What does the No Child Left Behind Act mean for school administrators?
The first thing it means for them is that every single child under their auspices now has to get major attention. Because it is no child left behind — even the ones most difficult to teach, even the ones with the limited English proficiency, even the ones who are disruptive in the classroom, even the ones who bring special education barriers to be overcome. So the first thing it means is an attitude that represents a determination to educate all of our kids. Let me see if I can put this in another context. Some years ago, management literature was dominated by a concept called Total Quality Management. That means fixing the production process so that defects are corrected before the product gets to the end of the pipeline. That’s kind of analogous to what we’re doing here. We’re switching to a zero-defect attitude and saying that each step along the teaching pipeline has to correct its own defects — so that when a person goes through the system and exits on the other end, they are assu
