Children Left Behind by NCLB

Although the controversy surrounding the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program is usually portrayed as a classic clash of conservative and liberal political philosophies, dissatisfaction with NCLB is spreading across philosophical lines.

“As one who had a kid in school when No Child Left Behind began, I want it abolished,” libertarian author Charles Murray said recently at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). A scholar at AEI, Murray wrote The Bell Curve, a controversial book published 12 years ago that examined I. Q. differences across racial lines.

“The very slogan No Child Left Behind is inane,” James R. Flynn, a professor emeritus at the University of Otago (New Zealand) said at the same AEI event. “Left behind what?” Dr. Flynn describes himself as a socialist.

“The people who put that up were from Lake Woebegone where all the kids are above average,” Murray told me when the panel concluded. He related the experiences his child’s instructors had at Brunswick High School in Maryland.

“The teachers are demoralized,” he said. “They spend all their time on test drills.”

“They devote more and more resources to the worst performing kids,” he elaborated. “I happen to think that smart kids have a right to learn too.”

His statist counterpart does not offer a markedly dissimilar assessment. “You can put a lot of money into schools but if you are in a home where no one reads and a peer group that discourages it, improvements in schools are good but they will only take you so far,” Dr. Flynn told the crowd at AEI.

The racial aspect of NCLB was explicit from the get-go as President Bush himself spoke repeatedly of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in promoting the plan. Murray and Dr. Flynn actually appeared at AEI on a forum in which they discussed black and white I. Q. differences.

“States inflate scores and downplay racial differences because of what is at stake in No Child Left Behind,” Murray said. Both men agreed that the I. Q. gap between blacks and whites narrowed in the last 100 years. “The gap did narrow in the twentieth century but the gap has stalled for persons born since the 1970s,” Murray argued. Murray has done extensive research on the effects of the federal government’s anti-poverty programs.

“Environmental variables in the 1960s when the gap was narrowing were awful” for blacks, Murray noted. This confluence would have left American blacks making their biggest I. Q. gains before Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs got up to speed and, significantly, before Republican President Richard Nixon signed the first affirmative action order.

Even the self-proclaimed leftist Dr. Flynn was hard pressed to discern any positive outcomes from this expansion of the federal government. “I can’t see any environmental progress for blacks in the last 30 to 40 years,” Dr. Flynn observed. “Sixty percent of black mothers are single.”

“Babies in welfare households are exposed to 600 words a day while babies in non-welfare households are exposed to 2,500 words a day,” Dr. Flynn told the audience. But Murray pointed out that, “Vocabulary depends not on whether children hear the words but on whether they ask what they mean.”

Murray himself did note that “graduation rates from high school for blacks were 30 to 40 percent in the 1960s compared to 80 percent now.” Nonetheless, schools deteriorated during the interregnum and, as can be gauged by standardized test results, so did the instruction they provide.

“The only reason why the [I.Q.] gap has been diminishing is because whites have been doing worse,” Murray said. Dr. Flynn contends that this gap is of more than passing academic interest because of the notable challenges faced by blacks in the United States.

“My people, the Irish, don’t get upset about our own I. Q. gap with the Chinese,” Dr. Flynn observed wryly. “We say, ‘Why can’t you be happy with this Civil Service job and hang out in pubs every night and talk politics?’”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.