Proficiency Is Not Enough

The _No Child Left Behind_ Act fails to balance equity and excellence.

By Carol Ann Tomlinson

Throughout our history, Americans have stood strong for two bedrock values: equity and excellence. Defining equity in terms of access to opportunity, we remain a country that values the possibility that every child—even those born into poverty—can achieve eminence through effort. We are a better and stronger people, we continue to remind ourselves, to the degree that we support this journey. At the same time, we hold fast to the value of excellence. Americans want to be the best—in science, engineering, movie-making, athletics, and countless other endeavors. If something matters to us, we want, as a nation, to push the envelope of possibilities in that area.

Balancing these twin commitments, to equity and to excellence, is a challenge. But it is a nonnegotiable one if we are to become who we wish to be. Nowhere is the challenge greater than in public education. Yet, nowhere else do we find the means to achieve the balance that we seek. Schools are the primary pathway in our society to equality of opportunity. They also are the mechanism through which we train individual human minds to function at peak levels—and, thus, to collectively scale new heights as a nation.

Yet, one of the reasons it is so devilishly difficult to balance equity and excellence in our schools is that, despite the political rhetoric to the contrary, we simply don't provide adequate economic support to nurture both goals. We have a substantial history in education, in fact, of supporting one to the detriment of the other. There have been few examples of our simultaneously giving attention to both goals. At times, we have come close to setting the fulcrum at a point of balance, but rarely have we done so. The "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 appears to...