This is the 12th year. The year the educational law passed by near unanimous vote in the House and signed by Bush in 2002 "No Child Left Behind" was suppose to be met, and hopefully exceeded. The goal was that every student in the nation should be at or above grade-level in Math and Reading. Grades 4 and 8 were the check points.
Doesn't seem like that difficult of a goal. If a child is in 4th grade, shouldn't she be reading at 4th grade level?
The whole plan sounds acceptable. It even gets your blood going. "No Child Left Behind". It rings with those slogans we hear from Fireman, Marines and Special Forces, "We Don't Leave Our Men Behind", "Everyone Goes Home." And at the time, 2002, just after the 9/11 crisis, we were looking for things to be patriotically positive about. Yeah, we were going to kill Bin Laden, but rage only gets you so far when you are hurt like that, you need something to care about, something with life in it -- who leaves children behind anyway? So Bush signed that paper, it became a national goal and we all felt good.
Results? Epic Fail.
The test is only for two areas. Math and Reading. There is a single standardized test for each of those, which is given every year. The objective was to come up with educational strategies which would bring students up to grade level within twelve years. Math came up some. A steady if disheartening amount every year. Reading basically flatlined.
Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders (effect size = 0.22 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade. -- NBER Working Paper No. 15531