What grade does NCLB get? In this fifth year, the No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization amid a cacophony of assenting and dissenting voices. What is the bottom line?

In 2004, Ashley Fernandez, a 12-year-old girl, along with the other girls in her gym class, was punished by her teacher for poor behavior by being sent into the boys' locker room. While in the locker room, "two boys dragged Ashley into the shower room. One held her arms and the other held her legs while they fondled her for more than 10 minutes," reported Reason magazine. "The teacher was not present, and no one helped Ashley." After that incident, Ashley was physically grabbed repeatedly by boys of her school. Ashley requested a transfer to another school, which, under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), should have been an option for her. The principal denied her transfer. When Ashley's mother kept her home from school, "she got a court summons for allowing truancy."

Reason magazine followed the account about Ashley with a litany of examples where students who wished to switch schools under the NCLB were denied transfers or only allowed transfers to other underperforming schools. Since 2002, the regulations associated with No Child Left Behind have cost state taxpayers over $1 billion, according to studies in Ohio and Texas. In 2002, NCLB proponents claimed that the act would whip our nation's performance in math and reading into shape, along with allowing students in poorly run schools to switch to other schools. Five years and some horror stories--like Ashley's--later, the question to be asked is,

"Is NCLB meeting this goal? If not, what should be done?"

It depends on whom you ask. The U.S. Education Dept. (USED) says yes. For proof, the USED claims that from 1999 to 2004 achievement gaps between African-American and white nine-year-olds narrowed to all-time lows. But an online Time magazine article from May 2007 states: "The achievement gap appears to be narrowing in some spots--fourth- and eighth-grade math scores for minorities, for instance--but not others. The gap between white and black eighth-graders has widened slightly in math, for example." The USED also claims that "the percentage of classes taught by a highly qualified teacher has risen to over 90 percent." But by July 2006, only nine states had submitted a teacher quality plan, and as of May 2006, only two states had established an acceptable definition of "highly qualified teacher."

In 2006 article, former Education Department official Michael Petrilli and Chester Finn, Jr., a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public-policy research center at Stanford University, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, stated that the NCLB has left "our schools undermotivated and overregulated, our parents frustrated and bewildered, millions of our kids subproficient, and thousands of our schools stuck with 'in need of improvement' labels but not improving." With all the conflicting data about NCLB, it is hard to tell whether it is "working" or not, but several indicators say that it's not.

Effect on Schools and Students

Under NCLB each state creates its own state-wide test to measure reading and math skills, and according to a Government Accountability Office study, the states vary wildly in how they define student proficiency--the goal of NCLB--making test results hard to interpret. Scoring on state-level tests can differ significantly from what is considered by many to be the gold-standard test by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For example, according to a May 2007 online Time magazine article, Mississippi students had the highest reading score among all state-level tests. But on the NAEP reading test, Mississippi ranked

Test alterations seem to be common. Education pundits Petrilli & Finn said that in Oklahoma, the number of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) on annual NCLB testing dropped by 85 percent from 2003-04 to 2004-05, but not because students became more proficient. Rather, Oklahoma officials made a change to the state's NCLB formula for calculating "proficient." Other states have taken similar approaches, such as Kentucky's finagling measurement errors on their tests in 2003, virtually doubling its pass rate. Wisconsin, among other states, has upped its confidence intervals associated with test scoring from 95 percent to 99 percent, which widens the margin by which the schools' scores can miss the AYP target,

Word and statistical games aside, the National Center for Education Statistics' 2005 assessment results plainly show that NCLB has not had a significant effect on the overall quality of education. Consider the following data points related to reading scores:

* The percentage of eighth-graders performing at or above Basic was higher in 2005 (73 percent) than in 1992 (69 percent), but there was no significant change in the percentage scoring at or above Proficient between these same years.

* No state had a higher average eighth-grade score in 2005 than in 2003, and seven states had lower scores. The percentage of students performing at or above Basic increased in one state but decreased in six states.

* The average reading scores for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds were higher in 2004 than in 1971, but the average score for 17-year-olds had not changed significantly since 1971.

Moreover, in 2003, Richard Elmore, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the AYP requirement a "completely arbitrary mathematical function grounded in no defensible knowledge or theory of school improvement." He also stated that it "could, and probably will, result in penalizing and closing schools that are actually experts in school improvement." This could happen because students are tested according to ethnic subgroups and English-speaking ability, and if any group underperforms, the whole school is listed as a failure.

Steppingstone to a National Curriculum

Also, in their book NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field, Gail Sunderman, James Kim, and Gary Orfield report that "in response to NCLB accountability, [teachers] ignored important aspects of the curriculum; de-emphasized or neglected topics that were not on the test; and focused instruction on the tested subjects probably excessively." More specifically, the Center on Education Policy stated that 71 percent of elementary schools have reduced time spent on other subjects to concentrate on the NCLB-tested subjects of math and reading. In other words, NCLB has served to narrow the curriculum in order to "teach to the test."

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And although it can be argued that a good start in math and reading enables students to learn other subjects more easily later on, the fact that NCLB is shaping what is taught underscores its role in developing a de facto national curriculum.

Nicholas Lemann, a prominent journalist who writes about matters regarding education, called NCLB a "significant step" toward a national curriculum because although states are able to choose their own tests, "they're judged against the NAEP--you'll have a great deal of convergence in curriculum."

Where to With NCLB?

Unfortunately, most of the people cited above, although they agree NCLB isn't improving students' performance, applaud the goal of a national curriculum, having come to the specious conclusion that "national standards and tests" are necessary to "fix" the school mess.

The mantra of the staunchest proponents of NCLB, and hence of more federal involvement in our schools, is that abject socialism is needed to improve our schools. As an extreme example, in a paper presented at the Second Annual Symposium on Educational Equity (Nov. 2006), Richard Rothstein, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, asserts that "unacceptably low achievement, and the achievement gap, are established in our current education and social system by age three" and proposes a 19-year program that includes prenatal care, pre-K, "highly qualified teachers," preventative healthcare, and after-school programs. In other words, a cradle-to-workforce education system that leaves the states and, more importantly, the parents completely out of the picture.

Less extreme are the findings of a report from the Commission on No Child Left Behind, issued in early 2007. The commission, sponsored by the Aspen Institute (a think-tank), proposed expanding NCLB to include science testing, using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and principals, and developing uniform state tests. Speaking of the commission's 230-page report, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, stated, "I believe so many of their recommendations are going to see life.... My own hope is that following science, we can get into history."

Besides being unconstitutional, a national curriculum is flawed in many ways, but perhaps its most important flaw is that it is unlikely to work. In fact, it is safe to say that it can't work. Terry Moe, chair of political science and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, pointed out one of the main reasons why the act is doomed to fail: it doesn't provide great enough incentives to inspire people to make it work. With public schools being protected from competition and with mediocre teacher having lifetime security, where's the motivation to change? He says that schools and politicians have been on "a frenzied push for reform" since 1983 when the book A Nation At Risk castigated public schools. Policy after policy and new curriculum after new curriculum have gone by the wayside since then, and we are still in the same predicament. He concluded for Stanford Magazine: "If we want significant improvement, we need to target the incentives at the heart of the system. Fortunately, there are potent reforms capable of doing that: school accountability and school choice." He added, "School choice ... shapes incentives from below through grassroots action. When parents are able to vote with their feet, when they are given alternatives--charter schools or private schools--to the regular public schools, the latter are put on notice that they stand to lose kids and money if they don't perform."

Moe believes that until adequate incentives are given for improvement, "real reform will be a constant uphill battle, and the public schools will continue to disappoint."