Bipartisanship Left Behind

Until he roared back onto the scene with his sure-to-please declaration that a free press was “indispensable to democracy,” George W. Bush hadn’t said too much since leaving the public eye in 2009. During the Obama years, we’d heard more from Will Ferrell as Bush than from Bush himself.



But Bush’s defense of journalism isn’t the only thing we can gain from him. Bush’s record was extremely bipartisan. And his signature, pre-9/11 achievement, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—though it’s without a champion today— is a blueprint for how legislation should be made.

NCLB was a bipartisan dream, proposed by Bush but sponsored by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). It sailed through Congress with 384-45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate.

The hallmark of the act was increased accountability, requiring increased student testing in grades three through eight for reading and mathematics. NCLB required school districts to identify demographic subgroups that included ethnicity, English proficiency, disability status, and economic background. Otherwise, the sour results of a small, underperforming minority group had nowhere to hide—forcing the system to confront the oft-criticized racial achievement gap instead of just complain about it. If enough of students in all of a school’s subgroups didn’t meet adequate yearly progress, then neither did the school.

Informed by his experience as Texas governor, Bush threaded the needle between national and local educators. While the federal government mandated accountability, educators at the state level designed the tests the students would take. It was not “one size fits all” and it trusted local teachers.

However, teachers’ unions were, broadly speaking, not fans of NCLB. The most common criticism was that it forced educators to “teach to the test” rather than instruct children to a purer ideal. Teachers didn’t like getting graded and they certainly didn’t like being told their schools “needed improvement.”

Accountability though has this odd effect of … holding people accountable. When I was a reporter covering NCLB in Utah, one principal told me, “Accountability is a good thing because it ensures we as educators know the level where children are performing and can adjust instruction accordingly.” If the goal of a test is to reinforce basic reading, writing, and math ability, it’s probably good for a student to be able to pass it—right?

Despite the grumbling, the system seemed to be working. After several years of implementation, NCLB could report notable improvements. Apart from the administration’s own praise for itself, the Center on Education Policy found that student outcomes in reading and math had increased and achievement gaps were narrowing. Education researchers Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob reported “large and statistically significant increases” in fourth graders’ math performance and smaller, but still “positive effects” for math in eight graders. They also found that these gains were highest among African-American, Hispanic, and poorer students.

Now it wasn’t a miracle cure: Dee and Jacob found no impact on reading achievement at either grade level, but this is what closing the achievement gap looks like.

So when Barack Obama became president, he continued NCLB, with very few changes. When he softened some measures of the legislation in 2011, Obama very generously said of his predecessor:

I want to say the goals behind No Child Left Behind were admirable, and President Bush deserves credit for that. Higher standards are the right goal. Accountability is the right goal. Closing the achievement gap is the right goal. And we’ve got to stay focused on those goals.

But once Obama’s Department of Education was in charge of the program, the teachers’ unions eased back. They didn’t like the program any more, but they complained a lot less. However, at this point critics on the right started to roar against it as a federal intrusion on state’s rights—especially with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. And leftist critics of Bush were hardly going to roar back.

So with critics on the right and the left, critics at the state level and at the federal level, and President Bush in self-imposed exile, NCLB had no friends. President Obama did replace it—but not until the very last year of his administration—with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which followed in NCLB’s footsteps with similarly large margins of bipartisan support.

Going forward, it might be useful for Washington to look at NCLB as a blueprint for how the city is supposed to work. There were mistakes along the way, but NCLB did much of what it set out to accomplish. It was crafted by a bipartisan team, based on state-level experience, and effectively balanced authority between federal and local educators. NCLB was not perfect but it was designed as federal legislation should be—even though the act is a hiss and a byword among both conservatives and liberals these days.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note: the national high school graduation rate increased from 72 percent in 2001 to 75.5 percent in 2009. In the same time the number of high schools labeled “dropout factories” (where 60 percent of students don’t graduate on time) dropped by a quarter, from 2,007 to 1,550. In 2016, the graduation rate hit 83 percent, the fifth record-setting year in a row, with NPR proclaiming, “Achievement gaps have narrowed even as all boats have risen.”

So, er, as Will Ferrell-as-George-W.-Bush might say: You’re welcome, America.

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