no child left behind essay brainly

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

No Child Left Behind: What Worked, What Didn't

Cory Turner

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act hasn't been updated since it was renamed "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 by President George W. Bush. The law was introduced by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to help states level the playing field for students living and learning in poverty. Matt Rourke/AP hide caption

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act hasn't been updated since it was renamed "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 by President George W. Bush. The law was introduced by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to help states level the playing field for students living and learning in poverty.

Cross your fingers.

Congress is trying to do something it was supposed to do back in 2007: agree on a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's not controversial to say the law is in desperate need of an update.

The ESEA is hugely important, not just to our nation's schools but to the social fabric. It pours billions of federal dollars each year into classrooms that serve low-income students. When President Lyndon Johnson first signed it in 1965, he declared the law "a major new commitment of the federal government to quality and equality in the schooling that we offer our young people."

The ESEA is supposed to be updated every few years but hasn't been rewritten since 2001, when another Texan, President George W. Bush, famously renamed it No Child Left Behind. Bush took Johnson's original vision, to help states level the playing field for students living and learning in poverty, and added teeth.

"We're gonna spend more money, more resources," Bush said at the time, "but they'll be directed at methods that work. Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work."

Those methods included a sweeping new federal system of testing and accountability — as strict as it was controversial. The message to states was clear: We don't trust you to do the right thing by your most disadvantaged students. Schools that fail to educate all kids should be fixed or closed.

With its emphasis — obsession, critics would say — on standardized testing, the law became unpopular among many teachers and parents and technically expired in 2007. But it's on the books until it's replaced.

Now, the challenge for lawmakers is figuring out what — if any — of Bush's tough-love methods worked. This week, NPR is trying to do the same.

The Tough Guy

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 with Kate Deadrich Loney, his first schoolteacher. Yoichi Okamoto/Lyndon B. Johnson Library hide caption

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 with Kate Deadrich Loney, his first schoolteacher.

Bush's tough-love approach was motivated by the sense that states weren't doing enough to fix their low-performing schools. NCLB created a new role for the federal government: Tough Guy. Right now, the House and Senate don't agree on much, but they do agree that the Tough Guy routine didn't work.

The recent bills crafted by both chambers — and that must now be reconciled — leave it to the states to decide what to do about struggling schools. That includes how to fix them and whether or when to close them.

But at least one researcher thinks the law, like the classic Tough Guy, is a little misunderstood. And that parts of the law did work.

"NCLB is usually regarded as a sledgehammer, but it's actually fairly complex and fairly nuanced," says Tom Ahn, who teaches at the University of Kentucky.

Ahn has a Ph.D. in economics and writes papers with titles like, "Distributional Impacts of a Local Living Wage Increase." In short, he's an unlikely guy to have written one of the go-to studies on NCLB. But he did . And it's an eye-opener.

A few years ago, Ahn and his colleague, Jacob Vigdor, wondered: In spite of the controversy, did No Child Left Behind do some good? Did it improve low-performing schools? For answers, they studied the schools of North Carolina, though what they found can be applied just about anywhere.

How It Worked

Under NCLB, schools were judged on something called Adequate Yearly Progress. The goal was to get every child to grade-level in reading and math by 2014. It was an impossible goal that infuriated teachers and administrators alike because it held all children — and all schools — to the same timeline.

The law didn't care if a child had begun the year three grades behind in reading and a teacher helped her make two years' worth of progress by May. According to NCLB's strict proficiency guidelines, that student was still a year below grade-level.

The law also required schools to break down their student data into lots of little subgroups, including race, disability and socioeconomic status. Ahn says that was a game changer. "If one group of disadvantaged students underperformed, the entire school was considered underperforming."

Or, as Nancy Barbour puts it: "Your high-fliers can't cover for your low-fliers."

In 2002, Barbour was the principal of a very good school in Durham, N.C. She says the new law made her and lots of fellow principals and teachers nervous, thinking "Oh no, oh no. In four years we're gonna be restructuring, and in six we're gonna be closed down."

Some of that fear was justified. Because of the law's attention to these smaller groups of students, some of whom tended to underperform, many schools that had previously earned high marks suddenly got red flags. This is the first of two important lessons Tom Ahn learned studying NCLB.

Lesson No. 1: Some Schools Didn't Need Fixing, Just Scaring

"The ones that had the capacity to shape up, they did," Ahn says.

He found that many schools improved after that first warning with no sanctions at all — just the threat of sanctions. Because these schools had relatively few kids below grade-level and enough money and staff to focus on them.

Ahn found a very different story among schools where lots of students were struggling. For these, often poorer schools, the law was like quicksand. Donna Brown is director of federal program monitoring and support for North Carolina's public schools, and she saw the quicksand firsthand.

"When I came to the department in 2004," Brown remembers, "there were nine schools in the state that were identified for some level of improvement sanction. And, by 2008-9, there were 521."

That's nearly half of all schools in the state that received federal Title I dollars. After two years of failing to make progress, a school had to offer students the right to transfer to a better school.

The problem with this transfer policy, says Brown, is "you're not really doing anything to address the needs of that school."

It was more punishment than panacea. Schools often sank deeper into the quicksand. If they continued to fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, they were also required to pay for tutoring services and, later, to choose from a list of "corrective actions," including changing curriculum or lengthening the school day. And here begins the other great lesson of No Child Left Behind.

Lesson No. 2: The Lobotomy

For schools stuck in the quicksand, Ahn says, "these sanctions start stacking up, and at the end of the day, they don't help the schools to improve."

That is, until the last, most-feared sanction — restructuring — which Ahn likens to "a lobotomy."

After five years, schools "in need of improvement" were supposed to write a restructuring plan that could include firing teachers, reopening as a charter or handing over control to the state. And in Year 6, they were supposed to do it.

In North Carolina, Ahn found the most common strategy was simply replacing the person at the top, the principal. The effect on student performance was significant, equivalent to "reducing class size by a third to a half."

Why did the lobotomy so often work? It's hard to say. Ahn points out that, to be forced into restructuring, a school had to be considered failing for six years.

"There's something seriously wrong with the way the school has been run," Ahn says. "And, when leadership change occurs, basically there's a sea change."

He says he could see it not only in student performance but in teacher satisfaction surveys. After the lobotomy, teachers were often happier.

At least, that's what the data suggest. To really understand restructuring and why, Ahn says, it was the only sanction under NCLB that seemed to work, we need to see a lobotomy firsthand. We'll have that story later today.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Should parents or other adults be able to ban books from elementary schools and libraries?
• Should corporal punishment be used in elementary schools?
• Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in elementary education settings?
• Where was George W. Bush educated?
• What did George W. Bush accomplish?

No Child Left Behind

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• DigitalCommons@EMU - Learning is Not Child's Play: Assessing the No Child Left Behind Act
• Electronic Privacy Information Center - No Child Left Behind
• Social Science LibreTexts - No Child Left Behind: Cure or Curse?
• Ohio State University - Origins - Updating ‘No Child Left Behind:’ Change, or More of the Same
• NPR - No Child Left Behind: What Worked, What Didn't

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) , U.S. federal law aimed at improving public primary and secondary schools, and thus student performance, via increased accountability for schools, school districts, and states. The act was passed by Congress with bipartisan support in December 2001 and signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush in January 2002.

NCLB introduced significant changes in the curriculum of public primary and secondary schools in the United States and dramatically increased federal regulation of state school systems. Under the law, states were required to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward raising the scores of all students to a level defined as “proficient” or higher by 2014. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of staff or closure.

Supporters of NCLB cited its initial success in increasing the test scores of minority students, who historically performed at lower levels than white students. Indeed, Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign had touted the proposed law as a remedy for what he called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” faced by the children of minorities. Critics, however, complained that the federal government was not providing enough funding to implement the law’s requirements and that it had usurped the states’ traditional control of education as provided for in the Constitution. Moreover, they charged that the law was actually eroding the quality of education by forcing schools to “teach to the test” or to lower standards of proficiency while neglecting other parts of the curriculum, such as history , social science , and art. Following unsuccessful efforts in Congress to remove the 2014 proficiency deadline from NCLB, the Barack Obama administration accepted applications for waivers of the deadline in 2011. The following year waivers were granted to states that had reformed their academic standards and established plans for improving poorly performing schools and for evaluating the effectiveness of teachers and principals.

In 2015 Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which rescinded several of the most-unpopular provisions of NCLB. Under the new law, for example, states were still required to administer standardized federal tests but had greater latitude in determining how and when such tests would be given. States were also permitted to include other measures of student and school performance in their accountability systems within broad federal guidelines. ESSA encouraged, but did not require, states to develop their own teacher-evaluation systems and eliminated NCLB’s requirement that teachers in core subjects be “highly qualified.” It also permitted school districts to design their own remedies for improving poorly performing schools with technical assistance from the states.

What is No Child Left Behind (NCLB)?

By Andrew M.I. Lee, JD

At a glance

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was the main law for K–12 general education in the United States from 2002–2015.

The law held schools accountable for how kids learned and achieved.

The law was controversial in part because it penalized schools that didn’t show improvement.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was in effect from 2002–2015. It updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The law applied to all K–12 public schools in the United States.

Before NCLB, many schools didn’t focus on the progress of disadvantaged students. For example, kids who got special education services were often shut out of general education. They were also left out of state tests.

The goal of NCLB was to provide more education opportunities for students. It focused on four key groups:

Students in poverty

Students of color

Students receiving special education services

Those who speak and understand limited or no English

Unlike previous versions of ESEA, NCLB held schools accountable for how kids learn and achieve. It did this through annual testing, reporting, improvement targets, and penalties for schools. These changes made NCLB controversial, but they also forced schools to focus on disadvantaged kids.

NCLB is no longer the law. In 2015, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act , which tried to address some of the criticisms of the law.

Dive deeper

School accountability.

School accountability rules were a big part of NCLB.

Annual testing:  Schools had to give students statewide math and reading tests every year in grades 3–8 and once in grades 10–12. Parents and caregivers had the right to get individual test results for their kids. All kids had to take the tests, including at least 95 percent of students in the disadvantaged groups.

Schools also had to publicly report school and “subgroup” results. For example, schools had to report how students in special education were performing on reading and math tests.

Academic progress:  States had to bring all students, including those in special education, up to the “proficient” level on tests. They had to set targets for improvement, called adequate yearly progress (AYP). 

Schools essentially got a report card from the state on how they were performing. The school had to share that information with parents of their students. If a school didn’t meet AYP, it could be labeled as “needing improvement.”

Penalties:  Schools with many low-income students are called “Title I schools.” If a Title I school didn’t meet AYP, NCLB allowed the state to change the school’s leadership team or even close the school. If a school repeatedly failed to meet AYP, parents had the option to move their kids to another school. The penalties only applied to Title I schools.

Learn what’s changed from NCLB in current law .

Other NCLB provisions

Apart from accountability, NCLB made other changes to federal education law. Here are a few of the most important.

Under NCLB, all teachers had to be “highly qualified” in the subject they teach. This meant that special education teachers had to be certified and demonstrate knowledge in every subject they teach. This is no longer the case. Now, federal law only requires teachers to be state certified and licensed.

NCLB gave more flexibility to states in how they spent federal funding, so long as schools were improving. The law also required schools to use science- and research-based instruction and teaching methods. These reforms still influence today’s laws.

Lastly, kids with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and 504 plans often have accommodations to help them learn in school. NCLB required states to allow these kids to use accommodations on statewide tests. This rule still applies.

Read more about accommodations on standardized tests .

Pros and cons of NCLB for students

People have mixed feelings about NCLB. On the positive side, many believe NCLB led to a greater focus on struggling students. The law set the expectation that they learn alongside their peers. 

By making schools report results by subgroup, NCLB shined a light on students in poverty, students of color, those receiving special education services, and English language learners. NCLB pushed schools to give struggling students more attention, support, and help.

More students graduated under the law. The graduation rate for students with specific learning disabilities increased from 57 percent in 2002 to 68 percent in 2011.

On the other hand, some say that NCLB focused too much on standardized testing. Some schools ended up “teaching to the test” — focusing only on what students were tested on. This left little time for anything else kids may have needed or wanted to learn.

Certain penalties, like requiring school improvement plans, were reasonable, critics said. Others could be very harsh, like firing school staff or closing a school that’s struggling. Critics linked several cheating scandals to NCLB, citing the pressure on teachers and educators to perform.

Some argued that NCLB’s standards-based accountability was inconsistent with special education, which focuses on meeting a child’s individual needs.

Despite the controversy, many people still support some of NCLB’s reforms. This includes the reporting of school results, inclusion of kids, and research-based instruction.

The Lessons of No Child Left Behind

As Congress debates a rewrite of the controversial education policy, what have we learned about closing achievement gaps?

Fifteen years ago, presidential candidate George W. Bush stood before the NAACP's annual convention, and talked about advancing racial harmony and economic opportunity through education.

"Under my vision, all students must be measured. We must test to know," Bush said. He proposed giving low-performing schools—"those schools that won't teach and won't change"—three years to improve before helping parents move their children elsewhere. "No child should be left behind in America," he said.

The education law President Bush signed, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), was based on a straight-forward theory: Give schools data and pressure them to improve, and they'll better educate children. Simple. But the law didn't always work that way in practice.

Now Congress is revising the law and grappling with its complicated legacy. A Senate bill would likely preserve annual, statewide testing while giving states more flexibility to design their own accountability systems.

NCLB essentially attached strings to federal education funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It required states to test students annually from third through eighth grades and once in high school, and to track test scores by students' race and ethnicity, low-income status, disability status, and status as English-language learners.

If students in any subgroup persistently failed to achieve certain scores on state tests, schools could be shut down. The law set a goal of ensuring all students in the country were reading and performing math calculations at grade level by 2014—a goal that proved so impossible to meet, the Obama administration has since granted most states a waiver from meeting NCLB's targets.

When Bush addressed the NAACP, he and his audience knew that African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students were more likely to struggle academically than white and affluent students. Since at least the 1960s, national standardized tests have revealed an achievement gap.

NCLB revealed the extent of those gaps in every school in the country—and pushed districts to hone in on low-scoring students. It fueled ambitious reform efforts in cities like New York and Washington, D.C. The disaggregated data "became a vehicle for us to start to explore equity issues, and look at basic principles of accountability that we wanted to build out," says Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City Education Department.

Reformers like Klein shut down schools, reorganized others, and expanded new models like charter schools. The NCLB era coincided with the rise of public-charter networks like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which proved that it was possible to raise the test scores of low-income and minority students.

But after more than a decade of shuttered schools and sanctions, the achievement gap remains as wide as ever, even in cities like New York. Nationally, scores on the low-stakes National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have risen, but researchers say the rise is just part of a long-term trend. A 2011 National Academy of Sciences study found that NCLB raised elementary-school math scores, but not much else.

Sandy Kress, a former Bush adviser, says he's troubled by how few schools responded to the law the way its architects intended: by reaching for proven solutions, like better teaching strategies. In successful accountability systems, he says, "people are highly motivated to go to what works."

That didn't happen in the Mississippi Delta, where Renee Moore taught high school until 2006. In her area, most districts serve almost entirely low-income, African-American students. "All of the schools around, we have nothing but poverty," Moore says. The area has a chronic teaching shortage and schools get less per pupil funding than the national average.

By requiring all schools and all students to meet the same standards, NCLB set schools like Moore's up for failure. There's no way to reallocate resources when resources are tight to begin with and almost all students earn low scores. Under pressure to raise test scores dramatically and quickly, Moore says, local elementary and middle schools started drilling students for state tests during social-studies and science classes.

The law also generated data that, while useful to policy wonks, education researchers, and civil rights activists, it wasn't particularly useful to teachers. "The test data that we were getting, it came late," says Moore. "It never came until after the school year was over." The state tests didn't generate information specific enough to help her focus her instruction.

What NCLB has demonstrated, 15 years in, is something policymakers already knew—that standardized test scores are strongly correlated with a student's family income. To education scholar Diane Ravitch, the achievement gap in test scores doesn't prove that there are bad teachers, or bad schools—it just proves that poverty matters.

It is possible to raise test scores, using a different theory of action. "If we only asked, are they [students] making annual academic growth, if that was the only thing we talked about all the time—that would end up skewing your organization in ways, and schools in ways, that aren't healthy," says Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation.

KIPP schools assess students on what they're learning constantly. They also measure student satisfaction, parent satisfaction, and teacher satisfaction. Students occasionally take tests that show how they compare with their peers nationally.

Teachers and school leaders talk about how to learn from the data all the time. "It's not about, you know, accountability and punitive measures," Barth says. It's about continuous improvement.

Next America's Education coverage is made possible in part by a grant from the New Venture Fund.

About the Authors

• About The Journalist’s Resource
• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

No Child Left Behind and education outcomes: Research roundup

Studies analyzing the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on student and school performance.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Margaret Weigel, The Journalist's Resource August 25, 2011

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/nclb-no-child-left-behind-research/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was intended to promote higher levels of performance in U.S. public education by tying a school’s federal funding directly to student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. Ten years after its implementation, however, research on NCLB suggests that the achievement levels of the nation’s students, teachers and school districts remain significantly below established benchmarks. In August 2011, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, describing the Act as “a slow-motion train wreck,” suspended the requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, and invited states to apply for a waiver of NCLB’s proficiency requirements.

The following studies analyze issues related to NCLB, and look at the law’s effects on student and school performance.

“The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement”

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 2011

Findings: “Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders … as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth-grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased fourth-grade reading achievement.”

“Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education”

U.S. National Research Council, 2011

Findings: “Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs. Even when evaluated using the tests attached to the incentives, a number of programs show only small effects.”

“Performance Effects of Failure to Make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP): Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Framework”

Economics of Education Review , 2011

Findings: “Using panel data on Maryland elementary and middle schools from 2003 through 2009, I find that the scope of failure matters: Academic performance suffers in the short run in response to school-wide failure. However, schools that meet achievement targets for the aggregate student group, yet fail to meet at least one demographic subgroup’s target see between 3 and 6 percent more students in the failing subgroup score proficiently in the following year, compared to if no accountability pressure were in place.”

“Exacerbating Inequality: The Failed Promise of the No Child Left Behind Act” (PDF)

Race Ethnicity and Education, 2007

Findings: “ NCLB received and continues to receive support, in part because it promises to improve student learning and to close the achievement gap between White students and students of color. However, NCLB has failed to live up to its promises and may exacerbate inequality. Furthermore, by focusing on education as the solution to social and economic inequality, it diverts the public’s attention away from the issues such as poverty, lack of decent paying jobs and health care, that need to be confronted if inequality is to be reduced.”

“The No Child Left Behind Act: Have Federal Funds Been Left Behind? ” (PDF)

Public Finance Review, 2008

Findings: “We find that new federal funding is sufficient to support very low standards for student performance, but cannot come close to funding high standards without implausibly large increases in school-district efficiency… [S]tates have a strong incentive to keep their standards low.”

“Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?” (PDF)

Educational Researcher , 2007

Findings: “Focusing on the performance of fourth graders, where gains have been strongest since the early 1970s, the authors find that earlier test score growth has largely faded since enactment of NCLB in 2002. Gains in math achievement have persisted in the post-NCLB period, albeit at a slower rate of growth. Performance in many states continues to apparently climb. But the bar defining proficiency is set much lower in most states, compared with the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] definition, and the disparity between state and federal results has grown since 2001. Progress seen in the 1990s in narrowing achievement gaps has largely disappeared in the post-NCLB era.”

Tags: children, schools, research roundup, campaign issue, youth

About The Author

Margaret Weigel

The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers, and Schools [with Comments and Discussion]

• The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers, and Schools [with Comments and Discussion] (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2010, No. 2)
• Data and programs

Subscribe to the Economic Studies Bulletin

Brian a. jacob and brian a. jacob walter h. annenberg professor of education policy; professor of economics, and professor of education - university of michigan, former brookings expert thomas s. dee tsd thomas s. dee professor - stanford university discussants: caroline m. hoxby and cmh caroline m. hoxby stanford university helen f. ladd helen f. ladd former brookings expert, susan b. king professor emeritus of public policy, samford school of public policy - duke university.

The controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) brought test-based school accountability to scale across the United States. This study draws together results from multiple data sources to identify how the new accountability systems developed in response to NCLB have influenced student achievement, school-district finances, and measures of school and teacher practices. Our results indicate that NCLB brought about targeted gains in the mathematics achievement of younger students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, we find no evidence that NCLB improved student achievement in reading. School-district expenditure increased significantly in response to NCLB, and these increases were not matched by federal revenue. Our results suggest that NCLB led to increases in teacher compensation and the share of teachers with graduate degrees. We find evidence that NCLB shifted the allocation of instructional time toward math and reading, the subjects targeted by the new accountability systems.

Economic Studies

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

Zachary Billot, Annie Vong, Nicole Dias Del Valle, Emily Markovich Morris

August 26, 2024

Brian A. Jacob, Cristina Stanojevich

Christine Apiot Okudi, Atenea Rosado-Viurques, Jennifer L. O’Donoghue

August 23, 2024

2016 Theses Doctoral

Were Children Left Behind? Essays on the Impact of No Child Left Behind on State Policy and School Closure

Davidson, Elizabeth Kate

Since 2002, the rules and regulations of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act have dictated state and local education policy, influenced state and local reform efforts, and led to significant investments in building the capacity of state and local education agencies to meet its mandates. Using a nationally comprehensive data set on school- and student subgroup-level NCLB outcomes, these three studies are the first national studies exploring the ways in which state officials’ interpretations of NCLB policy led to significant cross-state variation in school and subgroup outcomes across the country. I also investigate the extent to which NCLB accountability pressures and incentive structures led state and local officials to use school closure as a remedy for schools’ persistence poor performance. I conduct the latter analysis for all U.S. public schools and separately for a subset of U.S. public schools, all U.S. charters schools, in order to account for the idiosyncrasies of charter school governance and oversight. I find that significant cross-state variation in the share of schools identified as “failing” according to NCLB rules can largely be explained by variation in states’ NCLB implementation decisions, and that schools determined to have “failed” according to NCLB rules are more likely to close than schools that never “failed.” For all public schools and for charter schools only, a school determined to have “failed” according to NCLB rules is significantly more likely to close than a school determined to have never “failed.” Combined, these studies provide insight into the ways in which states’ NCLB implementation decisions had significant and lasting impact on school outcomes and state and local reforms.

• Educational change--Evaluation
• Educational law and legislation
• Education and state
• School management and organization
• No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (United States)

More About This Work

• DOI Copy DOI to clipboard

Ohio State nav bar

The Ohio State University website

• BuckeyeLink
• Find People
• Search Ohio State

Updating ‘No Child Left Behind:’ Change, or More of the Same

• John Spencer

President George W. Bush signs "No Child Left Behind" into law in 2002. Supported by those looking for school accountability in educational achievement, NCLB's tenure has been marked by significant protests by teachers and others. As NCLB comes up for reauthorization, the political desire to improve academic achievement will confront those who feel that the concentration on achievement testing unfairly scapegoats teachers and cheats students out of a complete educational experience.

In the wake of a highly polarized battle over health care reform, Congress and the Obama Administration began to take up another major piece of domestic legislation: reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, originally enacted in 1965), now more commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). (NCLB was itself a reauthorization of ESEA.) Put forth in 2001 by the George W. Bush administration and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, NCLB has attempted to hold schools more "accountable" for student achievement, as measured by regular standardized testing. The law has been widely unpopular, especially among educators who feel it scapegoats them for the "achievement gap" between students of different racial and social class backgrounds. Yet politicians of both parties remain attracted to its main emphasis on test-driven accountability. As the debate over federal education policy gains momentum, historian John Spencer looks at how NCLB-style accountability grew out of, and at the same time ignores key lessons of, a long history of educational inequality.

Readers may also be interested in this Origins article about Vocational Educational Reform in the 1990s . Please also read these recent Origins articles about current events in the United States: Detroit and America's Urban Woes , Darwin in America , Child Kidnapping , the Mortgage and Housing Market Crisis , and the 2nd Amendment Debate .

When President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation into law in 2002, one thing was strikingly clear: politicians loved it almost as universally as educators hated it.

The legislation was central to the Bush administration's domestic policy agenda, yet Democrats embraced it as well. Congress passed NCLB by margins that seem inconceivable today (384-45 in the House of Representatives; 91-8 in the Senate).

Politicians praised NCLB because it promised to measure student achievement in math and reading, through regular standardized tests, and to use that data to hold schools "accountable" for reducing academic achievement gaps between students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. These gaps in educational achievement have long troubled Americans, especially those who hoped that public schools and education could serve as a great equalizer in American society.

Educators tended to take an opposite view of these developments, believing that they cheapened the educational process, forcing teachers to "teach to the test," and that NCLB blamed schools for social problems beyond their control: such as poverty, urban decay, racial inequalities, and disparities in health care.

Little has changed in eight years.

Barack Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has described NCLB as a "toxic brand" because of significant opposition to its approach. Instead, he has offered a re-packaged "Blueprint" for the law's reauthorization, which was released in March, 2010.

But while Duncan sketched a host of changes to the controversial law, the Blueprint preserved the basic approach of using standardized test scores to hold schools "accountable" for student achievement—especially the roughly five thousand lowest-performing schools in the nation.

And that does not sit well with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Weingarten complains that the administration's plans "put 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and give them zero percent authority." Likewise, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association (NEA), sees "too much top-down scapegoating of teachers and not enough collaboration" in the plan.

As was the case in 2002, politicians across the ideological spectrum—from Newt Gingrich to Al Sharpton—support the current educational reforms, while those who actually work in schools remain suspicious, feeling scapegoated by those politicians.

The accountability agenda of No Child Left Behind, and the fierce debate it has generated, did not arise out of nowhere in the Bush years. The conflict over accountability has historical roots that reach back to two developments of the 1960s, and especially to the relationship that developed during that time between public education and the African-American civil rights agenda.

First, black educators, parents, and activists during that era fought to hold urban schools more accountable for the achievement of their children, who were often given a second-class education and were dismissed by white Americans (and white teachers) as uneducable. NCLB's focus on teacher and school accountability has its origins to some extent in this African-American civil-rights activism.

At the same time, social scientists in the 1960s began to sharpen our understanding of how school achievement is powerfully shaped by social and economic conditions beyond the direct control of schools and teachers. These ideas that universal educational success is possible only through broader social and cultural transformation have often overlapped with those of the school-focused activists, but they have also come to loggerheads—as they have done most recently.

Understanding that history helps explain why the primary division over education reform is not between Republicans and Democrats but between those who work inside schools and those who make policy for those schools on the state and federal level.

Both the reformer politicians and the school-based educators contribute important perspectives that are grounded in historical experience. At stake on both sides is the question—so foundational to the meaning of American democracy and society—of what role the schools play in creating equality of opportunity for all Americans.

Schools, Opportunity, and (In) Equality

No Child Left Behind is an expression of the widespread American idea that education is key to opportunity in America, and in this sense it is part of a tradition that goes back to the founding of public school systems in the early nineteenth century.

The "father" of public education, Horace Mann of Massachusetts, saw many purposes for state-supported school systems, including the Jeffersonian idea of making educated citizens for democracy. But perhaps his most enduring idea was that schools would be a "great equalizer of the conditions of men." Education "does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich," wrote Mann; "it prevents being poor."

The idea of schools as a social equalizer has been a powerful one in the United States. However, it has also fueled a sense of disappointment among many Americans for whom education did not pave the way to equality and opportunity—in particular, among racial minorities and those of low socioeconomic status.

The difference between the ideal of American public education and its often disappointing realities can best be brought into focus by looking at the experience of African Americans. Even as Horace Mann pioneered the notion of free public education in the mid-19th century, most blacks were not only denied an avenue of social advancement through education, but were stigmatized as an intellectually inferior people.

As a result, educational achievement has been a core value and political goal for African Americans, especially since emancipation. As the historian James Anderson and others have shown, academic achievement—particularly the acquisition of literacy—was a way for African Americans to transcend racist assumptions and to assert themselves as free and equal citizens.

The abolition of slavery brought significant progress in the African-American quest for education and literacy, but blacks continued to find their educational opportunities to be seriously limited. In the North as well as the South, many attended segregated schools, which, contrary to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, were not "equal" in terms of resources. Meanwhile, those who attended integrated schools (mainly at the junior and senior high-school level in the North) were often steered into separate, non-academic curricular tracks—a practice that was reinforced by the rise of racially biased IQ tests.

In 1935, the African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois expressed the frustration of many blacks over their dismal educational options. Segregated schools had inadequate facilities, poor salaries, and teachers of uneven quality—but at least black teachers treated black students "like human beings."

Just a few decades after co-founding the NAACP on an integrationist platform, DuBois concluded that it was better for black students to be taught by members of their own race than to enter white-run schools and be made into "doormats to be spit and trampled upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers, whose sole claim to superiority is ability to kick 'niggers' when they are down."

DuBois's reluctant rejection of integrated schooling got him kicked out of the NAACP. Still, his sentiments were shared by many African Americans whose children fell victim to low expectations in white-run schools.

Ruth Wright Hayre was a leading black educator in Philadelphia from the 1940s through the 1990s. She recalls how her high school guidance counselor tried to steer her away from a college-prep program and into home economics because, the counselor said, there were "just not any opportunities for colored girls for scholarships or professional jobs."

Later, as one of only two black teachers at Sulzberger Junior High School in the 1950s, Hayre bristled when white colleagues openly disparaged black students in her presence: "You can't teach them anything," they would say; "I'm going to transfer where I can teach children, instead of animals."

African-American educators like Ruth Hayre devoted their lives to raising expectations of black students and fulfilling the dream of social advancement through education. As of the mid-twentieth century, though, the public schools were not an "equalizer" in the way Horace Mann had envisioned, so much as an obstacle to true equality.

Education in the Age of Racial Liberalism: 1940s-1980

The blatantly unequal academic expectations that had dominated the history of public schooling began to come under wider criticism in the 1940s, a shift that gained powerful momentum in the 1960s, and eventually helped fuel the creation of No Child Left Behind.

Changes in education grew out of larger social changes, especially since World War II. From the 1920s through the 1960s, millions of southern blacks migrated to the nation's big cities, leading to a transformation of race relations and urban schools. African Americans sought new opportunities in urban workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. White residents fought hard to exclude them. [For more on this process, see the recent Origins article on Detroit and the Fate of Urban America .]

As the cities became a racial battleground, the combination of liberal social science and the war against Hitler's genocidal racism did much to discredit the racist ideologies (that is, biological explanations of racial inequality) that had dominated American society since slavery and Reconstruction. In public life (though not among all citizens and communities), racism gave way to a new "racial liberalism": an increasingly widespread acceptance that it was time to begin to address the civil rights agenda, to do away with segregation, and to stop openly expounding racist justifications for policy.

The shift from racism to racial liberalism was epitomized by the massive study of American race relations, An American Dilemma, published in 1944. Sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and led by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma defined racial inequality as a vicious circle of white "prejudice" and black cultural "pathology." Inequality went from being an inevitable condition to one that could be altered—especially through education.

Postwar liberals thus rejected the biological racism of the early twentieth-century and replaced it with an emphasis on the educability of all children, regardless of racial or social class background.

Out of this milieu came the "compensatory education" programs that became a key element of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" (including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESEA, the forerunner of NCLB). Compensatory education was based on the idea that low achievement among urban black children was not a matter of race, per se, but a problem of poverty and social isolation in declining urban environments. It was up to the schools to "compensate" for the educational and cultural "deprivation" of children in the "ghetto."

As American politicians and educators focused attention on what they saw as the social and cultural causes of achievement gaps, however, black activists and educators increasingly pointed a finger at white-run schools to explain why African-American performance lagged.

In 1966, for instance, activists in Oakland, California formed the Ad Hoc Committee for Quality Education and began to publicize what came to be known as the "achievement gap": students in predominantly black schools had less than half the average percentile rank of their counterparts at all-white schools on standardized math and reading tests. Poor students, regardless of race, actually tested worse as they advanced from grade to grade.

In a report on their findings, the Oakland activists quoted education critic John Holt to suggest that the schools themselves were to blame for unequal achievement: "The conventional wisdom of our day has it that…the children's lack of ability and skill is not their fault, but the fault of their environment, their neighborhoods, above all their homes and families. . . The diagnosis is false. The most important reasons for the failure of slum children's education lie not in the children but in the schools."

The impulse to hold schools responsible for student achievement was also a major factor in one of the most notorious educational conflicts of the 1960s, the battle for "community control" of the schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of New York City.

In one sense, Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a power struggle: black parents and community activists gained a measure of "local control" over their neighborhood schools and used it to fire white teachers who were members of the United Federation of Teachers. (After a series of strikes that divided white and black New Yorkers as bitterly as any event of the 1960s, the UFT prevailed in re-instating the teachers.)

But "community control" was not just about power; it was also a struggle over who was responsible for low achievement. Black students were not learning in white-run schools, and in New York City and other urban centers, African Americans believed that more pro-active and responsive leadership would make the difference.

African-American educator Marcus Foster, of Philadelphia, captured this emerging sense of accountability when he wrote, "Inner city folks . . . want people in there who get the job done, who get youngsters learning no matter what it takes. They won't be interested in beautiful theories that explain why the task is impossible. The people believe that the job can be done. And they want it done now."

From Reagan to NCLB

Education policy since the Reagan years is often described in terms of a shift from "equity to excellence"—that is, a shift from desegregation and other policies aimed explicitly at racial equality, to a focus on academic achievement and standards. This is true in significant ways. No Child Left Behind, with its focus on holding schools accountable for measurable results (including the ultimate penalty of shutting down chronically low-performing schools), represented a triumph for those who came to apply a bottom-line business mentality to the world of education.

But it is also true that the struggles of the 1960s were about "excellence" all along—excellence and higher achievement for all students, including many who previously had been written off as uneducable.

Echoes of the 1960s were plain to see in the passage of No Child Left Behind. When George W. Bush decried "the soft bigotry of low expectations"—when he and the Congress created a law that broke down achievement data by race and socioeconomic status in order to shine a light on achievement gaps—they took their cues and rhetoric from black educators and activists in the civil rights era.

That is not to say NCLB has been a cause for celebration among those who fought for equal educational opportunity in the 1960s—or for many other people. The law has been tremendously unpopular for many reasons.

Among the most important: it established what nearly everyone saw as an impossible deadline (2014) for all students to test at a "proficient" level. It narrowed the curriculum by prioritizing basic skills in math and reading to the exclusion of nearly every other subject. It led many states to "dumb-down" their tests in order to reduce the number of "failing" schools. And, even with such downward pressure on standards, it led to the labeling of one in three American schools (including many high-functioning ones) as failing.

NCLB has also failed to produce big improvements in student achievement or in racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes referred to as the "nation's report card," math and reading scores for both blacks and whites showed modest gains from 2003-2007—but the gains were smaller than those made in the three years prior to implementation of NCLB.

Roughly two-thirds of American students are still not "proficient" as defined by NAEP (which most serious observers believe to be a more reliable standard than the widely varying state tests).

Meanwhile, the gap between black and white scores was narrowing at a faster rate in the three years before NCLB than in the years since—and it is still a substantial gap (at least 26 points on a 0-500 scale, in all subjects, at each tested grade level).

And yet, despite NCLB's failure to make a dent in the achievement gap, its declared focus on this goal has taken a firm hold in national debates over school reform, regardless of the shift from a Republican to a Democratic administration. In those debates, in fact, the very designation of "reformer" now tends to be reserved for those who advocate standardized testing to hold schools accountable for reducing or ending the achievement gap. The "reformers" are described, and they describe themselves, as being in opposition to excuse-making "traditionalists"—that is, teachers, their unions, and other supposed defenders of a failed system.

The continuing cachet of "accountability," and the aura of civil rights activism that surrounds it, is strikingly evident in the work of a national advocacy group called the Education Equality Project (EEP). EEP was founded during the 2008 presidential campaign by a group of urban school superintendents, political figures, and education activists who wanted to influence the future of No Child Left Behind and other policies of the next president. In particular, EEP is dedicated to "one clear goal: Close the achievement gap in public education now."

EEP ties this goal to a larger history of African-American struggle in education. Its number one Statement of Principle reads: "Fifty-six years after Brown vs. Board of Education, forty-two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and twenty-seven years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, we must confront a shameful national reality: If you are an African American or Latino child in this country, the probability is high that our public education system will fail you, that you will not graduate from high school, that your ability to function successfully in the twenty-first century economy will be limited, and that you will have no real prospect of achieving the American dream."

Or, as EEP co-founder Al Sharpton has said, the achievement gap is "the civil rights issue of the 21st century."

Sharpton has been joined by more than 140 signatories to the Education Equality Project. Two of them—Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings—are the Secretaries of Education who implemented No Child Left Behind during the Bush years. Another signer is the current Secretary, Arne Duncan.

How do the "reformers" who comprise EEP propose to end the achievement gap? Nearly all of the organization's proposed steps focus on factors within schools and school systems—for instance, an effective teacher in every classroom (and fewer union restrictions on firing ineffective ones); expansion of charter school options for parents; and the need to hold teachers, principals, and administrators "accountable for student progress."

The reformers' impatience with educators is understandable, considering the long history of low expectations and underachievement among working class students and racial minorities—and the inspiring example of individual schools and educators that do produce greater-than-expected achievement for such students.

Still, as the critique of low expectations gained steam in the 1960s, so did another current of thought and research that calls into question the accountability agenda ushered in by No Child Left Behind.

The Limits of School Reform

NCLB ignored what more than fifty years of social science research has made clear: what goes on outside of schools, in homes and neighborhoods and social and economic life, is as important to school achievement, if not more so, than what goes on inside.

A defining moment in the development of this research was a massive U.S. government study, Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966) — better known as the Coleman Report, after lead researcher James Coleman. The Coleman Report suggested that factors associated with a child's family and social class background—the education level of the parents, for example, or the degree of exposure to books and other cultural materials in the home and community—had a greater impact on achievement than did resource "inputs" like the amount of school funding or the quality of the facilities.

The Coleman Report echoed the "cultural deprivation" thesis, which had been controversial but persistently influential since the early 1960s. As such, it drew criticism from some black activists and critics who saw it as "blaming the victims" of racially biased schools and an unequal social system.

Analysts still debate the interplay between family background, social structure, and educational achievement. However, since the 1960s, historians and sociologists have reinforced the basic thrust of the Coleman Report, emphasizing social and structural forces that shape the lives—and the educational achievement—of racial minorities and low-income students.

After World War II, de-industrialization and other aspects of the "urban crisis" trapped many African-American and Latino families in urban poverty, and the effects of poverty—for example, inadequate nutrition and pediatric care, or greater transiency due to unstable housing—have had a negative impact on student performance in school.

At the same time, racial minority and low-income students have tended to lack what sociologists call "cultural capital"—the knowledge, skills, resources, and attitudes that some parents (especially those who know the unwritten codes of the dominant culture and can afford such amenities as summer camps and private lessons) are able to pass on to their children to ensure their academic success.

The social science research that has followed from the Coleman Report is, in a sense, a corrective to Horace Mann: it has showed that schools are not, in fact, the "great equalizer"—at least not by themselves.

Even among charter schools that have been celebrated for making inroads on the achievement gap, the lesson seems to be that only unprecedented commitments of resources will do the trick.

In the one-hundred-block area of New York City known as the "Harlem Children's Zone," for instance, Promise Academy charter schools do not raise achievement by themselves; they are part of a more ambitious social experiment that provides health clinics, parenting workshops, and other community services aimed at supporting children from birth through college graduation.

The nationwide KIPP schools network, or "Knowledge is Power Program," thrives on extended school days, after-school tutoring, Saturday sessions, and summer school. Students have their teachers' cell phone numbers and are obligated to call them at night when they get stuck on a homework problem. Turnover is high among the young, enthusiastic teachers the schools tend to attract. As critics tend to point out, KIPP is impressive, but it could not be replicated on a large scale without a massive commitment of resources.

Just as the accountability agenda is well-expressed by the Education Equality Project, the legacy of social research on achievement gaps is captured in an initiative entitled the "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." Like the Education Equality Project, "Broader, Bolder" emerged during the presidential campaign of 2008, and it gained attention because of the list of educational luminaries who signed on in support. (In this case the list was skewed more toward researchers than to politicians and other "reformers.")

Some people—notably Education Secretary Arne Duncan—have signed both statements. And indeed there is overlap, especially in the passion with which both groups call for an end to racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

But whereas EEP calls on schools and school systems to eliminate the achievement gap, the "Broader, Bolder" group emphasizes that school improvement strategies, by themselves, are inadequate. We will not break the enduring correlation between socioeconomic disadvantage and low student achievement, they argue, unless we combine school reform with policies that improve the health, the early childhood learning, and the out-of-school experiences of underachieving children. Such policies, needless to say, are expensive—much more expensive than annual standardized testing.

In addition to spotlighting a wide range of factors that influence school achievement, the "Broader Bolder" proposals raise important questions about the very definition of educational "achievement." Arguing that NCLB has narrowed that definition to basic skills and cognitive growth, they call for an expanded sense of purpose in education, one that includes the development of physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills.

Obama's "Blueprint for Reform"

The Obama administration's Blueprint for revamping NCLB contains a number of proposed changes. One of Duncan's main priorities has been to shift from punishments to incentives. Under the new plan, annual testing in math and reading would continue, but only the bottom 10 percent of all schools would face "warnings" or sanctions (including, in many cases, the firing of all staff). The other 90 percent—many of which have been declared "failing" under the current law—would enjoy greater flexibility and incentives to broaden their curricula.

Meanwhile, the Blueprint also recognizes the impact of economic disadvantage on achievement, in the form of incentives for creating "Promise Neighborhoods" modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone.

And yet, as critics such as Richard Rothstein (a "Broader, Bolder" advocate) have pointed out, the part about "Promise Neighborhoods" is contradicted by the part about getting tougher on the nation's worst schools. Those lowest performing schools have the highest concentration of disadvantaged students; according to the logic of "Promise Neighborhoods," they need extensive services in order to succeed. Yet, regardless of whether they get such services, the staff is likely to be fired if test scores do not show improvement.

In this sense, the Obama Blueprint seems to maintain the NCLB practice of holding educators solely responsible for academic achievement (the big difference being that middle-class schools will now be under less pressure).

In fact, in one key respect the Obama Administration's brand of accountability goes a step further than NCLB: it seeks to tie teacher evaluation directly to standardized test scores. Already, under the administration's much touted $4 billion "Race to the Top" program, the chance to win competitive grants has been limited to states that are willing to buck the teachers unions on this controversial new policy.

As we've seen, the belief that public schools should be social "equalizers" is rooted deeply in U.S. history—in the vision of Horace Mann and, more recently, in the unwillingness of the civil rights movement to let schools off the hook for achievement gaps.

Arne Duncan captures that view when he says that the children in the low-performing schools "can't wait for incremental reform. They need radical change right now—new leadership, new staff, and a whole new educational approach…we have a moral obligation to save those kids."

No one would argue with that. The question that has plagued education reform for over half a century has been whether that "whole new educational approach" comes only inside the school building, or in attempts to deal with the larger questions of socio-economic inequality. 

Kantor, Harvey and Robert Lowe. "From New Deal to No Deal: No Child Left Behind and the Devolution of Responsibility for Equal Opportunity." Harvard Educational Review 76, no. 4 (2006): 474-502.

Moss, Hilary J. Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America . Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009.

Neckerman, Kathryn M. Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education . Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007.

Noguera, Pedro A. and Jean Yonemura Wing. Unfinished Business: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap in Our Schools . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.

Payne, Charles M. So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2008.

Perry, Theresa. "Up From the Parched Earth: Toward a Theory of African-American Achievement." In Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students . Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education . New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Rothstein, Richard. Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap . Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004.

Spencer, John. "A 'New Breed' of Principal: Marcus Foster and Urban School Reform in the United States, 1966-1969." Journal of Educational Administration and History 41, no. 3 (2009): 285-300.

Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

Tough, Paul. Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.

Urban, Wayne J. and Jennings L. Wagoner Jr. American Education: A History . 4th ed. Routledge, 2008.

U.S. Department of Education, "Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act." http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/index.html [Accessed May 14, 2010].

• Share full article

The Address Has Changed. The Spots Remain the Same.

In a Manhattan apartment festooned with animal prints, Renée Demsey, 92, adapts to her newly single life.

Renée Demsey in her one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is a decorative painter and was an artist-in-residence at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1970s and ’80s. “Renée’s paintings are like taking a happy pill,” a company executive said. Credit...

Supported by

By Shivani Vora

Photographs by George Etheredge

• Aug. 28, 2024

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

With her leopard-patterned pants, chunky brown necklaces and gumball-size gold cocktail rings, Renée Demsey, 92, is as maximalist and vivacious as her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

Ms. Demsey, a decorative painter, was an artist-in-residence at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1970s and ’80s. Last year, she participated in a group exhibition at the department store, and her bright renderings of flowers and people sell on sites like 1stDibs. “Call it my artsy side, but I like dramatic,” she said. “Everything has to be dramatic.”

According to Linda Fargo, the senior vice president of the fashion office and director of women’s fashion and store presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, “To have Renée back to be part of a group show is like coming full circle. Renée’s paintings are like taking a happy pill.”

She has lived in the senior living community Sunrise at East 56th Street since late 2023, in an approximately 700-square-foot ode to eclecticism consisting of a bedroom, bathroom, dressing area and living room. A leopard-print carpet covers it all. The terrace that runs along the entire length is a biophilic wonderland of azaleas, boxwoods, hollies and euonymus shrubs.

The home, a rental, like all Sunrise apartments, marks the first time in Ms. Demsey’s nine-decade-plus existence that she has inhabited a place that she can claim as entirely her own. “I went from living with my parents to getting married when I was 20 and living with my husband for almost 70 years,” she said.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Advertisement