For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘it might have been.’ – John Greenleaf Whittier
We are now a quarter century into the current federally-managed era of Education Reform that began with No Child Left Behind. Some may argue that the current era began earlier with IASA or perhaps a bit later when the NCLB assessment requirements fully kicked in. Ohers may want to restart the clock with ESSA, college-and-career-readiness, and tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Fine points to make if we are interested in the finer points, but bluntly speaking, for all practical intents and purposes NCLB and 2001 serve as a good starting point to reflect on a quarter century of Education Reform.
25 years.
That’s basically two nonoverlapping generations of students who have matriculated through grades K-12 since 2001. Those kids, like my daughter, who were in first grade when George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001 graduated high school in 2012. Children enrolling in kindergarten in the 2013-14 school year (i.e., the year that 100% of kids were supposed to be Proficient in reading and mathematics) will graduate from high school this spring. Sadly, like their predecessors, the majority of 2026 graduates will neither be Proficient (by NAEP or many state standards) nor college-and-career-ready. The fact that approximately 60% of them will nevertheless enroll in college is a topic for another day.
The issue on my mind today is whether we could have done anything differently 25 years ago when NCLB was being written that wouldn’t have left us sitting here in January 2026 asking why Johnny, Jane, Jose, Julia, Jamal, and Jiaying can’t read. Strike that last one. We know damn well that Jiaying can read.
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to look back and see that what was missing from education reform over the last quarter century was systemic reform, system-wide change in the way that we view and do public education.
By attempting to hold districts, schools, and educators (but mostly schools) accountable to change, improvement, or “growth” from one year to the next, almost from the beginning of NCLB, not only were we totally off-base regarding how school improvement and basic statistics work; more importantly, we doomed ourselves to be forever focused on incremental change. That is, the small amount of change that could be manifested and measured between spring test administrations.
By definition, incremental change involves making small adjustments to existing processes and practices. It tends to focus on enhancing the efficiency of existing systems rather than on reimagining and reconstructing those systems.
A reform initiative seeking incremental change would adopt tutoring as its primary support and/or sanction. Such an initiative would seek improvement by identifying and replacing “ineffective” teachers (ultimately defined as only the bottom 1% of teachers even in the nation’s “worst” district). Such an initiative also would be comfortable with many inferring that its primary theory of action was that defining common state achievement standards and holding school accountable for meeting those standards would be sufficient to produce the desired change in student achievement.
[Aside: I have argued for years that such a simplistic theory of action ignores the billions of dollars spent on Title 1 instructional programs each year, but even I have to concede that outside a few pockets of perspicacity, primarily in the South, the nation seems content with ignoring how effectively and efficiently those billions of dollars are used by states in favor of keeping a laser focus on test scores.]
Given the principle that “systems produce what they are designed to produce” we should not be surprised that by all accounts NCLB did produce incremental change. Like the Texas Miracle on which it was based, schools were able to improve the performance of students at the bottom of the achievement distribution by reducing inefficiencies in the system.
But reducing inefficiencies can only produce so much. After you have wrung as much inefficiency out of the system as possible without actually reforming the system, test scores will hit a plateau, and improvement will decrease and then stop. You may get a couple of extra scale score points and years out of unintended practices tied to accountability based on chasing test scores, but inevitably you hit a wall – as we did as a nation sometime around 2013.
The Great Recession, the Common Core State Standards, the backlash against educator evaluation, and a host of additional factors, undoubtedly all affected student achievement, but the simple fact is that the NCLB model with its focus on the lowest-hanging fruit was going to hit a wall at some point – sooner rather than later in states where there were fewer inefficiencies at the start. And when I see that so many of the initial discussion around AI in education is focused on “reducing inefficiency” it gives me pause.
A Different Approach
I find myself wondering what things would look like now if rather than jumping right in on school accountability the way that we did with annual measurable objectives and adequate yearly progress we had decided to play the long game. What if instead of a goal of 100% of students in grades 3 through 8 and high school Proficient by 2014 we had set out to ensure that 100% of young students entering kindergarten in the 2013-2014 school were prepared to take that step.
When those students began state testing in grade 3, that elusive concept of “a year’s worth of growth” would mean progressing from one Proficient benchmark to the next as they moved through grades 1 to 12.
We would not have students entering the state test pipeline in grade 3 whose achievement was lagging by 1 or 2 grade levels. With all of the test data available to states since the beginning of NCLB, we should know the hard data on the trajectory of students entering grade 3 already behind the eight ball. Will there be some outliers who succeed? Sure. But the picture for the vast majority of such students isn’t pretty.
We would not have the frankly mind-boggling situation where a large percentage of students entering Kindergarten as English learners were born in the United States. (Or if we did, it would be by choice and deliberate action with our eyes wide open.)
Such an approach, of course, would require an enormous shift in focus and reallocation of resources from high school and graduation rates to early childhood education. It would require radically new ways of thinking about public education prior to kindergarten or pre-kindergarten. There are groups and states now dedicating themselves to such a focus on early childhood services and education, but to this point in time those “proof of concept” efforts have not led us to a tipping point.
Buying Time
And the funny thing is that simply by improving the front end of the pipeline by focusing on early childhood education, we would be able to wring several more “productive” years out of the current public education system. With almost all students entering third grade with a decent chance of interacting with grade 3 content standards, we will undoubtedly see another “bump” in test scores – even on our current flawed, impersonal, state-of-the-art, standardized state tests. And those improvements will build on each other as those third-grade students move from grade to grade and test to test. At fourth and eighth grade, we will see the performance of those students at the 10th percentile and below move up closer to those at the 25th percentile. And perhaps the 25th percentile might even move closer to the 50th.
It will be a beautiful thing. It will be good.
Of course, it won’t be enough, but it will give us a buffer in the form of additional time to thoughtfully debate, design, and implement real reform of public education. And we will need that buffer because the problem with playing the long game is that there are kids in school right now.
Whenever federal legislation is enacted or education reform initiatives are implemented there is a sense of urgency to do something to make life better for those kids. Rightly so. At that very moment, there are real students in real schools in classrooms who are not achieving at a level necessary for them to have a solid chance at leaving high school college-and-career ready, prepared to become informed and active citizens, and live a happy and productive life. Good luck to the politician or policymaker trying to promote a program aimed at kids not even born yet who will be entering kindergarten 12 or 13 years from now.
Any reform initiative will have to operate on multiple levels at the same time. It will have to include something to support the kids in school right now who are not meeting grade-level standards. (the immediate problem). It will also need to include supports for students entering the system over the next 1, 5, or 10 years (the short-term problem).
But to be successful, ultimately education reform must be focused on real reform and not on incremental change. Long-term goals must actually be long-term and not the 5–7-year ESSA “long-term goals” that were eerily reminiscent of those Soviet five-year plans that those of us of a certain age will remember.
For now, instead of thinking about where we want the next generation (or the one after that) of students to end up, let’s instead get a clear idea about where we want them to begin.
Embrace the Absurd 