Let's Not 'Kill Off' NCLB

A Response to Diane Ravitch

By B. Alexander Kress

When you take out the opinion and cant, Diane Ravitch’s evidence for “killing off” the No Child Left Behind Act ( “Time to Kill ‘No Child Left Behind,’” June 17, 2009) really comes down to her shrewd and misleading comparison of student-performance data on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 1999 to 2004 with the NAEP data from 2004 to 2008.

Recently, Ms. Ravitch wrote an indictment against New York City officials for using test statistics as “damn lies” to justify conclusions she believed to be false claims. Yet that unacceptable approach is exactly the one she has taken in this opinion piece on NCLB. And here’s how she’s done it.

First, and less important, she fails to mention in using 1999-2004 data that NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and began to be implemented in early 2002. So, two-plus years of NCLB are in the base period she’s comparing...