The Night They Tore the Red Schoolhouse Down: The Future of No Child Left Behind

Just over a month ago, a Washington D.C. landmark was destroyed. Thankfully, it wasn’t the Vietnam Wall, the Smithsonian, or any of the countless presidential landmarks. No, it was a little red schoolhouse that seven years ago was the backdrop for what was supposed to be a grand defining moment for the Bush administration’s domestic policy. In retrospect is may have been a defining moment, but a grand one it was not, for in the shadow of that red schoolhouse frame President Bush first introduced No Child Left Behind.

Watch the destruction here

Now seven years later, the reauthorization that passed with bipartisan support is now garnering bipartisan ridicule, with new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan even going so far as to say “No Child Left Behind has become toxic“. President Obama does not go that far in his critiques of the initiative, and while campaigning for the office he now holds, he even went so far as to say “the goals of this law were the right ones“. However, the goals did not meet up with the actions and in a recent interview he asserted that the standards were set too low and the federal government did not do it’s part to support the program it created.

So does No Child Left Behind have any role in the future of education? Many seem to think that in spite of its unpopularity, it’s not going away. After all, the original act was passed in 1965 as the “Elementary and Secondary Education Act” and comes up for reauthorization every five years. No Child Left Behind was the Bush administration’s twist on the old law, and now it appears the Obama administration is attempting to do some twisting of its own.

The Race To The Top grant program (outlined in my previous blog post) is the nation’s first look at what might be going on at the White House behind the curtain. Judging by the application standards put forth by the Wizard of Ob(ama) and his Education Secretary, it seems like the emphasis on standardized testing will be increased, much to the dismay of NCLB critics everywhere. President Obama said in the press conference announcing the program that it would be about “finally getting testing right”, as in developing assessments that better determine a child’s knowledge on a subject, rather than further exacerbating the problems of teaching to the test and assessing a student’s ability to bubble in an answer.

But how will this be accomplished? The original law from 1965 explicitly forbids the development of a national curriculum, something that many educators are calling for with increasing fervor. Without a nationalized curriculum, states will continue to measure different kinds of knowledge at different times in a student’s education with different benchmarks determining what students (and by implication, what teachers) were successful. But even with a nationalized curriculum, the emphasis on high-stakes testing remains.

A rose by any other name is still a rose. Likewise will be any law testing our children into the ground, no matter what color schoolhouse is erected to go with it.

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