No Child Left Behind

July 11, 2008

Karen Symms Gallagher, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, examines the controversial No Child Left Behind Act. Instituted in 2001 and building on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, No Child Left Behind has devoted billions in federal funds to accountability and standards testing in American schools. Gallagher predicts the law’s fate under the next administration.

“No Child Left Behind is going to be with us, since it’s a renamed title program that’s been with us since the ’60s, since Lyndon Johnson,” Gallagher says. “It’s a source of money that almost no school district can do without.” It might not be called “No Child Left Behind” — unless John McCain wins — but it will still exist in some form, she adds.

Either McCain or Barack Obama will probably take a good look at the law, Gallagher believes. “What they need to look at: obviously, funding. It’s never been fully funded. And quite frankly, the math doesn’t add up,” she says.

There are both positives and negatives to No Child Left Behind as it exists now, according to Gallagher. “The good thing is that it holds schools accountable for children’s achievement.” Under this program, you can’t mask the performance of poorer students by hiding them in separate categories like “special education,” she points out. “However, the notion that everybody’s going to be above average — or even average — by 2012 isn’t even possible, mathematically.” This part of the act needs to be adjusted, so that schools can be realistic about average yearly progress, she says.

The way things are going, in several years California will have a thousand school districts with no improvement, Gallagher adds. “And what are the feds or the state going to do with these schools?”

There’s another element of No Child Left Behind that could use adjustment, according to Gallagher. The act currently emphasizes math and reading, which are important, but there are other areas like science that deserve attention, she says. “Right now the low-performing schools — or those with a high percentage of low-income kids — are not spending time doing anything but preparing for tests.”

Education policy over the next four years will be influenced not only by the winning candidate but by the staffers and politicians surrounding him. Gallagher finds illuminating the names she’s heard swirling around as potential Obama picks for secretary of education — including a few school superintendents from major cities; and Stanford University professor and Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, a critic of the way the act has been implemented. “So I feel sure that Obama would recommend adjustments and look at the mechanics and implementation of the policy,” Gallagher says.

If Congress becomes even more overwhelmingly Democratic, that will also have an impact, according to Gallagher. She identifies two particularly influential figures: Rep. George Miller, who has worked to increase funding for the act, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, who reached across the aisle to work with the Bush administration on No Child Left Behind.

“The problem is, everybody has an idea of how it ought to change,” Gallagher says.

Karen Symms Gallagher, holder of the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean’s Chair in Education at the USC Rossier School, is an education policy and administration expert. She is author of the Politics of Education Yearbook: The Politics of Teacher Preparation Reform and Shaping School Policy: A Guide to Choices, Politics and Community Relations.