What No Child Left Behind left behind.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: THE STAKES 2008

The biggest upward ratchet ever in the federal government's role in public education--historically a state and local function--and possibly the most significant piece of domestic social legislation since the Great Society is George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which sailed through Congress in the spring of 200l. Perhaps because so many of them don't send their children to public school, the American chattering classes have been strangely uninterested in No Child Left Behind. It has not been even a midlevel campaign issue this year. But it is due to be reauthorized, and one of the most important decisions the next president will have to make is what to do about it.

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No Child Left Behind is a national version of the "accountability" regimes in public education that swept across the states (including Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor and Texas when Bush was governor) during the 1980s and '90s. It gives local school districts money, in exchange for their administering to their students standardized tests of proficiency in reading and math. In theory, the states have to get everybody--including, in particular, minority students, whose scores are registered separately--up to an acceptable level of literacy and numeracy. Schools that repeatedly fail to show steady progress face an escalating series of sanctions, starting with having to pay for outside tutoring for their failing students and culminating in being shut down altogether. No Child Left Behind was the domestic equivalent of the Iraq War resolution: a lot of liberals voted for it and have been publicly backpedaling ever since. The No Child Left Behind equivalent of "Bush misled us about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction!" is "It was never fully funded!" This is true, but it misses the more fundamental issue: Should the federal government force the entire public school population to be tested for reading and math proficiency, or not?

We've now forgotten, but Bush used to have a high level of optimism about his ability to reshuffle the deck in American politics and produce a stronger Republican Party. No Child Left Behind represented his abandoning the long-held conservative dream of reducing the footprint of public education, through vouchers and other means, and, instead, accepting that public school is the nearly universal experience of American children. (Its overall market share is not eroding at all.) Bush wanted to position the Republicans as the...