On Jan. 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which amended a variety of previously written education laws, required the states to give assessments on basic skills (in order to receive funding), and operated under the impression that setting high standards and requiring testing would push students to be the best that they could.
Proposed in 2001 by President Bush, George Miller, Edward Kennedy and Judd Greg, the bill was passed through Congress with bipartisan support. Around 2005, things began to become a bit hazy around the edges. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) began to show negative effects on students (primarily with learning disabilities), the arts and teachers.
Giving rise to a new brand of problems such as Common Core, adequate yearly progress (AYP) and school closures, NCLB was deemed to be ineffective almost immediately after it became a law.
On Dec. 10, 2015, President Barack Obama repealed NCLB, however, his campaign to rewrite the law began five years ago in March of 2010. He proposed a blueprint for a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the father to the original NCLB), and he faced difficulties at nearly every turn.
But now, Obama's rewrite of the NCLB returns powers to states and school districts that were taken away back in 2002. The new act is titled the Every Student Succeeds Act -- it aims to sustain the standardized testing that is federally mandated and takes away the punitive consequences for poorly performing states. Additionally, it prevents the American government from setting academic requirements, like Common Core, for example.
At the White House signing ceremony for the law, President Obama said, "This bill makes long overdue fixes to the last education law, replacing the one-size-fits-all approach to reform with a commitment to provide every student with a well rounded education."
This signing, deemed by President Obama as "a Christmas miracle," was unusually welcomed by both Democrats and Republicans, and businessmen and teacher's unions alike.
America is too large a country to place one date on a timeline as a success for its national school system, but to have support from both parties is a large success for the Obama administration. While there is reasonable skepticism from members of both parties, the passing of this bill shows that we are capable of putting the education of our future generations before petty arguments. It shows that we have moved further towards a compromise that many wouldn't have ever thought would happen on such a topic.
