--- description: Rachel Carson middle school in Herndon, Va., is full of winners. In the past year alone, its students have taken home trophies for all kinds of competitions, from the science bowl and debate league to... title: Why It's Time to Replace No Child Left Behind image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte1f0d25668dd6c89/698a44b4096a94f1796ae9aa/360_nclb_0123.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [U.S.](/section/us/) # Why It's Time to Replace No Child Left Behind by [Kayla Webley](/author/kayla-webley/) Jan 23, 2012 5:00 AM CUT  No Child Left Behind No Child Left BehindMATT EICHLUCEO FOR TIME by [Kayla Webley](/author/kayla-webley/) Jan 23, 2012 5:00 AM CUT Rachel Carson middle school in Herndon, Va., is full of winners. In the past year alone, its students have taken home trophies for all kinds of competitions, from the science bowl and debate league to the state’s chess championship and a haiku contest. The school has won a governor’s award for educational excellence for the past four years and has been named a school to watch by a national forum for middle-school reform every year since 2004\. And yet to the federal government, Rachel Carson, like many other well-to-do suburban schools in the U.S., is failing. Since 2002 the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has raised the bar each year for how many of a school’s students must pass statewide math and reading tests; if a school fails repeatedly to make “adequate yearly progress,” teachers and administrators could lose their jobs or, in the worst-case scenario, the whole place could be shut down. Rachel Carson, which is in one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. and whose student population is 81% white or Asian, has high average scores. But because the law is designed to highlight achievement gaps–breaking out test results by such categories as race, gender and income–even high-performing schools can no longer ignore their problem areas. Last year, Rachel Carson started an after-school boot camp for its low performers, tracked their progress on practice tests every few weeks and offered cram sessions on four Saturdays before the test. Despite these efforts, 69 of the school’s black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged and special-education kids–5% of the student body–did not score high enough. And so for the first time, Rachel Carson, home to a gifted-and-talented center and 1,001 trophies, joined the estimated 48% of U.S. schools that failed to make the grade last year. In many ways, Rachel Carson showcases exactly what NCLB set out do to: gather detailed demographic data on student performance and light a fire under complacent schools–suburban and urban alike. But grouping a generally successful school with dropout factories that don’t teach the majority of their students much of anything highlights one of NCLB’s many failures. Signed into law by George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, No Child Left Behind was a long-awaited shift toward accountability, but despite its admirable intentions and the measurable gains it has produced in the past 10 years, the good no longer outweighs the bad. Teachers and administrators say NCLB sets impossibly high standards and has narrowed curriculums, forcing teachers to teach to the tests, and it has labeled far too many schools as “in need of improvement,” creating a race to the bottom as states dumb down their standards to ensure that more of their schools meet NCLB’s rigid benchmarks. “It’s become meaningless,” Fairfax County superintendent Jack Dale says of the law, under which 62% of Virginia’s schools fell short of the mark last year, compared with 39% the year before. The sad irony of NCLB is that the language of failure, which it applies with such rigor, has come to be associated with the law as much as the schools it targets. “There’s just so much broken in the law now that I actually think it’s become an impediment to progress,” says Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, whose biggest complaints about NCLB include its one-size-fits-all penalty system. “It’s like taking a hammer to kill an ant.” Judgments like that help explain why, on the law’s 10th birthday, no one feels like going to its party. Standards and Penalties But that wasn’t always the case. Bush moved into the White House determined to make good on a campaign promise to get serious about education reform. Eager to inject some Texas-style accountability measures into the public-school system, he proposed testing students in reading and math every year from third through eighth grade and making the results public. And his plan didn’t stop there: it included a cascade of penalties for schools that did not make progress toward closing achievement gaps. If a school fails two years in a row, it must direct a chunk of its federal funding toward teacher development and give its students the option to transfer. Fail five years in a row and the school has to take significant corrective action–replacing its staff, changing its curriculum or extending the school day. Fail a sixth time and the school can be taken over by a private charter-school operator or the state or be shut down altogether. Neither party was all that wild about the bill at the outset. Democrats–and the teachers’ unions that backed them–feared the bill prescribed reforms that were too disruptive and, at its worst, was a backdoor scheme to defund public schools, a concern fueled by Bush’s introducing NCLB at the same time he was talking up private-school vouchers. Republicans, never fans of federal rules and regulations, were leery of depriving states of the control that they historically exercised over schools. Still, Democrats saw the bill as their best chance to enact significant education reform (and get schools the money that often comes with it), and Republicans wanted to support their new President’s top domestic-policy idea. When Bush rolled out the plan on his third day in office, he did so with bipartisan help from Ohio Representative John Boehner and Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. The bill passed with overwhelming support, 384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate. “You’re seeing government at its best,” Bush said at the bill signing. “We figured out how to put our parties aside and focus on what’s right for the American children.” That support began to erode almost immediately. Eight months after the law was enacted, the Department of Education released its first list of failing schools. Nearly 9,000 schools were named–and not just the inner-city schools everyone expected to see on the list. By dividing the test results into subgroups, the law exposed achievement gaps at wealthy, suburban schools where high-flying majorities had long masked the low achievement of minority and special-ed students. “The law allowed us to get under the definition of what is good and ask the question, Is this school really good for all kids?” says Kati Haycock, president of the national policy group Education Trust. And as schools were labeled failing, states pushed back. “School systems spent a lot of time being defensive,” says California Representative George Miller, a Democrat, one of the lead authors of NCLB. “They got angry. They were embarrassed.” Then they got creative. By year’s end, Utah had removed some of the more difficult questions from its statewide exams, and Ohio refined its criteria for determining which schools were low-performing so that the number shrank from 760 to 200\. These changes inspired other states to follow their lead. On Capitol Hill, Democrats began attacking the Administration for underfunding the law, despite the 19% increase in federal spending for elementary and secondary education Bush had pushed through, and Republicans began lamenting the magnified federal role in education. By the time the law’s first anniversary came around, Kennedy, who had stood beside Bush at the bill signing, boycotted the ceremony. By its second anniversary, at least 20 states had banded together in revolt, urging Congress to exempt them from the law. It got so bad that by the time NCLB came up for reauthorization in 2007, no one wanted to touch it. NCLB was jury-rigged from the start and fell apart almost immediately. Minding the Gap Getting schools in the habit of collecting and sharing data is the law’s most enduring legacy. In addition to forcing states to release annual scores, the law requires the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation’s report card, to test a representative sampling of fourth- and eighth-graders every two years to help compare students’ progress in states that have vastly different standards. “Twenty years ago we would talk about schools without having any idea how they were doing,” says Jay Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Take Rachel Carson, where the majority of students do very well but only 62% of black students passed the state’s seventh-grade math test. In other words, Rachel Carson is exactly the type of school that, before NCLB, could have easily glossed over the scores of its lower-achieving students. “Fairfax is widely known to be a high-performing school district,” says principal August Frattali. “But we always knew in the back of our mind there was a gap between our black and Hispanic and white students.” Pushing the gap into the spotlight is inarguably one of the law’s greatest victories. At the same time, failing to close it–the NAEP report cards show that all groups of students have made academic gains over the past decade but that the gap has narrowed only slightly–is one of its most crushing defeats. Teachers at Rachel Carson, like many others nationwide, say the focus on low achievers has come at a price. They complain that NCLB has sucked the creativity out of their lesson plans, forcing them to narrow their curriculums and teach only those concepts that will be on state tests. “The worst thing is when students have questions and interests and I have to say, ‘Put your hands down. We don’t have time to talk about that,'” says Leslie Hanna, who teaches eighth-grade science, a subject included on Virginia’s tests along with math and reading. The push to improve scores means there is little or no time for some students to pursue electives like art and music. The band director, Linda Gammon, mentions one seventh-grader who was really excited this fall about playing a baby tuba but had to drop out of the band in order to take an additional reading class. “Every time I see him, I ask him how’s he’s doing, and he says, ‘I’m doing O.K., but I really wish I was playing an instrument,’ ” she says. “I understand he needs the extra help in reading, but it really tugs at my heart that he can’t have the experience of playing in the band. These classes can be the highlight of their day–the only time they feel like they are succeeding.” The law turned schools into test factories. Administrators at Rachel Carson say that in order to get students to pass the one assessment that counts, the school has to give all its kids practice tests constantly. “From January till June there is a major test just about every week,” says director of student services Cheryl Weaver. Yet when students don’t do well on the annual state tests, they’re not penalized under NCLB; the school is. “From the child’s perspective, there’s no consequence for not learning,” says superintendent Dale. And the students know it. “The amount of pressure teachers put on these tests is huge, but they don’t really affect your future,” says Dhruv Gupta, an eighth-grader in Rachel Carson’s gifted-and-talented program. If students fail the state reading or math test, the school might not let them play in the band, but they won’t be held back a year or forced to attend summer school. Losing Its Shock Value NCLB was supposed to pinpoint schools that were truly failing their students. The government would then direct more resources to help those schools turn around, and if they didn’t, it would shut them down. Neither of those things has happened in practice, and at this point almost everyone agrees that the law needs to be replaced. Even the people who wrote the law and worked to implement it admit that NCLB has run its course. “There’s a limit to what you can wring out of calling attention to a problem. At a certain point it loses its shock value,” says Charles Barone, a former congressional aide who helped draft NCLB. Yet despite the fact that NCLB’s deficiencies have been well known for years–it decreed, for instance, that 100% of students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014 but didn’t do much to help schools reach that goal–there is no consensus on how to change it. If there were, it would have been drastically altered when the law came up for reauthorization in 2007\. Instead, NCLB in its current form, a law everyone knows isn’t working, has lingered on the books, neglected, where it is expected to stay at least until after this year’s elections. “It’s an incredible reflection on our dysfunctionality,” says Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, who spent nearly four years grappling with NCLB as superintendent of the Denver school system before he went to Washington. “Our inaction is a choice to keep it the same.” In the meantime, Education Secretary Duncan is offering waivers to states that promise to adopt common standards in exchange for relief from NCLB’s rigid targets, and schools are still struggling to keep up. At Rachel Carson, students who failed or barely passed the standardized tests last year are being encouraged to participate in a peer-tutoring program, take a new class called Prep for Success and stay after school three days a week–and go in every Saturday if they want–to get extra help. The school hired an additional teacher to lead lunchtime math-tutoring sessions where students snack on mozzarella sticks and chocolate milk while they complete math drills and compete in Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader? “There’s an energy in this building I haven’t seen in years,” says Frattali, who has been the principal of Rachel Carson since 2003\. “We’re charged up like a basketball team before a big game.” But what if, after all this energy and work, Rachel Carson doesn’t make Virginia’s target this year–90% proficiency in math–and is again deemed failing? “I would never tell my staff this, but I’m scared what will happen if we don’t make \[adequate yearly progress\] this year,” Frattali says. “My teachers have put their hearts and souls into this. We’re doing everything we can possibly think of to get there, so to be told we’re not making progress–that we’re failing–well, it would really take a toll.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6640952/why-its-time-to-replace-no-child-left-behind/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6640952/why-its-time-to-replace-no-child-left-behind/"},"headline":"Why It's Time to Replace No Child Left Behind","datePublished":"2012-01-23T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:04:34.389Z","description":"Rachel Carson middle school in Herndon, Va., is full of winners. 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