The New York Times Sam Dillon reports that the implementation of No Child Left Behind has not changed scores for the 4^th and 8^th grade students on national, standardized math tests. George W. Bush’s goal was that every 4^th and 8^th grader by 2014 would score at the “proficient” level in these bi-annual tests administered by the Dept. of Education’s National Asessment of Education Progress. This year 39 percent of 4^th graders and 34 percent of 8^th graders attained at least the proficiency level – the same level as when NCLB was first implemented in 2003.

So NCLB has not lead to better scores on 4th and 8th grade standardized math tests– and it’s fair to ask if 4^th and 8^th grade education is now worse than it was in 2003. The gripe of NCLB opponents is that an emphasis on proficiency scores on tests encourages teachers to “teach for the test,” ignoring other facets of a student’s education. Well, maybe teachers are putting more emphasis than ever on teaching to the test – but scores are still the same, and other parts of education were sacrificed.

Education was one of Bush’s most promising policy areas — NCLB was bi-partisan legislation viewed by liberals like the late Ted Kennedy as a way to track the most vulnerable students and hold those student’s schools accountable. However, the results are in — the Bush administration failed on education as badly as it failed at basically everything else.

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