Negatives in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) What's wrong with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that President George W. Bush and key members of the U.S. Congress put together in such a cooperative spirit in 2001? The NCLB was signed into law (in January, 2002) with such fanfare that teachers, parents, students and school boards nationwide had high hopes for a revolution in the way teachers teach and students learn. But something has gone wrong -- in fact many things about NCLB just haven't panned out the way they were supposed to. The NCLB era is simply not what it was cracked up to be, and this paper reviews and critiques the reasons why, and the specific points of contention vis-a-vis NCLB's weaknesses and flaws. The Obama Administration has pledged to revise NCLB, but there are many legislative and political challenges facing the administration's plans, and as of August, 2011, Obama has not introduced new legislation.

Statewide Standards / Federal Funding / Quality of Education

Something must be terribly wrong with this well-intentioned legislation because a number of states openly rebelled against the provisions of NCLB shortly after the legislation went into effect. Those states include Utah and Virginia (both legislatures voted not to comply with NCLB), and Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico and Vermont (theses states have rejected all of some parts of NCLB). According to Michele McNeil, writing in Education Week (July, 2011), Idaho, Montana and South Dakota have recently told the U.S. Department of Education that they "…will stop the clock as the 2014 deadline approaches for bringing all students to proficiency in math and language arts." These states intend to "freeze" proficiency targets at 2009-10 levels, McNeil explains. That way these three states hope to limit the number of schools that may fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP); failing to achieve AYP means penalties must be paid.

The Superintendent of Public Instruction for Idaho schools, Tom Luna, recently wrote the following to the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: "Idaho, like many other states, does not have the luxury of spending time and limited...

2). Schools that do not meet their AYP targets are facing sanctions; and Duncan, pushing Congress to revise the legislation, flatly stated that when this year's (2010-11) test scores are all reported, 82% of those "will be labeled 'failing'" (McNeil, p. 2).
Meanwhile, in their book Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools, Deborah Meier and George Harrison Wood (founding members of Forum for Education and Democracy) point to several problems that need to be addressed. For one, the NCLB has not been fully funded. Meier claims that even by 2004, the federal government had shorted the requirements of the legislation by as much as $12 billion. A superintendent in Vermont, William Mathis, who is also a professor of education finance, reviewed the costs of NCLB and determined that the "average funding would have to be increased by 28% per state in order to be adequate" (Meier, 2004, p. x).

Meier asserts (xi) that a number of lawmakers in states that have large rural populations are reporting that "mandates on teacher quality, which focus almost solely on subject matter expertise," make it very difficult to bring in teachers in certain subject areas for schools "that need teachers who can teach in multiple areas."

A report in the PBS NewsHour points to many instances -- notwithstanding NCLB's mandate to reach teacher qualification goals -- that show a lack of quality teachers in high poverty secondary schools. In Ohio a survey shows that while only 1.5% of teachers were "not highly qualified" in schools with less than 10% of low-income students, when it comes to schools with 90 to 100% low-income students11.9% of the teachers were not highly qualified (Schleicher, 2006, p. 2). Nationally, Schleicher continues, in schools with high rates of students from poor neighborhoods "…34% of classes are taught by out-of-field teachers while only 19% of classes in low poverty schools are taught by out-of-field…