Moving past No Child Left Behind

Koretz, D. (2009). Moving past No Child Left Behind. Science, 326(5954), 803-804.

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No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a poorly designed test-based accountability (TBA) system that requires fundamental changes.

• Score inflation: Test-accountability systems are polluted with score inflation which means a spike in scores that is not reflected in true gains in student learning. One of the many causes of score inflation is the instructional time allocated to test preparation at the expense of other content.
• Focus on the proficiency threshold: There is a fundamental flaw in focusing on a proficiency score or line as educators get credit only when students cross the proficiency mark. Research confirms that is system can result in attention to students thought to be near the mark while ignoring students who are scoring well above or well below proficiency levels.
• No strong evidence of benefit: Scientifically credible evidence that supports No Child Left Behind is lacking and weak at best. Studies about the benefit of NCLB are vulnerable to corruption, score inflation, and make it difficult to separate correlation from causation.

In order to move past No Child Left Behind, we need to move past looking at small number of goals on which NCLB is focused and instead we need to enumerate the most important goals for education and incorporate that into a larger subset.