Education Sector Press Releases

For Immediate Release: November 13, 2007
Contact: Renée Rybak, 202.552.2853

Washington, D.C.—When policymakers in the White House and Congress wrote the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, their goal was to steadily raise the bar for academic achievement. But many states have undermined the spirit of the law by lowering achievement goals every year. A new report from Education Sector explains how these states are gaming NCLB's accountability system and doing so with the full approval of the U.S. Department of Education. 

"The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act," features a composite index of state rankings based on annual reports that states submit to the federal government detailing their progress under NCLB. Ideally, the index should show which states are doing the best job of educating their students. Instead, the index is more indicative of which states have simply chosen to define themselves as doing well. Education Sector first unveiled the Pangloss Index in a 2006 report "Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Progress Under NCLB."

In this new report, Research and Policy Manager Kevin Carey updates the index for 2007 and reveals that in some states, not much has changed: Wisconsin and Iowa still fill the top two slots, defining themselves as educational utopias, while Massachusetts, which is one of the highest-performing states nationally, is ranked near the bottom, holding itself to tougher standards.

But some states changed their rank substantially. And none increased its position more than Alabama, which jumped from 22nd to 5th. Carey chronicles Alabama's progress under NCLB and demonstrates that this didn't happen because students in Alabama and in similar states learned much more than they did the year prior. It happened because state departments of education manipulated NCLB in such a way that no other result was possible. 

"The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act" provides specific recommendations for Congress as it prepares to reauthorize NCLB, including ways to close the loopholes that states have routinely used to undermine the nation’s most important education law.

Read "The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act." Detailed information about how your state measures up on the 2007 "Pangloss Index" is available upon request.

This publication was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Education Sector is an independent education policy think tank devoted to developing innovative solutions to the nation’s most pressing educational problems. We are nonprofit and nonpartisan, both a dependable source of sound thinking on policy and an honest broker of evidence in key education debates throughout the United States.

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