CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – These days, the No Child Left Behind education law has about as many fans as New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

But unlike A-Rod – who was unpopular even before the phrase “performance-enhancing drugs” entered the American lexicon – the Bush-era education law used to have many, many admirers. Eighty-nine percent of the entire U.S. Congress voted for NCLB, which became law in early 2002.

Lawmakers liked NCLB because it represented the first major effort by the federal government to impose academic accountability, through annual standardized testing, on public schools that received federal assistance.

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How things have changed.

Today, Democrats and their supporters in the Education Establishment routinely slam NCLB for its “test and punish” approach to education reform. They want to get rid of NCLB’s accountability measures for dysfunctional schools which, they claim, are little more than “shaming tactics.”

Republicans and Tea Party activists, on the other hand, say the law has forced states and school districts into playing “Mother, May I?” with the federal government, and want to re-establish local control over public education.

Members of both parties dismiss the law’s requirement that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014 as “unrealistic.” (That begs the question: Since when has Congress let reality get in its way?)

NCLB may be unpopular with the political class, but it still has some very impressive friends in the academic realm. One of them is Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Peterson recently wrote a convincing defense of No Child Left Behind for the Wall Street Journal, calling it one of the Bush administration’s “crowning achievements.”

Using recently released 2012 math and reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Peterson concludes that NCLB helped black and Hispanic students make “remarkable gains” in learning, and was actually closing the achievement gap between white and minority students.

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“For the first nine years, the average gains (in reading and math scores) were six points annually for African-Americans, five points for Hispanics and three points for whites,” Peterson writes. “Over that stretch, the test-score gap closed by two to three points each year, on average. While minority students did not attain the proficiency NCLB expected, the record shows steady positive momentum.”

That momentum came “to a virtual halt” after the Obama administration decided to stop enforcing “most of No Child’s key provisions and offered waivers to states that signed up for more lenient rules devised by the Education Department,” Peterson writes.

More than 40 states have taken the feds up on their waiver offer. As a result, academic gains “by all students range between minimal and nonexistent, and the black-white gap on test scores threatens to widen after having narrowed steadily over the previous nine years,” Peterson writes.

Penalties key to NCLB’s success

According to Peterson, minority students benefited under NCLB largely because the law forced schools to produce learning results – or face a series of penalties.

“Before No Child Left Behind, some states didn’t have an accountability system,” Peterson tells EAGnews. That allowed some schools to fail to deliver quality instruction for students year after year, with no consequences.

Other states did have ways of holding underperforming schools accountable before NCLB, but those penalties tended to be weaker than the federal ones, which got progressively more severe, Peterson says.

For example, schools in which students didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) in reading and math for two consecutive years were required to allow students to transfer to another in-district school and to provide them with transportation, to and fro.

The stiffest penalty was reserved for schools that didn’t make AYP five or more consecutive years. Those consequences ranged from turning the school over to a charter school operator or replacing the school’s teaching staff and principal.

The penalties may have been responsible for NCLB’s success, but they were also contributed to its undoing.

In March of 2011, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made headlines by warning that 82 percent of schools were failing to make AYP. (The actual number of schools that didn’t make AYP in 2011 was 48 percent.)

When President Barack Obama introduced the NCLB-waiver plan six months later, one analyst described the announcement as “the beginning of the end of the No Child era.”

Turning off the spotlight

The other key to NCLB’s success, according to Peterson, was the requirement that students’ test scores be made public. Letting parents and taxpayers know how much (or little) their students were learning in school put pressure on administrators and teachers to step up their game.

Annual testing led to the realization that each teacher’s classroom performance could be measured and tracked from year to year. That idea mushroomed into support for linking student test scores to teacher evaluations and establishing merit pay plans.

“Before No Child, schools didn’t have the data available to do that,” Peterson says.

But that transparency is being lost under the Obama administration’s waiver plan.

A recent Washington Post report explains how:

“The Education Department has been giving some states waivers from the education law’s requirements, including those to collect and publish data about students and then use the results to pinpoint problem schools. The resulting patchwork of rules — from Miami to Seattle — has given states more freedom to carry out plans to boost education but has allowed almost 2,300 schools to shed their label of seriously troubled, according to numbers compiled at the Campaign for High School Equity.”

As a result of the changes, “students who are at the highest risk of dropping out — those from poor families, students whose native language is not English, those with learning disabilities and minority students — are often no longer tracked as carefully as they were before Duncan began exempting states from some requirements if they promised to better prepare their students for college or careers,” the Post reports.

Without the spotlight created by public reporting, “schools are returning to their former practices,” Peterson says.

No Child Left Behind is still in effect in the handful of states that haven’t received waivers from the Obama administration. The law will remain on the books until Congress passes a different one.

Democrats and Republicans have both offered legislation to replace NCLB, but the parties can’t agree on a bill. Last week, the Education Department announced it will offer states another round of waivers, which will run through the spring of 2016, according to the Associated Press.