The Myth of the 1,000-page No Child Left Behind Act

I've been reading the posts in Bridging Differences, the new Diane Ravitch / Deborah Meier blog over at Ed Week. It's interesting so far, but Meier makes one minor point that's worth debunking, just because it gets said a lot and is completely wrong:

The Senate passed the latest version of Title I (NCLB)—all thousand unread pages—without considering the side effects of their grandiose ideas.

I bought my copy of NCLB in 2002, in the store on the first floor of the Government Printing Office headquarters on North Capitol Street, here in Washington, DC. It's 669 pages long, front to back. Other editions might be longer because of page and font size or what have you. In any case, it's long.

But here's the thing: the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001," as it's officially called, reauthorized the entire Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That includes nearly every federal K-12 law outside of special education and vocational education (which are covered under separate Acts) passed by Congress since ESEA was originally enacted over forty years ago, in 1965.

Meier refers to ESEA Title I, the biggest and most important federal K-12 program serving low-income students. But ESEA has nine other Titles. They authorize a wide array of programs, from big initiatives focused on teacher quality and school technology to little programs like "Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners," which is designed to "develop innovative culturally based educational programs, cultural exchanges and internships and apprentice programs to assist Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and children and families of Massachusetts linked by history and tradition, to learn about their shared culture and tradition."

That would be Title V, Part D, Subpart 12. Page 420 in my copy. In other words, the vast majority of NCLB's 1,000 or 669 or whatever pages aren't devoted to new law; they're devoted to reprinting old laws, many of which were enacted a long time ago.

Title I, Part A--which is what most people mean when they refer to "NCLB"--runs 91 pages. The really controversial testing and accountability provisions are only a subset of that.

If you take Meier's assertion at face value, you'd think that in a fit of hubris, Congress invented some kind of absurdly mammoth and complex education law out of whole cloth in 2001. NCLB detractors often cite the law's length as prima facie evidence against it.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize NCLB, but size really isn't one of them.