaval of K-12 schooling, fueled by the expectation that federal mandates governing testing, transparency, accountability, and remedies could ensure that children would no longer, well, get left behind.

In the end, it didn’t work out quite the way anyone intended. This fall, 20 years on, it’s worth reflecting on a few of the lessons that have been obscured by the passage of time—especially at a moment when the current White House has urged all manner of ambitious federal education programs and directives.

NCLB Kinda, Sorta Worked. No Child Left Behind was billed as a tool for pushing schools to focus more energy on making sure low-performing students were mastering the basics. There was some evidence this happened. On the National Assessment of Education Practice (the “nation’s report card”), there was a notable achievement bump right around the passage of NCLB and the following half-decade showed some steady progress. The gains weren’t immense, but they were real and they were disproportionately racked up by the overlooked students that NCLB was intended to help.

The Gains Came at a Cost. The hope was that NCLB would raise “the ceiling” (promote educational excellence) as well as raise the floor (boost the performance of low-performing students). In practice, it didn’t really work out that way. School systems wound up resorting to all kinds of dubious, anti-excellence strategies in order to raise the floor. Meanwhile, they cut back on social studies, civics, the arts, recess, and gifted education in order to devote more time to tested subjects. All of this tended to lower the ceiling. Scores may have gone up, but it wasn’t clear students were learning more—and high-achievers tended to get put on the back-burner.

Schools Went Test Crazy. Back when NCLB was being negotiated, there was broad agreement that we needed more transparency into how schools were doing and that schools needed to be more accountable for every student. Outside of the nation’s education schools and teacher unions, this was uncontroversial. Over the ensuing years, however, schools fixated on testing. Test prep, benchmark testing, test-based teacher evaluation, cheating scandals, and lots of game-playing around the meaning of “proficiency” gave the impression that schools had lost the thread of the plot.

Backlash Ensued. Less than a decade after the adoption of NCLB, most of the nation’s schools were judged “in need of improvement” under the law—and subjected to a series of mandated federal remedies. At the same time, would-be reformers and officials at the Obama Department of Education used the door NCLB had opened to push a slew of new technocratic proposals. Populist concerns about the Common Core, union complaints about test-based teacher evaluation, and conservative frustration with federal overreach, all coupled with the sense that testing had run amok, fueled the backlash that led to the NCLB-dismantling Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Perhaps the big lesson here is that ambitious social reforms aren’t just about doing something that “works” in the short-term. While NCLB did appear to nudge up test scores in its early years, its larger legacy may have been to undermine broad-based support for testing and to help entangle educational accountability in larger political fights. When it comes to reforming education, NCLB is a reminder that the real-world reactions of parents and educators are likely to count for much more than the aspirations of federal lawmakers.