Chapter 4: Meeting the Requirements of No Child Left Behind

The panel today will discuss No Child Left Behind (NCLB): where we are with the law, what’s happened so far, and what we think will happen in the future. You’ve already heard about many of the issues surrounding No Child Left Behind; Lowell’s panel earlier talked about reforms that work and the prospects for No Child Left Behind. I’m going to present a couple of charts. Some of these are going to be repetitive, but as all you teachers know, it’s good to go over yesterday’s work to start the next day.

Chart 4.1 shows that we’re teaching kids, but most of them are not learning very well. Sixty-nine percent of fourth-graders and 68% of eighth-graders are not proficient in reading. Not only are the general levels of proficiency low, but when we look at the proficiency levels of the kids eligible for free and reduced lunch vs. not eligible for free and reduced lunch, there’s a huge difference. However, even those kids not eligible for free and reduced lunch scores are nothing to write home about Chart 4.2). The fact that less than 15% are proficient in fourth-grade reading is terrible. Now you’ve seen a lot of other gaps in achievement, but I developed a new kind of gap. I call it an interstate gap. These are the scores on 2003 fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading by select states (Chart 4.3). I wanted to show this because one of our panelists is the commissioner in Massachusetts, and as you can see, Massachusetts’ score is 228 compared to some of the other states.