No Child Left Behind Act of 2001

As part of his “War on Poverty,” President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed and signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. Enacted in order to improve equal educational access across socioeconomic strata for students attending public schools, the ESEA directed additional federal funding to schools with large percentages of economically disadvantaged students. Since its passage, the ESEA has gone through several reauthorizations and modifications. One such transition occurred in 1994, when, largely in response to A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a report by President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education, and the concerns it raised about the teaching profession, school curricula, and other schooling issues, the ESEA was reauthorized by the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA). Among other changes, the IASA, along with the Goals 2000 Act, required more tightly defined standards of student learning but afforded state- and local-level flexibility on how to meet those demands.

Drawing on and expanding the corporate-style, standards-centered model for education and educational assessment introduced by the IASA, President George W. Bush's administration proposed its reauthorization of the ESEA in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) within months after his election. Coauthored and endorsed widely across party lines, the bill passed in the House of Representatives (by a vote of 384 to 45) and the Senate (91 to 8) and was signed into law by President Bush on January 8, 2002.

Like the IASA, NCLB endorses standards-based schooling and assessment. NCLB differs from its predecessors, though, in the extent to which it relies on standards and standardized assessment data to measure the effectiveness of schools. It differs, as well, in the specificity with which it directs schools to collect and analyze data about various populations of students, the way it requires similarly standardized assessments of future teachers, and the penalties with which it threatens schools that do not meet certain standards of progress. Due to these and other aspects of the act, many educators, education activists, and advocates for educational equity have raised questions about the motivations behind and implications of NCLB, debates about which were reignited as President Barack Obama's administration—under the guidance of Education Secretary Arne Duncan—prepared to propose further changes to the ESEA in another possible reauthorization.