To the Editor:
Re “‘No Child Left Behind’ Nostalgia Is Delusional,” by Ross Wiener (Opinion guest essay, June 24):
In his essay on the legacy of the No Child Left Behind policy, Mr. Wiener creates a false choice between academic achievement and everything else we want for students: purpose, character and civic engagement. Framing the issue around nostalgia misses the point entirely: Wanting accountability is not a longing for the past but a recognition that when systems are held responsible for results, students benefit.
Reading and math are not competing with the outcomes Mr. Wiener rightly values, but rather foundational to them. The vision of schools that cultivate meaning, belonging and civic commitment requires students who can actually read.
The data are damning. Eighth-grade reading scores are at their lowest level in more than 30 years. This is not an abstract metric. It is a signal that we are failing real children — most of them low-income students and students of color.
Accountability is about holding systems and adults responsible for results. Measurement is how we know whether we are making progress. I saw this when my son’s elementary school missed its reading goals in 2008. The community took it seriously, marshaled resources and changed course.
We are not choosing between academic rigor and human flourishing. We are choosing whether to take seriously our obligation to deliver both.
Cheryl Oldham Washington The writer is an executive vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who has worked at the U.S. Department of Education and the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
To the Editor:
Ross Wiener’s essay about the legacy of No Child Left Behind policy makes a compelling case for an education system that truly prepares students for the future. Learning should move beyond rote memorization and instead be driven by student interests, grounded in real-world challenges and designed to build both academic and social-emotional skills.
I was a founding teacher at Springfield Renaissance School and led the Greenprint audit project that Mr. Wiener praises. The students involved in the project took on real jobs, engaged in community dialogue and developed the confidence to use their voices beyond the classroom — an experience with lasting impact. That work now informs my role at New York City Outward Bound Schools, where we bring this kind of deeper learning to nearly 10,000 public school students across the city.
New York State’s rollout of its Portrait of a Graduate framework offers a timely opportunity to expand this approach. Alternatives to Regents exams, such as performance-based assessments, ask students to research, write and defend original ideas, building the skills they will need in college, career and civic life.
Even in the wake of No Child Left Behind, schools across the country are proving that this kind of authentic and future-focused learning is not only possible but essential as well.
Aurora Kushner New York The writer is the vice president of school programming and impact at New York City Outward Bound Schools.
To the Editor:
As a teacher with 41 years of experience at the elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels, I can attest that No Child Left Behind had a number of flaws that ultimately doomed this attempt at education reform.
Its goal of 100 percent efficiency in math and reading by 2014 was totally unrealistic, since there will always be students who do not take school seriously. On test days there were even some students who would blow off the tests and put anything down on the answer key.
Schools were unnecessarily put under pressure. Designated groups or subgroups were expected to reach designated goals, and failure to do so reflected badly on the school even if the rest of the student body did extremely well. As a result, some states gamed the system, making the state tests easier or doctoring the numbers, especially the number of dropouts.
Given the obvious dilemmas that No Child Left Behind presented, we certainly do not need to return to it or glorify it.
Larry Vigon Chicago
To the Editor:
I would add to Ross Wiener’s critique that the No Child Left Behind policy in conjunction with the earlier back-to-basics movement has led to a large democracy gap in the American education landscape.
In the 19th century and for most of the 20th, school was, in effect, this nation’s designated teacher of democracy. The pressure on our public school system to devote ever more time to meeting test standards has meant less time spent initiating each new generation into our cherished democratic form of government and way of life.
If belief in and love of democracy were inborn traits, I would not be concerned. They are, however, acquired characteristics. Had we asked some other institution to step into the breach and become our nation’s head democracy teacher, I would not be so worried either. But we did not.
Unfortunately, Mr. Wiener is right: Children reading a grade lower than in 2015 is the least of our problems.
Jane Roland Martin Lexington, Mass. The writer is an emerita professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
To the Editor:
It’s really quite simple: If you are testing, you are not teaching. If you strip billions of dollars from our great universities and colleges that prepare teachers of reading and language arts because of a dip in the birthrate and policies that impede foreign students, there will be a severe negative effect on literacy education in America.
Allen Berger Savannah, Ga. The writer is an emeritus professor of reading and writing at Miami University in Ohio and a former editor of many education publications.
Watergate as Symbol
To the Editor:
Re “Watergate Today as a Blip of a Story? Vance Might Not Be Entirely Wrong” (news analysis, June 29):
Your excellent article about Vice President JD Vance’s remarks points to something deeper than historical revisionism. Mr. Vance is attempting to neutralize Watergate not by disproving it but by changing its symbolic meaning.
For half a century, Watergate has functioned as a civic morality tale — a demonstration that no president stands above the law. By recasting it as merely another episode of partisan conflict or as the product of a “deep state” conspiracy, he seeks to strip it of that moral authority.
The struggle is therefore not over the historical facts but over the collective memory that underwrites democratic accountability. If Watergate ceases to signify a constitutional breach and becomes simply another partisan narrative, one of the central moral reference points of American democracy will have been dissolved.
Jeffrey C. Alexander New Haven, Conn. The writer is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University.
To the Editor:
That Vice President JD Vance may be correct that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story” is a tragic commentary on how far we have fallen from recognizing that a criminal act should be disqualifying for any federal official, no less the president.
Mr. Vance is just acknowledging what we already knew: that President Trump has desensitized us to illegal and self-aggrandizing behavior by elected officials.
Lawrence Weisman Westport, Conn.