In 2001, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind Act, and President George W. Bush signed it into law. The No Child Left Behind Act, also known as NLCB, seeks to improve public education in the United States. It mandates that all states must test students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and mathematics. Schools must then demonstrate improvement in their test scores, or risk losing federal funding. The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is to bring every student in America to proficiency in reading in math by 2014.
So, is it working? Are students learning more? Is the achievement gap closing? The answer is: yes, and no. Under NCLB, test scores have increased for the lowest performing students in the nation, almost across the board. According to state testing results, it is unquestionable that the achievement gap between white and non-white students is getting smaller. On the other hand, the No Child Left Behind Act has actually had an adverse effect on the highest achieving students. Since the act was signed into law, test scores have shown a steady and disturbing trend: scores for the highest performing students have consistently decreased.
As we approach the 2014 deadline set by the No Child Left Behind Act, it seems less and less likely that the goal of 100% proficiency can actually be accomplished. Some critics have insisted that such a goal is impossible to achieve under any circumstances; children vary in their native intellectual capacity and it is simply incorrect to assume that they can all universally achieve at the same academic level. The No Child Left Behind Act insists that all children are capable of proficiency although it is important to note that the law itself does not define proficiency or set any actual standard for measuring it.
Indeed, the lack of any specific standard is perhaps the real flaw of NCLB. The law mandates that every state must set its own standards, and create its own tests for measuring whether students are performing up to those standards. So what passes as proficient in Mississippi might well be considered under-performing in Massachusetts. Furthermore, although the standards tend to remain the same, the tests administered according the No Child Left Behind Act change from year-to-year (of course, since it would make no sense to give the exact same test each year). As a result, there is an inevitable variation in test difficulty levels. Yet the No Child Left Behind Act insists that states must compare the data from one years test with the data from other years. In other words, a state may find that fourth-grade reading scores got higher from 2007 to 2008, and then even higher in 2009. It sounds very promising. But did the students get better at reading, or did the tests get easier? NCLB contains no provision for guaranteeing that the latter explanation does not occur.