Authors:  Deborah Meier and George Wood

ISBN: 0807004596

The following review was contributed by: Paul Lappen & CLICK TO VIEW Paul Lappen's Reviews

The nationwide No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is the
latest attempt to reform American education. It is
supposed to do this through enforcing a system of
standards and accountability through standardized
testing. According to the authors in this book, NCLB
actually hurts, instead of helps, children, especially
urban children.

The biggest problem is that NCLB has been underfunded,
by anywhere up to $12 billion. The states have all
sorts of new federal mandates, but not enough money to
pay for them. Standardized tests are valuable as a
measure of a student's progress, but they should not
be the only measure, which is the case with NCLB.
Portions of the school curriculum that don't directly
deal with testing, like art, phys ed and field trips,
will be dropped, as schools become little more than
test-prep factories.

A school can be classified as Failing if even one
subgroup in the school, like Asains or disabled
students, don't do well enough on the test. The school
must then pay to bus its students who want to transfer
to a non-failing school. If it is an inner-city
school, their resources are already thin enough. There
probably aren't any non-failing schools nearby, and
besides, they have no incentive to accept students who
might bring down their test scores. Urban schools, and
urban communities in general, need a lot more help
than to be told, "Raise your test scores, or else."
Many schools have gotten in the habit of making
students repeat a grade, raising the chance that they
will eventually drop out, only because they might
negatively affect the test score for the upper grade.

The most well-known non-education provision in NCLB
forces schools to give student contact information to
military recruiters, or face a cutoff of federal aid.
Any policy that prevents participation in prayer in
public schools, as well as any policy that prohibits
the Boy Scouts or any other "patriotic society" access
to school facilities. For these and many other
reasons, the list of states refusing to follow NCLB is
growing.

This is an excellent book. It shows that the public
pronouncements about NCLB are much brighter than the
reality. It's short, easy to read and highly
recommended