In the coming weeks, the 90ways Essay house will be running a feature on teaching from the perspective of teachers. Virtually the entire debate around the American education system is focused on students these days; and where we do talk about teachers, it's with abstract terms like "teacher quality" and "teacher effectiveness." And in many ways, that's probably a pretty good thing. Ultimately, the most important ingredient in any teaching relationship is the student. But, as we often do here on 90ways, we'd like to round out the discussion a bit. In our view, it's important to remember that the classroom is a collection of people, and it doesn't end with the front row of desks. Over the next few weeks, we'll talk public school, we'll talk private school, and we'll talk somewhere in between. We'll talk about first jobs, second jobs and third jobs. We'll talk about teachers exposing themselves and students saying, "I love you." But most of all, we'll talk about people.

Before we do that, though, it's time for another installment of Dissect-O-Stat. In recognition of the five year anniversary of No Child Left Behind, we'd like to take a look at exactly what constitutes a child who has been "left behind" and what progress the law has helped those children make.

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First, some history. During his 2000 election campaign, President Bush consistently touted his "Texas Miracle," a series of education reforms that helped dramatically decrease dropout rates and increase test scores across the state. When he took up residence in the White House, Bush brought Houston Superintendent Rod Paige with him to be Secretary of Education and to help him make good on education reform promises made during the election. Paige's work in Houston became a model for many of the mandates included in the 670 pages that make up NCLB.

Riding a tide of bipartisan support in the wake of 9/11, NCLB was passed in December of 2001 with a 381-41 vote in the House and an 87-10 vote in the Senate. The first three years of the law, leading up to the 2004 election, were dedicated to the basics: NCLB requires every teacher to meet a certain set of qualification; it prohibits teachers from using methods that have not been "scientifically tested;" and it penalizes schools if every group of students does not meet ever-increasing test score targets. The overriding theme: achievement through standards, though what those standards are, wasn't entirely clear.

In August of 2004, 60 Minutes and the New York Times ran a series of investigative reports in which some officials in the Houston School District, most notably Assistant Principal Robert Kimball, reported that the "Texas Miracle" was essentially based on cooked books and rigged test scores. Other officials denied the charges, stating that reporting inaccuracies, including the misclassification of some 3,000 students who the left school system in 2001, were the result of sloppy bookkeeping and not fraud.

Even though they were revealed only months before the 2004 Presidential election, the shenanigans in Texas didn't become much of an election issue because of Iraq and because, as Linda Perlstein points out, John Kerry's stance on education reform was essentially the same as Bush's: he believed in test-based, out-comes driven standards. Substantively, Kerry did not seize the opportunity to push the debate beyond the basics.

In 2005, NCLB produced a new controversy around the certainty of its results. As Sam Dillon wrote in the New York Times, "After Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math this year, state officials at a jubilant news conference called the results a 'cause for celebration.' Eighty-seven percent of students performed at or above the proficiency level. But when the federal government made public the findings of its own tests last month, the results were startlingly different: only 21 percent of Tennessee's eighth graders were considered proficient in math."

On the one hand, these results in Tennessee and the "misclassification" in Texas would indicate that standards-based systems like NCLB provide a strong incentive to cheat. And it doesn't take an act of Congress to tell you that cheaters never win. But in the case of Tennessee, we haven't necessarily learned that there was cheating going on. All we've learned is that a lot of kids who passed Tennessee's test didn't past the Feds' test. Does that mean the Federal test was set the bar higher? Probably. Does that mean the Federal test was a more accurate indicator of how well-educated students in Tennessee are? Or how well-prepared they are to succeed in life? Not necessarily.

When the Bush Administration introduced an education-reform bill with a strong emphasis on "scientifically tested" teaching and assessment methods, you had to be a bit skeptical. Since when did they care about science? And how much do you trust them to use it well here?

At the end of 2006, in preparation for the five-year anniversary, the White House released a Fact Sheet on NCLB. The sheet points out that the achievement gap between African American and white 9-year-olds narrowed by 5 points in math and 9 points in English. Even if we assume these statistics to be an accurate representation of the progress students have made, they still leave a lot of room for improvement. Even within the dictates of the law, American students have a long way to go: NCLB calls for the achievement gap to disappear by 2014.

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One of the most difficult things about NCLB is that nowhere in its 670 pages does it define the term "left behind." In Texas, children aren't left behind if they are accidentally identified as having "transferred schools" or "gone back to their home country." In Tennessee, very few children have been left behind. Unless, of course, you ask the Federal government. Snarky comments aside, it seems safe to assume that ultimately, "left behind" means not graduating from high school. It also seems that students can get "left behind" along the way by not passing proficiency tests in third, eighth, or tenth grade.

The problem is that many children, especially poor and minority children aren't being left behind. They're behind before they even start. Fifty percent of all children from low-income families start first grade two years behind their peers in preschool skills. Five-year-olds from low-income communities have one-fourth the vocabulary of their mid-income peers. The best predictor of whether a 10th grader is reading at grade level is whether or not she knew her alphabet at the age of 5.

The adage goes: before third grade, you learn to read; after third grade, you read to learn. While holding schools accountable for the education they are providing their students and setting achievement goals can be extremely valuable, NCLB has been misguided in its focus. Its first test, in the third grade, should actually be its last. By continuing to focus on standardized tests throughout secondary school, No Child Left Behind asks junior high and high schools students - and even more importantly their teachers - to stop thinking critically. It focuses only on learning to read, which we should have taken care of long before that.

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