One theme of the work of the Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education is a focus on K–12 education law and policy. This essay by Alan J. Borsuk, the Law School’s senior fellow in law and public policy, is interspersed with reactions by six individuals, including two colleagues from the Marquette University College of Education as well as national observers. Illustrations by Robert Neubecker.
In 2008, Margaret Spellings, then the U.S. Secretary of Education in the administration of President George W. Bush, visited Milwaukee. The visit included a meeting with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the city’s daily newspaper. As an education reporter for the newspaper at the time, I was assigned to sit in and write about what she said.
It was more than six years after Congress, by large, bipartisan majorities, passed the sweeping education law called No Child Left Behind. The law required that every public school student in the country read and do math at grade level
by 2014.
I asked Spellings whether a more realistic goal should be adopted since it was clear that getting 100 percent of kids to grade level was not going to happen in the next six years. How about something less ambitious but more doable?
Spellings disagreed. She said that every child could reach grade level and that she expected the law’s requirement to be met. I told her that I was in favor of every student’s succeeding but that I was willing to go with her right then to any of about 50 schools within a short distance of downtown Milwaukee, where it was very clear that fewer than 100 percent of the students were going to be reading on grade level six years out.
Of course, for a statement that gives me no satisfaction, in 2014 success fell far short of 100 percent nationwide. In fact, things hadn’t changed much since 2008. Or since the law’s passage in 2002. And they haven’t improved much still today.
In many places, student achievement has slipped in recent years, perhaps largely on account of the impact of the COVID pandemic yet also because the gaps between higher-income students and lower-income students—precisely what the No Child Left Behind law was aimed at closing—have grown larger. A trip now to any of the schools I had in mind in 2008 would remain about as unhappy as it was then.
From coast to coast, the No Child Left Behind law remains one of the most important and telling examples of overreach by politicians: Proclaim big goals, create elaborate programs, make people involved in education jump through big hoops—and land on pretty much the same spot where things started.
The issue of overreach by government bodies, from presidents and the Congress to local school boards, in making decisions about schooling is a central fact of American education. Statutes, other laws, and prescriptive policies have been created for decades. But goals, even when completely worthy, often have yielded in practice to realities that are complex and almost intractable. Many laws and policies have proven largely ineffective—some even outright failures.
This history, continuing up to the moment, raises important questions: In what ways can the law drive—or fail to drive—student success? For lawmakers at every level, who (rightfully) want to see students do better, what course should be pursued? What works? What would work better? Why do so many initiatives fail to yield the desired results?
The era of large-scale interaction between the world of policymakers and the world of students goes back about 70 years. As a broad generalization, before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, there was little role in education played by any branch of the federal government. State initiatives also were modest and less ambitious than now.
Desegregation efforts and other disappointments
Brown certainly had huge impacts. The phrase, “with all deliberate speed,” that was used by the Supreme Court carried no timetable, and in many places it took years for large-scale action to unfold. But over a couple of decades, school desegregation plans were attempted all over the United States. In some ways, they broke the ideological mold that had supported segregated schools.
But did the results break segregation itself? There has been change in many places where communities themselves have become more diverse. But analyses of enrollment in schools continue to find that segregation remains a dominant fact, especially when it comes to the schools where millions of Black and Hispanic students are enrolled. (White students are overall more likely to attend schools where the diversity of students has increased.) In the overall picture, school segregation remains a fact of American life.
In the decades since Brown v. Board, top-down efforts intended to prod improved education outcomes, especially for children in groups where education success was historically weak, have been launched often.
The first version of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson was president (No Child Left Behind was one of the successor enactments). The first version of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, when Gerald R. Ford was president. Under Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, there were major steps aimed at improving education. President Joe Biden’s efforts to pass major education changes unleashed a large amount of money intended to offset COVID pandemic impacts but otherwise have largely been held back by the partisan gridlock in Congress. Executive orders by Biden have taken the place of congressional action in some cases.
And at the state level nationwide, recent decades have brought big ideas, big actions, big legislative disputes, and big judicial decisions.
A lot of what has been done by federal or state action is important. It has helped shape the education landscape nationwide. Decisions on funding of education, from Congress to school boards, are central to the viability and capacity of schools. Major changes in laws regarding students who have special education needs have enabled millions of children to get more services than they would have received in the past. The rise of “school choice”—including mechanisms for using public money to support children attending private schools and the creation of charter schools that are self-governed in important ways—has opened doors for large numbers of students to go to a much wider range of schools. A new era of opportunity for young women to take part in sports resulted from federal law. And policies and practices involving race, ethnicity, and gender identity have changed greatly, largely as the result of both changing public opinion and changing laws.
But has the rise of any or all of the grand initiatives solved the problems they were intended to address? Have gaps shrunk, have those who were dealt less promising circumstances at birth done any better overall, or have broadscale measures aimed at improving student academic skills, success, and proficiency paid off?
Well, at the risk of being too blunt about it: No.
Let’s focus on one past and one current example of major policy initiatives aimed at raising the overall success of students from coast to coast: the No Child Left Behind era of 2002 to 2015, for the one, and, for the other, the surge of laws and state policies in the last several years aimed at making a lot more children proficient readers (more than 30 states have ordered changes in how literacy is taught).
No Child Left Behind
The principal federal law about kindergarten through 12th grade goes back to 1965. It was renewed several times over the following 36 years, each time with new provisions intended to spur positive change. Each time, that didn’t happen, at least not on a large scale.
“A Nation at Risk,” a landmark report issued by a national commission in 1983, decried declining success by students nationwide in literacy and math. The report said, “[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . . . [¶] If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The report attracted much attention—but not big change.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush summoned the nation’s governors to a meeting on education in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia, and 49 of the 50 governors attended. Among the goals that emerged—indeed, no. 1: “By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.” Didn’t happen.
In 2001, in the first year of President George W. Bush’s administration, Bush and congressional leaders from both parties agreed that more demanding, ambitious, and specific goals and actions were needed. No more Mr. Nice Law, if you will; more formally, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The new legislative initiative attracted overwhelming support. Bush signed the law in early 2002, with Democratic Sen. Edward
M. Kennedy at his side.
The law set goals for improvement in every public school and school district nationwide, especially those where students had overall low achievement. It required, for the first time, that all states have students in most grades take annual standardized tests in reading and in math and, in some years, in other core subjects. And it required that the district-level results be made public, including a breakout of data on the performance of groups by race and ethnicity, by income, and by whether students had special-education needs. Improvement in each subgroup was to be a key to assessing whether schools were making adequate progress. One effect was to require improvement, for the first time, in overall outcomes for special-education students. The law also called for improving the overall qualifications and quality of the teacher workforce. And it included sanctions on schools and districts that didn’t measure up, including the development and implementation of “improvement plans,” superintended by higher levels of government.
The result was the creation of elaborate programs that set requirements and timetables for meeting the law’s goals. An array of acronyms—such as NCLB, AYP (adequate yearly progress), SIFI (school identified for improvement), DIFI (district identified for improvement)—became parts of education jargon for a few years. To this day, the law’s advocates point to some improvements in national test score trends, but the movement was relatively slight. One thing the law did accomplish: The annual testing nationwide brought a wealth of data, disaggregated by race and other groupings, which put the gaps in education success firmly in the spotlight so that no one could dismiss the issue. Not nothing, but not much else.
The law was set to be reauthorized in 2014, but, amid increased partisan polarization, differences over what paths to pursue in education improvement, and general dissatisfaction with the law’s results, there was little progress toward agreement in Congress until a compromise was reached at the end of 2015, near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term. The resulting bill—known (cynically, some suggest) as the Every Student Succeeds Act—brought a broad retreat from federal involvement in state and local education policies.
Almost all of the No Child Left Behind structures were eliminated or watered down, except for the requirement to give standardized tests and report results. The 2015 law calls for states to make progress in closing achievement gaps, focusing particularly on schools in the bottom 5 percent of overall success. But it has no substantial enforcement provisions. The clearest sign of the breadth of the retreat is the minimal attention the law now receives from educators, politicians, or the general public. Quite unlike the 2001 law, how many people know even the name of the 2015 law?
Those 5 percent of low-success schools are required to have plans for “comprehensive support and improvement.” But in January 2024, more than eight years after the law’s passage, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report concluding that, among those schools, only 42 percent had plans that addressed the three broad requirements of the law and that there was “wide variation” in the plans. Reacting to the report, Anne Hyslop, director of policy development for the nonprofit advocacy organization All4Ed, told Education Week, “The state of school improvement is just dismal.”
While 2001’s No Child Left Behind is the most comprehensive failure of policymakers in demanding big action but bringing little positive result, it is hardly the only one. Consider just the names of other initiatives over the years, arising both from within government and, in some cases, from education leaders, nonprofits, or academia: The Race to the Top. The Common Core. Standards and accountability systems. Reading reform plans. Math reform plans. Teacher-pay-for-performance experiments. A large initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create many small high schools. Teach for America. Title I. Court-ordered school desegregation. The long-standing federally funded Head Start program, which has provided early-childhood care and programming to millions of low-income children but has not closed gaps in success. The rise of school choice, involving both private schools and charter schools, which offers a wide range of options but has not changed the overall picture of educational success. Changes in school structures, leadership styles, curriculum choices, and teaching philosophies.
And, across the nation, there are scores, probably even hundreds, of state and local reforms, often described before enactment as steps toward wider education success—and almost always bringing results that fall short. The overall history has a clear theme of big talk and small impact.
And now, reading reform
The “reading wars,” as they often have been described, go back decades—to the 1990s, some say, or even the 1950s, say others. Differences over the best way to teach youngsters to read may seem academic, not just literally but figuratively. But at the classroom level, they are significant, and feelings among advocates have a long history of being heated. On the one hand, there is strong support for teaching reading in a way that emphasizes sounding out letters and “decoding” words letter by letter, which is generally labeled “phonics.” On the other hand, many reading educators have used approaches that emphasize leading children to recognize whole words—to learn to read by reading, as some put it. That includes using the context for words or cues such as pictures to figure out what a word is. The approach often downplays sounding words out letter by letter, and it is generally labeled “whole language” or, more recently, “balanced literacy.”
But, amid the many rounds of debate and rising and falling trends, results have not been great when it comes to how many children become capable readers. In the broad picture, about a third of American schoolchildren read well below grade level, and another third or more read adequately but not at a strong level of proficiency. Students with weak reading skills are found across the gamut of living circumstances—income, race, ethnicity, and so on—but are concentrated among low-income children and Black and Latino children.
In the late 1990s, a group of experts, at the request of Congress, came together as what was called the National Reading Panel. They analyzed research and trends and, in 2000, issued a voluminous report, which found there to be research-backed science that could guide teaching reading and lead to wider success. The report advocated for efforts built on five pillars, two of them involving phonics and what is called phonemic awareness. The recommendations around phonics attracted (and continue to attract) the most attention. The other pillars included building fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. But the following years were largely a time when balanced-literacy advocates held the upper hand in schools across the United States—without much improvement to show for the effort.
One thing that spurred a surge of fresh advocacy for using phonics was the success of Mississippi in raising reading success following passage of a state law in 2013. The law called for phonics-based teaching, training of teachers in how to do that, extra help in early grades for struggling readers, and retention of children in third grade until they could read on grade level. Mississippi had long been near the bottom of the nation in reading success, but it began moving up the ranks (based on student scores in tests that were part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress). In recent years, Mississippi has been in the middle of the pack nationally, and its improvements have been the strongest in the country overall. The law behind what some called “the Mississippi miracle” became a model for other states.
Along with other developments, including the wide impact of several sets of podcasts attacking balanced-literacy curriculums by journalist Emily Hanford, more than 30 states between 2019 and 2023 passed laws or launched policies promoting and, in many cases, requiring use of “science of reading” approaches, especially in early grades. In some cases, certain “balanced literacy” approaches, particularly one known as “three-cueing,” which teaches students to look at context, illustrations, and other clues to figure out a word, were banned by law.
This is a large and fresh current example of legislators and executive branch leaders demanding improvement in success in school through steps they largely dictate. It is generally too early to tell whether the effect will be notably positive. History counsels skepticism. Even thought leaders for the changes have warned about not making the “science of reading” just another education fad that yields little.
“Just buying a new curriculum won’t fix this problem,” Hanford told about 250 reading teachers and others in late October 2023 at a program held in suburban Milwaukee by The Reading League Wisconsin. Furthermore, while ending “three-cueing” is a good step, that, too, is not enough, Hanford said.
In an interview during a visit to Madison earlier that year, Hanford expressed caution about expecting progress easily or quickly from the surge in reading reform. “I believe that understanding things helps,” she said. But she added that policy is messy, there are unintended consequences, and there always are problems with execution of laws. And Hanford said the impacts of poverty and trauma on children are factors in making reading success difficult to attain. Interventions and individualized support for many children—steps that could cost much more than many schools can currently afford—are important, she said.
The work of Mark Seidenberg, a University of Wisconsin–Madison psychology professor, including his 2017 book, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It, has been influential among “science of reading” advocates.
Seidenberg said that improving the way reading is taught to children is an important step. But he also cautioned about expecting too much from that alone. At a conference in Madison in February 2023 and in an interview then, Seidenberg said that other aspects of the “science of reading,” such as building vocabularies and increasing children’s knowledge of the world around them, need attention. And he said that dealing with broader contexts of children’s lives, such as improving early-childhood education and the stability of their living circumstances, can make substantial differences.
“The fastest way to improve kids’ reading is to talk to them,” he said at the conference. “We need to do more than pounce on three-cueing. There is so much more.”
The nationwide surge of state laws and education policies requiring use of the “science of reading” in teaching literacy is at an early point. There are some indications in states such as Mississippi and Tennessee that it may bring positive results. It will take several years (or more) to find out how big the impact will be. Would a rise of several percentage points in overall reading proficiency be a success? Are the reforms being launched potent enough to bring much larger jumps in success?
The reading reforms are not a result of federal policy, but they are occurring across such a wide swath of America that they amount to a nationwide initiative. The reading wave will be a major, even crucial test of whether top-down initiatives can work or whether what is happening will be another big example of legislative overreach.
Why do initiatives fall short?
It is good for political, civic, and education leaders to address the important needs of children, such as learning to become good readers and, more broadly, getting on track to successful lives as adults. But, beyond public funding levels, the limits on what leaders address—test scores, school structures, hot-button social matters, etc.—may in themselves frustrate the chances for their decisions to have positive impact. Here are seven thoughts on why big plans from lawmakers and others who shape school life so often fail to bring anything resembling the degree of desired improvement:
- The impact of poverty. Even in high-poverty communities, there are schools and teachers that are leading children to success at rates much above the average for such circumstances. But they are relatively few in number, replicating them has been generally difficult, and their success may well be based on leadership qualities and commitment that are just plain rare. It is almost impossible—and certainly unwise—to ignore the broad reality that overall academic success of a school or school district correlates strongly with wealth and qualities of life that match wealth (reliable food sources and stability of shelter, to name two). Some experts argue that relieving poverty and increasing the supply of family-supporting jobs are the only ways to improve education outcomes. Maybe that argument lets schools and school leaders off the hook more than is merited. Yet poverty has impacts. The overall well-being of schoolchildren when it comes to their families and lives makes a difference in their education. For policymakers to proclaim ambitious goals or plans for improving achievement in school can’t make the children’s surrounding lives go away.
- The state of culture generally. Mental health issues among children were increasing before the COVID pandemic began in 2020, and they have accelerated since then. The rapid and dramatic changes in technology and communication throughout society also have had great impact on children, with some research suggesting that things such as excessive amounts of time focused on computer screens or smartphones are detrimental to many children. And the social fabric shaping the lives of children across the spectrum of socioeconomic situations is far different now from a generation or two ago, with some benefits and some harms. Overall, is the cultural climate of the nation good in broad terms for educating children? Millions of children are doing great. But millions are not, and the tides of life around them may be a big reason why.
- Early-childhood issues. In important ways, the gaps in educational attainment that show up across school years and into adulthood are there when children walk in the door for kindergarten. Largely along some of society’s most recognized fault lines, there are big differences in how millions of children at age five are on track to thrive or not in schools. How developed are their vocabulary and their awareness of the world around them? Do they know the names of colors or days of the week? More broadly, have their social skills developed when it comes to engaging with other children or adults or participating in class? Some studies have suggested that schools as a whole do a reasonable job of keeping the gaps in success from growing across the kindergarten to 12th grade years but that they are not good at closing the gaps that were there from the start. And experts such as Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago have said for years that improved early-childhood programs, especially for low-income children, have great lifelong benefits. There have been improvements in early-childhood programs, but they fall far short of the overall potential for good results.
- The intractability of the problems. The problems underlying disparities in educational success have roots going back many decades and generations. A crucial example: Issues related to race and the legacy of highly discriminatory education systems during slavery and in the post-Civil War era, in both the Jim Crow South and the highly segregated North, are not easy to overcome. No Child Left Behind was a noble and entirely worthy goal. But after so many years of leaving children behind, putting a halt to inequitable results is just immensely difficult.
- The failure to improve the quality of teaching and to offer the support and environments that teachers need. Ultimately, whatever happens in school board meetings or legislative chambers or wherever large-scale decisions are made about education, the crucial action in education comes between a teacher and students, often behind closed classroom doors and with little or no oversight as to what is going on. Even the best teachers are known to think that they should keep doing what they think works with their students because education fads come and go and the teachers will outlast whatever is the current hot idea. And the teachers who aren’t the best? They often feel the same way—that they will do what they think works and no supervisor or policy will impact that much. More broadly, the strains on teachers and teaching—both for individuals and in broad aspects of the profession—are enormous and continue to grow.
- Inadequate attention to developing quality teaching. While there is agreement across the board that good teaching is crucial, little is done to put that belief into practice. Whether it is pay and working conditions, general lack of resources and support, stress, poor morale, the wear and
tear of having too much to do in their work, difficult relations with some adults, limited training and
mentoring, or simply limited ability, there are a lot of reasons why many teachers can’t or won’t embrace change and improvement in the way that policymakers hope. High turnover in the ranks of teachers and increasingly limited pools of talent to draw from in finding new teachers are also factors. And little is done to deal with all of this, especially on a large scale. - Poor thinking. Some of the ideas for reform are just poorly thought out or sound good in political discussions but are impractical or unrealistic. Go back to where this essay started, with the secretary of education of the United States saying that every student in the country would be reading and doing math on grade level within six years, even as it was sadly but indisputably obvious that this wasn’t going to happen. Frankly, that was just poor thinking.
To conclude: In broad strokes, two of the biggest factors in a student’s educational success are what goes on between a teacher and student and what goes on in a child’s life outside of school. And those are two of the factors that people such as legislators, bureaucrats, and school board members have had the least success in shaping.
Is it a worthy goal to focus on the quality of education and to try to get the maximum number of children on paths to solid lives as adults? Absolutely. Schools can and do play important parts in children’s lives—and they shouldn’t be given a complete pass when it comes to assessing blame for why so many children are not thriving. But if the goal of education policy is to build a future of thriving adults—which is to say, to boost today’s children—a lot more needs to be considered than what public policy usually considers now. And it needs to be considered wisely, candidly, and urgently.
Continue the conversation…
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