Most educational professionals would agree that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has good points, bad points, and even a few contradictory points. After complications arose with NCLB when government officials were debating over the education portion of last year's economic stimulus package, people began to truly acknowledge that the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act wasn't going according to plan. (Read the Education Topics blog post from 27 January 2010 or follow this link to see one example).

This year, Obama's administration is going to make some necessary and (hopefully) practical changes to the somewhat infamous 2002 law, as discussed in "Administration pushes to rework No Child Left Behind law." In this article, Washington Post writer Nick Anderson briefly examines issues caused by NCLB, changes that Obama’s administration have already made, and changes that may be coming in 2010.

One of the most prominent issues with NCLB is that it punishes schools that do not produce high student scores on standardized tests. The New York Times editorial "A Vital Boost for Education" specifically says that poor and minority schools do not get "a fair share of experienced, qualified teachers." Although the No Child Left Behind Act requires states to disperse good teachers into poorer districts, that part of the law had not been effectively enforced as of last year, seven years after the law was put into place. Poor and minority schools cannot be expected to produce high scores on standardized tests without qualified teachers. Disadvantaged schools should not be punished under NCLB for lacking resources that they were supposedly granted under NCLB.

Although Obama's "Race to the Top" program has problems of its own, the "Race to the Top" program is an improvement over No Child Left Behind because it uses funds strictly as a reward for schools that meet federal standards rather than punishing schools that haven't yet received the benefits that No Child Left Behind was supposed to provide.

Obama’s administration will be hard-pressed to pick out the best measures within NCLB and expand on them while weeding out the most problematic parts of NCLB, but the “Race to the Top” program shows that they are starting to look at federal education law in a more realistic light. Using money as a positive reinforcement may encourage schools in poorer districts to strive towards meeting federal standards. So far, underprivileged schools have just been punished for being underprivileged.