CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – It seems like the entire education world has turned against the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” initiative, which was the first major effort by the federal government to impose academic accountability on public schools around the nation.

But Harvard University Professor Paul Peterson claims the law was much more effective than any education policy pursued by the Obama administration.

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As Newsmax summarized the situation in a recent article, “Once in office, (President) Obama dropped enforcement of most of the law’s main elements and granted waivers to states that volunteered for more lenient rules created by the Education Department.

“Meanwhile, the Senate Education Committee has passed a bill to allow students to hand in ‘portfolios’ or ‘projects’ instead of (taking) the standardized tests required (under NCLB). 

“And the House approved legislation in July that would allow state and local governments to come up with their own ways to evaluate school performance, instead of relying on the federal government.”

In other words, pretty much everyone is either telling the feds to stay out of K-12 education altogether, or loosen up on the pressure to force schools and students to perform better.

Peterson thinks they’re all mistaken. While NCLB may be unpopular, he offers statistics to prove that the program was working and American students were benefitting.

Peterson cites reports from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which said that among nine-year-olds between 1999 and 2008, Hispanic students improved 21 percentage points in standardized math test scores while black students improved 13 points and white students improved 11 points.

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In reading for the same age group, Hispanics improved 14 percentage points, blacks improved by 8 points and whites improved by 7 points.

Those numbers suggest that the much-publicized “achievement gap” between white and minority students was starting to shrink.

Since Obama has been in office and relaxed enforcement of NCLB standards, no gains higher than 2 percentage points have been recorded for any ethnic group, according to Peterson.

“Those remarkable numbers came to an end after the Obama administration took charge,” Peterson was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal, which first reported this story. “Given these numbers, the Obama administration’s current effort to suspend accountability provisions seems entirely misguided.

“Instead, the White House should extend the provisions of the original No Child Left Behind law by requiring high school students to meet similarly high standards. If we scrap student and teacher accountability, we are failing our students.”