Many Children Left Behind

Many Children Left Behind, Deborah Meier and George Wood (ed.), Beacon Press, 2004

The nationwide No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is the latest attempt to reform American education. It is supposed to do this through enforcing a system of standards and accountability through standardized testing. According to the authors in this book, NCLB actually hurts, instead of helps, children, especially urban children.

The biggest problem is that NCLB has been underfunded, by anywhere up to $12 billion. The states have all sorts of new federal mandates, but not enough money to pay for them. Standardized tests are valuable as a measure of a student's progress, but they should not be the only measure, which is the case with NCLB. Portions of the school curriculum that don't directly deal with testing, like art, phys ed and field trips, will be dropped, as schools become little more than test-prep factories.

A school can be classified as Failing if even one subgroup in the school, like Asians or disabled students, don't do well enough on the test. The school must then pay to bus its students who want to transfer to a non-failing school. If it is an inner-city school, their resources are already thin enough. There probably aren't any non-failing schools nearby, and besides, they have no incentive to accept students who might bring down their test scores. Urban schools, and urban communities in general, need a lot more help than to be told, "Raise your test scores, or else." Many schools have gotten in the habit of making students repeat a grade, raising the chance that they will eventually drop out, only because they might negatively affect the test score for the upper grade.

The most well-known non-education provision in NCLB forces schools to give student contact information to military recruiters, or face a cutoff of federal aid. Any policy that prevents participation in prayer in public schools, as well as any policy that prohibits the Boy Scouts or any other "patriotic society" access to school facilities. For these and many other reasons, the list of states refusing to follow NCLB is growing.

This is an excellent book. It shows that the public pronouncements about NCLB are much brighter than the reality. It's short, easy to read and highly recommended.