No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act leaves children behind. It sets up a two-tiered system of education in which a few are favored, while most are only given tests. Public Schools, teachers and students are judged (measured), instead of providing means (money) and methods (including more teachers) to improve the education of students. For schools the road to survival becomes "teaching to the test," which may actually reduce the quality of education.

Paired with assessments and "Adequate Yearly Progress" scores, are encouragements for transfers to other schools from poorly performing ones, or vouchers that are never enough to pay for an adequate private education. Only parents with some assets can usually take advantage of vouchers, which means that the No Child Left Behind Act can actually end up encouraging state (and district) funding of private, elite schools for the few, taking money away from the problem schools that need it most.

There are some public schools (and elite private schools) from which students regularly go on to Harvard, Yale, or NYU, but they are few, and they are found in affluent districts. It isn't just the generous funding of these schools that creates this outcome; it is the backgrounds of the children's parents. No Child Left Behind Act according to the government There are many schools, in inner cities and older suburbs where the No Child Left Behind program is risible. This is because the students in these schools come from highly disadvantaged backgrounds: low income, unstable families, homeless, disproportionately with minority backgrounds, many with little English spoken at home. The No Child Left Behind Act does not normally provide more funding to these schools, nor to the families that make them up, although it does provide what it calls "supplemental education services." A real No Child Left Behind act would have to be massively involved in social change, in improving the living standards, stability and attitudes toward education in these poor districts.

What our education system has done effectively has been to train the majority of American children adequately enough that they can fill lower level jobs when they graduate; it has high quality schools to educate a small minority for highly valued jobs. You need only apply economic analysis to see that the result will be to overvalue those highly paid jobs, because applicants are scarce, while devaluing the lower paid jobs for which there are many more applicants than openings.

Immigration and outsourcing only reinforce this effect. In other words, the education system reinforces the trend towards an affluent, powerful upper class, and a desperate underclass.

In the late Roman Empire, the vast majority had no schooling at all, and their value to the economy was less than that of slaves; they were desperate and willing to do almost anything to survive. Senators sons, on the other hand, were highly educated, even by today's standards, although their education was entirely in the Greek and Roman classics and was largely by rote; they were taught how to charm and fawn for favor, useful skills at the highest levels of society. For more on this see: How to Create Good Rulers and Good Followers