No Child Left Behind
Article
No Child Left Behind is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 18, 2021 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Programs like Common Core and No Child Left Behind”; “After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything”. It most often appears alongside Bryan Caplan, Montessori, The Case Against Education.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 18, 2021
- Last seen: June 27, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Bryan Caplan (2 shared issues)
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- Montessori (2 shared issues)
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- The Case Against Education (2 shared issues)
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- 10,000 hour rule (1 shared issues)
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- 2 Hour Learning, Inc (1 shared issues)
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- 2-hour Learning (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Amplifier (1 shared issues)
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- Alpha (1 shared issues)
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- Alpha Portal (1 shared issues)
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- Alpha Portal (1 shared issues)
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- Alpha Reads (1 shared issues)
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- Alpha School (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But then how do education reform efforts and charters produce such dramatic improvements? DeBoer's answer: by lying. Programs like Common Core and No Child Left Behind take credit for radically improving American education. But DeBoer shows they cook the books: most graduation rates have been improved by lowering standards for graduation; most test score improvements have come from warehousing bad students somewhere they don't take the tests. When charter schools have excelled, it's usually been by only accepting the easiest students (they’re not allowed to do this openly, but have ways to do it covertly), then attributing their great test scores to novel teaching methods. Most of this has been a colossal fraud, and the losers have been regular public school teachers, who get accused of laziness and inadequacy for failing to match the impressive-but-fake improvements of charter schools or "reformed" districts.
Inline links: have ways
“Powered by AI (not teachers).” If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical. Either Alpha is (a) another program for the affluent propped up by selection effects, or (b) a clever way to turn children into joyless speed‑reading calculators. Those were, more or less, the two critical camps that emerged when Alpha’s parent company was approved to launch the tuition‑free Arizona charter school this past January. Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be allowed to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do. I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was). Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on‑the‑ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper: Starting Point: My Assumptions: how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). WHAT is the existing education environment.