Why the No Child Left Behind Act Is Unsalvageable

By Eric Schaps

Much of the talk in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act’s reauthorization is centered around two contentions: that the federal law needs only some tweaking to be made right, such as shifting to a “value added” or “growth” method of charting progress; and that, once tweaked, it must be fully funded to be effective. Key Democrats in Congress seem committed to a continuation of the law’s basic provisions, as do many of their Republican counterparts and the Bush administration. These proponents argue for staying the course because, they assert, left to their own devices states and districts will not push their schools to eliminate achievement gaps, or move all students to and beyond “proficiency.”

The intentions behind the legislation may be good, but no amount of tweaking will fix several fatal flaws. In part, these flaws are inherent in the law’s unrealistic goals, which, because they can’t be met, set schools up to fail. And in part, the flaws are inherent in the law’s basic strategy for realizing its goals: high-stakes testing. That strategy ignores the primary reasons for the inequities that schools are supposed to redress, and also causes collateral damage of several kinds. Specifically:

1. No Child Left Behind calls for eliminating the so-called achievement gaps among ethnic, racial, and economic subgroups. But students spend 80 percent of their waking lives outside of school, and so it is absurd to expect schools to overcome the toll taken by discrimination, poverty, poor nutrition, inadequate health care, high crime and substance-abuse rates, and broken...