No Child Left Behind was mainly designed to help black, Hispanic and poor children. After all, they were ones who were being "left behind." Yet 13 years after President George W. Bush signed the law in 2002, there's still debate about just what it's meant for America's disadvantaged communities.
As my colleague Lyndsey Layton reports, most of the major civil rights organizations support the law's requirement for yearly standardized tests for all students in Grades 3 to 8. The annual tests are easily the most visible and controversial aspect of the law.
These groups see testing as a civil rights issue, a way to guarantee fairness. Meanwhile, some activists and educators of color feel the tests are a distraction from helping students improve or, worse, an indirect form of punishment for shortcomings beyond their control.
This debate is coming to a head as Congress considers an overhaul for No Child Left Behind, which all sides agree is several years overdue.
Among advocates for civil rights, there's broad agreement on two main points: The federal government should make sure that impoverished school districts have enough money and that suspensions and expulsions are not unfairly keeping many children of color out of school, denying them the chance to learn.
And the NAACP, the National Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among other organizations, signed a statement in January calling on Congress to maintain the testing requirement.
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Research on the consequences of No Child Left Behind has been inconclusive. The testing data generated by the law does show gains among black and Hispanic children, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford University. On the other hand, average scores had been improving for years before No Child Left Behind, and it isn't clear that the law contributed at all.
Reardon and other researchers found evidence that students of color were doing better at schools that risked sanctions if those students did not improve, but the gains were minor overall. Other schools, meanwhile, escaped scrutiny because their minority populations were too small. No Child Left Behind actually appeared to harm those students' performance, possibly because educators were focusing on the groups whose scores mattered under the law.
In short, it does look as though educators can sometimes improve the way they teach when test scores are at stake, and there certainly have been real successes at a number of schools across the country. Yet these improvements just aren't substantial or widespread enough to really help students of color in the aggregate.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
Sean Reardon is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is a member of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
