Comment & Debate
No Child Left Behind had some significant problems when it was first implemented under the Bush administration. But this had much more to do with insufficient funding than with any inadequacies of the program itself. Barack Obama recognized as much in the following remark: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong. […] We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind. We must provide the funding we were promised, give our states the resources they need and finally meet our commitment to special education.”[1]