Putting No Child Left Behind behind Us: Rethinking Education and Inequality

This essay examines four books that may offer some insight into the post-No Child Left Behind (NCLB) discussion about educational policy, reform, and performance. Collectively The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling, by Jal Mehta, Too Many Children Left Behind: The US Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective, by Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, by Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond, and Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam, by Bowen Paulle, show that concerns with school accountability are now embedded in broader discussions about the importance of investing in children, families, and schools and how the internal dynamics of schools either support or frustrate those investments. We hope that these works represent a trend toward less ahistorical and reductionist and more empirically grounded thinking than that which drove NCLB.