By Frederick M. Hess 

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of No Child Left Behind: A Primer. 

This summer, in a much-discussed speech at the National Press Club, Representative George Miller, the chairman of the House education committee and a principal author of No Child Left Behind, upended debate regarding reauthorization when he declared, “The American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong.”  With even the law’s stalwarts arguing for change, it’s useful to step back and ask what went wrong.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) began in 2001 with the ambitious promise that every U.S. school-child would be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.  While we obviously can and must do a far better job of educating our children, no educator believes that universal proficiency in 2014 is a serious goal. Only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism among school practitioners and state and local officials.

In hindsight, NCLB’s passage was less about improving schools or results-based public-sector accountability than declaring fealty to a noble but utopian ambition, one the statute welded to clumsy, heavy-handed procedural mandates.  It was less about teaching, learning, schools, or schooling than it was about trying to write desirable social outcomes into federal law.

NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a dubious basis for policymaking, much as if Congress tackled energy by declaring that all American cars would get at least 90 miles per gallon by 2014.  In this sense, NCLB was more ambitious and more problematic than even the grandest of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society designs.  After all, even Johnson, long held up by critics as the poster child of federal overreaching, never imagined enshrining in statute the promise that 100 percent of Americans would be employed, well-fed, well-housed, or adequately educated. 

NCLB’s gallant unseriousness is politically understandable. Imagine JFK pledging in 1961 that “America will get most of the way to the moon” by decade’s end.  It leaves the heart a little cold, doesn’t it?  Moreover, NCLB’s backers can legitimately note that they had already spent nearly two decades asking state and local officials and educational leaders to address mediocre schools and stubborn race-based inequities in educational outcomes. From that perspective, the urgency infusing NCLB is eminently understandable. 

Indeed, NCLB has important virtues.  It has produced long-overdue school transparency, focused unprecedented attention on student achievement, and offered valuable political cover to determined superintendents and principals.

Nonetheless, the NCLB accountability system was adopted with scant attention to principles of sound public sector accountability or to how it could be competently implemented.  The statute’s authors sought to craft an elaborate plan that would alter the behavior of thousands of schools and millions of educators through a mixture of goals, rewards, sanctions, choices and sunlight. Yet their deliberations overlooked the fact that effective behavior-changing regimes marry realistic expectations with palpable incentives and punishments.  The reality is that NCLB provides neither of these.

The conventional account propounded by NCLB’s champions is that the law is well-crafted and that any problems are due to implementation. Thus, for example, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s has famously asserted in 2006 that the law is “99.9 percent pure”, like “Ivory soap” and her deputy Ray Simon declared in 2007 the need to “stay the course.”  The law’s defenders attribute any concerns to implementation glitches, foot-dragging by state and local officials, educator recalcitrance or lack of funding. 

Unfortunately, as Chairman Miller’s remarks suggest, the calls to “stay the course,” spend more money, and tweak the edges of NCLB are insufficient for the challenge.  They misdiagnose the law’s problems and are therefore unlikely to deliver the hoped-for results.
In promoting education reform during the 2000 election and after the enactment of NCLB, President Bush fatefully opted to focus on compassionate moralism (e.g. “the soft bigotry of low expectations”) rather than offer a more robust vision of what might be done to overhaul the feds’ education machinery and facilitate school improvement.  This reflected standard Washington practice—where education policy debates are more often about social justice than institutions, incentives, or instruction. Enlisting allies in the civil rights community who were eager to insist upon radically improved outcomes for poor and minority students, Bush forged a powerful bipartisan coalition. 

Ironically, at the very moment of supposed conservative “triumph” on federal education policy, the Bush administration somewhat remarkably embraced a moralistic vision of accountability and big-government enforcement while jettisoning the pragmatic, incentive-focused model that had emerged from three decades of conservative critiques of grandiose Great Society designs.

NCLB’s accountability system is an assemblage of three distinct models of educational change, awkwardly welded together.  The first model seeks to make transparent the performance of students across the nation, essentially providing an X-ray of how different schools and groups of students are performing in key subjects. The second model promotes the kind of “behavior modification” accountability refined through decades of public sector reform in order to compel low-performing schools and districts to improve. The third model sets forth “shoot-the-moon” targets and engages the federal bully pulpit to encourage leaders in states and districts to do better.

Each approach is worthwhile and each has a place in federal policy.  But they cannot reasonably be linked to one another as NCLB tries to do. Unwilling or unable to choose among them, NCLB’s builders gamely jammed all three into the same law. The result is a slowly developing train wreck.

The value of a national “X-ray” of educational performance has long been recognized. NCLB’s dictate that all states regularly test students in key subjects was an historic victory.  The X-ray’s accuracy is compromised, however, when this cross-sectional snapshot of achievement becomes the basis for gauging the performance of schools and educators—much less triggering interventions. We don’t judge doctors based on whether their patients are sick today but by how much patient health improves under their care.  Judging professional performance on the basis of a one-moment-in-time X-ray encourages questionable behavior, leads states to play games with standards, and can discredit the X-ray itself.

Pushing public-sector institutions to set goals, monitor performance, and then reward excellence and address mediocrity is all to the good. Decades of studied effort, touted in iconic books like Reinventing Government and championed through the 1990s by the Gore Commission, make clear that sensibly structured accountability systems encourage self-interested workers to take goals seriously, focus on outcomes, and employ all the levers at their disposal to produce those outcomes. But this dynamic is undercut if targets are unattainable. By making failure inevitable, unrealistic goals have the perverse effect of focusing employees on compliance and masking “failure”.

Finally, aggressive use of the bully pulpit is a proper and a vital role for federal officials.  Setting high bars, shining a bright light on performance, and challenging state and local officials can provide political cover to leaders and spark efforts among the foot-draggers.  Yet such efforts are discredited when the X-ray reveals little progress over time or when laggards pay more attention to exploiting loopholes than to teaching or learning. 

Bundling the three models together presumes that federal intervention on all three counts is appropriate everywhere in the land. In fact, several states already had X-ray assessment or behavior modification systems more serviceable than those mandated by NCLB.  Moreover, the fact that these systems were not linked to a date certain for universal proficiency was arguably a good thing. 

Can NCLB be saved? Yes, but only if its key components are thoughtfully uncoupled from each other and from naively heroic expectations.

It is appropriate for Uncle Sam to demand that every state provide a fine-grained X-ray of student achievement and pupil performance. It’s reasonable also to insist that states develop sanctions, remedies, and interventions for schools and districts that are performing badly and not improving.  But these cannot be linked in a functional accountability system.  
Washington should press states to track performance levels, but “adequate progress” should be based primarily on the academic value that schools add (i.e. the achievement gains their pupils make), not the aggregate level at which students perform.

Bush was right to argue that Washington should set ambitious goals and exhort everyone to attain them. But the constructive way to do this is by promoting transparency, setting benchmarks, rewarding high-achievers, identifying laggards, and clearing political obstacles.  The most sensible way to do this is via a consistent metric.  Washington cannot competently micromanage what state, districts or schools do, and it shouldn’t try. 

It is possible for policymakers to scale back the grand ambitions of the 2001 law and erect in its place a more modest, more sensible, and more constructive law.  Whether the law’s proponents will summon the determination and the votes to do so—or prefer the shallow symbolism of grandiose ambition—is the question.

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