No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB

As the reauthorization of the nation’s seminal education law—the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—rapidly approaches, a team of respected education scholars and analysts assess how NCLB’s interventions for poorly-performing schools are actually working. Editors Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation pull no punches. In No Remedy Left Behind, seventeen education experts rigorously assess—across the nation’s states and school districts—the law’s public school choice requirement (which offers students enrolled in schools in need of improvement the opportunity to attend another school), its complex supplemental educational services provision (that is, free tutoring services offered to low-income students who attend failing schools), and its controversial “restructuring” mandate (which forces low-performing schools to plan and implement significant reforms). Throughout the volume, contributors inform us whether big-city school districts are complying with the law, whether low-performing schools are informing parents of their options, and whether reported problems are due to flawed federal implementation or a fundamentally flawed statute.