In an article written by Claudia Wallis for the June 8th issue of Time Magazine, Susan Neuman, the former Assistant Secretary for Elementary & Secondary Education during George W. Bush’s first term, reveals that NCLB served as a Trojan horse for the school choice agenda and a way to expose the failure of public education. She states, “There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization.” While she and a number of others argued that many schools would fail to reach the NCLB goals and needed more flexibility while making improvements, they were ignored.
The current Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has modified the NCLB approach to school accountability by going to the ‘growth model.’ Ms. Neuman says, “Going to the growth models is the right way to go. I wish it had come earlier. It didn’t because we were trying to be too tough. Vilifying teachers and saying we are going to shame them was not the right approach. There’s so much anger that it (NCLB) might not be fixable.”