NCLB Overhaul to Abandon Bush's "Utopian Goal"

Since its inception eight years ago, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act has been both panned and praised by educators and policy reformers. Love it or leave it, the Obama administration says NCLB is here to stay. But a major overhaul is in the works that will vastly change the way that NCLB will measure school and student success and distribute resources in the future.

Yesterday, the government revealed the outline of its proposed changes to NCLB, alongside the announcement of its $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year. The most notable change? The new plan would abandon the deadline for every American child to achieve academic proficiency by 2014, which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called a “utopian goal.”

Instead, the overhaul would institute a new measure of success: whether students graduating from high school are “college- and career-ready.” This sounds a whole lot better than setting an arbitrary deadline for mass student “proficiency,” but it still seems awfully vague. Just what does it mean to be career ready? And does that align with standards for college readiness, or do the two represent different sets of expectations? For now, the definition of what it means to be college- and career-ready is up in the air, and with it the basis for the success of the nation's entire education system.

Bush’s NCLB was remarkably good at labeling schools and teachers as failing, but a lot less effective when it came to fixing the problems. The new changes to NCLB aim to tweak how school success is measured and provide more allowances for school progress versus straight-up performance. Likewise, it will modify the system by which federal funding is apportioned to encourage competition, much in the way that Race to the Top, the federal grant program, has states competing for $4 billion in stimulus money.

The standards and accountability drive of the past eight years has identified countless problems in our education system, and created a few of its own. Will Obama’s reforms start providing solutions? It will take time (and passage through Congress) to find out.

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