#educational malarkey

Nah, it was exactly the opposite of that. Misleading name to get people to support it, policy that’s actually crap and hurts most everyone. 

No Child Left Behind was intended to get all schools in America up to the same “high standards”, regardless if they were rich or poor. The idea was that kids from poor (read: usually minority-majority inner-city) schools were not getting the same education as kids from rich (white, suburban) schools. Therefore, in order to Not Leave Them Behind, we’d hold all schools to the same standards, make sure they had a similar curriculum, and test kids to make sure they were getting the same education. 

(This is where the phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” comes from, for the record. The idea was that liberals were actually keeping poor not-white kids down by not expecting them to meet the same standards white kids were meeting. But it’s pretty hard to meet the same standards when you have no money and your students are getting one meal a day.) 

And ... well, in theory, it was not a bad plan, but in practice... hoo boy. 

First off, NCLB is why there’s so much testing in schools now. “High-stakes” testing- meaning, ‘how the students perform on these tests determines how much money your school gets’- was a cornerstone of NCLB. They turned getting school funding into a contest- the schools that were doing ‘best’ would get a bigger chunk of federal education money, and the schools that were doing worst would get less. SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, LEONARD. 

Because of this, education actually got a lot less accessible. See... if your school gets money based on how students perform on tests, it is a disincentive to properly educate disabled students, because disabled students will not be able to compete in a high-stakes testing environment. The government did give schools some money for taking severely disabled students- like, intellectually-disabled, Downs’ Syndrome, nonverbal-autistic, kind of disabled.

But what that meant is - if you weren’t severely intellectually disabled, but you were disabled enough to have trouble getting good grades and participating in high-stakes testing, you were kind of scroomed (a word which, gentle reader, means ‘both screwed and doomed’.) 

What would happen is, the school system would try to figure out how they could milk the most money out of your existence. If you were functional enough to be able to get good grades and participate in high-stakes testing, they’d try to ‘mainstream’ you- put you in the ‘normal’ classes with the ‘normal’ kids and give you the minimum accommodations you needed to be able to get good grades on the tests. If you weren’t, you’d be put in the program with the intellectually disabled kids, even if you weren’t severely ID, because they could get more money out of you that way. (In the words of my former vice-principal: “eh, just put them in the monkey room.” )

So... basically, NCLB made school into a Game of Teacher Thrones. You get high enough test scores for your students, by any means possible- or you don’t have any money to educate your students. School became less accessible for any student who couldn’t pass tests, and more of a hassle for parents and teachers alike.