Why Can’t We Leave No Child Left Behind ... Behind?

Federal education policy can seem impenetrable to those most directly affected by it: students, parents, and ordinary people interested in the success and well-being of children.

The legislation is packed with jargon (supplement not supplant!), abbreviations (AYP!) , and technical requirements (n-sizes!) that make it difficult for the non-wonks among us to determine whether a school policy is the result of local, state, or federal law—or some combination of the three.

Case in point: An article outlining what’s in the No Child Left Behind Act remains one of Education Week’s most popular stories, 23 years after the law was passed and nearly a decade after Congress replaced it with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Even though it’s no longer the law of the land, readers can’t seem to leave No Child Left Behind ... uh ... behind.

“When most people think about the No Child Left Behind Act, they think of two things: former President George W. Bush, and standardized testing,” Assistant Editor Alyson Klein wrote in that 2015 explainer. “But the politics, policy, and history of the law are far more complicated than that.”

When she wrote that piece, Congress was debating how to replace the law with what eventually became ESSA, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main law through which the federal government sends money to states and schools. Key elements like how to define academic success, and support struggling schools were likely to change.

People needed to understand the specifics of No Child Left Behind to understand how those shifts might (or might not) address public concerns about the law, like a perceived overemphasis on testing in schools.

Klein, who now covers ed-tech for Education Week, didn’t know that that story, which she wrote on a plane ride after years of covering federal policy, would still regularly pop up on EdWeek’s daily lists of most-read stories a decade later. (At the top of the story, EdWeek editors have added a referral to a newer piece on the law’s successor.)

“I definitely didn’t think it would turn out to be one of the most-read stories I’d ever write!” she said.

Site analytics show the vast majority readers of the explainer come from searches on Google, where the story is the No. 2 search result for “No Child Left Behind” after the law’s Wikipedia page.

While the story is linked on state education department websites and listed on several university syllabi, it seems the majority of traffic comes from general internet users—ordinary people trying to understand a consequential policy, high school students writing research papers, and maybe even a few people who aren’t aware that NCLB has been replaced.

“It probably has a lot to do with the fact that people consider No Child Left Behind not as a specific piece of legislation but as an umbrella term for testing, standards, accountability, and for a proactive national government role,” said Jeffrey Henig, professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

A bipartisan education law that became a household name

Given the divisive state of education politics today, it may be difficult to imagine that No Child Left Behind passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001. As Bush signed it, he was flanked with an ideologically diverse panel of lawmakers including the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Democrat, and former Ohio Rep. John Boehner, a Republican.

The feds had required testing before but the Bush-era revision of the law ramped up their importance and more than doubled their frequency. For the first time, states had to publicly report results for various student populations, including English learners, students in special education, students from low-income families, and students of various racial and ethnic groups. Schools were expected to help students in general and in those subgroups meet benchmarks of “adequate yearly progress” towards proficiency each year, and when they didn’t, faced requirements like giving students the option to transfer or offering free tutoring.

“There’s no denying that those provisions changed the culture of schools, for good or for bad,” Klein said.

For civil rights groups, the law ensured more transparency about how schools met the needs of often marginalized populations. Business leaders saw it as a way to ensure that schools spend federal dollars wisely and to ensure an internationally competitive workforce.

But public opinion soon hit speed bumps. Twenty-nine percent of respondents to a 2012 Gallup poll said NCLB had made public education worse, and 16 percent said it had made it better. Major criticisms of the law included concerns that its prescribed interventions didn’t adequately help struggling schools and that the importance of test scores caused schools to narrow their focus on the targeted academic subjects at the expense of others.

The law’s unforgettable name (cheerful red schoolhouses outside the U.S. Department of Education were festooned with it) helped NCLB become so well known, but it also served as a liability. As Congress debated replacing NCLB in 2015, Education Week spoke to marketing experts about how to replace the law’s moniker, which critics saw as “a promise the nation hasn’t kept.” Even supporters of the law acknowledged its name had too much baggage, the story said.

“You want the name to feel forward-looking and aspirational and positive,” said Sasha Stack, a partner in the Boston-based strategy group at Lippincott, a branding firm that counts companies like Southwest Airlines and Samsung among its clients. “I think the current name was emphasizing the negative.”

What’s behind the continued interest in No Child Left Behind

Ten years after the law was replaced, why do people keep wanting to learn about it?

A dive into all of the places the 2015 story shows up suggests continued interest inthe NCLB law is fueled by both informed debate over the merits of the law and—misinformation about what it actually did.

The explainer is cited in hundreds of academic papers and journal articles about the technicalities of policies like ensuring teacher quality (the law required schools to ensure students had access to “highly qualified teachers.”) On social media, armchair policy wonks sometimes share the link to bust myths. Recently, an X user shared the story to dispute a misinterpretation that NCLB required social promotion. It didn’t.

Links to the story frequently appear in discussions of standardized testing, still a focal point of complaints.

But opinion polls show that the public values information about students’ academic progress, Henig said. In a 2022 poll by Education Next, 72 percent of the general public and 68 percent of parents said they supported the continuation of federal student testing requirements.

The devil may be in the details, though. A parent may support annual testing while also believing schools should do more to avoid its adverse effects.

That Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced NCLB, sought to address those concerns. States need only focus on a small group of low-performing schools, rather than every school missing their progress benchmarks. And the law sought to take a broader look at school success by requiring states to look at indicators like chronic absenteeism and career readiness alongside test scores and graduation rates.

Still, the basic idea of the law—test and intervene—is still extant. And that’s probably why it’s stuck in our collective memory.

“ESSA made big changes to what states are required to do with the data they get from those tests—but it didn’t take away the tests themselves,” Klein said.

The changes ESSA made “are real and consequential,” she said. “But they aren’t felt as keenly by teachers, parents, and kids as they are by, say, district central office staff and state education officials.

“For most people who interact with the education system, it feels like NCLB never actually went away.”