Sometimes, despite best efforts by school districts, annual state test scores come in showing little or no improvement, no doubt in part because of unreadable books. Too often today, books are set years above actual average student reading levels because those books address the Common Core questions expected to be found on the state annual test. No Child Left Behind laid the groundwork for this problem, but the fact that NCLB is no longer technically in operation* has left a legacy that still impacts America’s schools.

Under No Child Left Behind, that lack of improvement  spelled trouble and then progressively deeper trouble for district and school administrators who could not hit targets. Repeated failures led to government sanctions up to and including governmental takeover of a school district. While the axe poised over our many failing school districts seldom fell, NCLB gave states the right to bring down that axe, after first sending consultants to help prepare remediation plans.

A few years back, I watched as the state of Illinois fired my district’s local school board and took over district management. Before the takeover, I had spent two years working on my school’s Building Leadership Team, a committee preparing remediation plans. We filled fat binders. Then we redid the plan in a new computer-based system called Rising Star. Afternoon after afternoon, whole days out for conferences later, we had created a plan that required manpower and funds which did not exist, but which met the approval of consultants who did not have to ensure the plan’s implementation.

Districts with scores at subterranean levels have been locked into required assemblies, forming multiple committees to solve the problem of resistant test scores. Especially in financially disadvantaged districts, resources have commonly been redeployed since money to add new resources can seldom be found. Ironically, time and money have often been stolen from instruction or actual class preparation as everyone went to more meetings.

Not only did the NCLB process lead to sometimes dubious uses of resources, the reasoning behind these frantic efforts was faulty. Districts were responding to a real government threat – but a threat based in a fundamental misconception. Under NCLB, scores were supposed to march steadily upward. But scores cannot always march steadily upward. In fact, scores SHOULD not march steadily upward. For example, a school that has added 25% more English language learners over a decade will be doing extremely well to hold scores steady. Rapidly rising poverty and/or mobility rates in a district also sink scores, absent interventions for which there may be little time and less money.

Test scores are neither the problem nor the solution in district’s with rapidly changing student bodies. They are merely indicators. Rather than indicating a need for “better teachers,” I submit that what these scores actually indicate is a need for a more effective war on poverty, combined with a recognition that immigration patterns may create falling scores that are nobody’s “fault.”

*Under NCLB, the year when all students were supposed to be at grade level came and went in 2014. While government leaders made a big deal about the end of NCLB, the truth was that NCLB had already ended in abysmal failure.