No Child Left Behind tied part of a US school’s funding to how its pupils did on standardised tests in reading and maths. A school that kept missing its targets faced penalties that ran up to restructuring or closure.

Congress backed it by margins that now look unreal: 384 to 45 in the House of Representatives and 91 to 8 in the Senate. President George W. Bush signed it in 2002.

How the test scores reached the budget

The law set federal standards in reading and maths and checked them through testing across the country. Each school had to show Adequate Yearly Progress, a measure built from test scores, graduation rates where they applied, and figures such as attendance.

The measure did not stop at the whole school. It also looked at groups within it, split by race, income, English fluency and disability. A school could pass overall and still fail on one group.

The targets rose each year. Bush set the goal that every child in the country would be proficient in reading and maths by 2014.

What happened to a school that missed

The Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy lists the escalating penalties:

  • letting pupils transfer to a better-scoring school
  • offering free tutoring
  • in severe cases, restructuring or shutting the school

States faced federal audits and scrutiny of their own policies too.

Why teachers taught to the test

With funding and jobs on the line, teachers narrowed lessons towards what the tests covered, the Claremont paper argues. It found the effect was not all bad. Maths scores rose, most of all among pupils who had been doing poorly, while gains in reading and writing were small.

Teachers’ unions saw blame rather than help. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers said a later version of the plan gave teachers “100 percent of the responsibility” and “zero percent authority”.

How it ended

Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, called NCLB a “toxic brand”. In 2012 Obama began granting states waivers from its strictest rules, on condition they took up reforms such as the Common Core. In 2015 Congress replaced it with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which let states pick their own ways to hold schools to account.

Under that law, schools still report their progress to Washington.