218 pages
ISBN-10: 0807746673
ISBN-13: 978-0807746677
List price: $28

            DeBray’s work is a microscopic examination of the shifting political landscape and alliances that allowed for George W. Bush’s initiative No Child Left Behind to become federal law—despite Republicans’ longstanding and fierce opposition to federal involvement in education.  And, therein lies both the book’s strength—and its shortsightedness.  As would be true for anyone looking at a paramecium under a microscope, the closeup shows the examiner any number of characteristics normally invisible to the human eye and offers a great deal of information about the subject and how it functions.  However: to forget that this laboratory-like view magnifies characteristics to many times their natural size while concurrently largely eliminating from view the complex and diverse world outside the microscope lens is to court total distortion. That this one organism is shaped like a slipper and expels water by osmosis is interesting information that tells us something worth knowing—but it’s hardly a representative description of organic life.  Similarly, DeBray’s analysis zeroes in to reveal interesting and important details describing political actors and actions around the passage of NCLB—but her meticulously detailed description of political intricacies tells only a fraction of the NCLB story while unavoidably minimizing the many other forces swirling around the periphery of her lens.

            This is not to criticize the author for her choice—every author is entitled to choose boundaries for a work, and no author should be criticized for not writing a book someone else would have chosen.  And indeed, what DeBray does, she does well.  Her purpose is clearly laid out in the introduction:

This book attempts to answer questions about the politics of the adoption of this law in Congress over the three-year period 1999-2002, and more broadly, about the dramatic shift in the Republican Party’s positions on federal education policy….What is different about the period I document here is not the conservative education agenda itself, but the new sources of input utilized by GOP congressional staff to shape an ESEA bill.  The influence of new kinds of interests not associated with the traditional “left” was growing.    The heightened polarization between parties and the growing coherence of the Republicans’ policy positions now made the political process more closed than in the past to outside interests, except those most closely aligned with the party.  It is my argument that these questions of which groups and interests gain access to the legislative process have enormous implications for the substance of federal education policy in the coming decades.  (p. 10)

DeBray works out the answer to political questions in great detail and offers copious support for her thesis in the chapters that follow.

            After a brief introduction that spans the years 1964 to 1994 and includes such seminal events as President Johnson’s War on Poverty and the release of the damning Nation at Risk report of 1983, Part I provides an overview of trends in politics and education policy from 1990-2004, Part II a detailed look at the 106^th Congress (1999-2000), and Part III a similar examination of the 107^th Congress (2001) that finally passed the legislation.  In Part IV, she examines implications for the future, including the implications of Bush’s ability to turn politicians away from ideology by prioritizing party loyaly and his role in setting the legislative agenda.  She also considers how drastically players in the educational policy arena have changed:

Education interest groups that had been accustomed to providing input into program decisions and wielding influence with Democratic committee staff, have been largely exluded from the process.  Republican staff considered tehse groups a self-interested monolithic entity—the “blod”—and showed a tendency to consult center-right think tanks and groups of state education administrators, such as the Education Leaders Council and the National Governors’ Association. (p. 151).

All of her assertions are true enough, and all are well-supported.  And it’s true the she calls attention to the role of such forces as conservative think-tanks and the Business Roundtable.  What is missing from DeBray’s description, however—though one catches a glimpse of the surrounding world outside her microscope in her references to such forces—is a consideration of the crucial linkages among politicians, Bush, think tanks, business groups, personal alliances…and money.

            Typical of the glimpses is this:  “The Business Roundtable circulated an e-mail to its membership, asking them to lobby in support of testing” (p. 104).  Now:  why?  Of course public rhetoric abounds about the need for well-educated workers, the global marketplace etc. ad nauseum.  However:  it is also well-known (in certain business and critical circles) that the testing industry has to date made billions (yes—with a B) on new testing requirements—not to mention the other mountains of profits produced by the mandated supplemental services requirement which kicks in when a school doesn’t perform to mandated levels.  NCLB’s tremendous increase of the testing and tutoring “markets” provide crucial insight into business’s support of the law, and this is the kind of insight that is excluded when DeBray notes that a player has been active in the struggle without noting why.   Of course, business is also the source of enormous campaign contributions and “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine” scenarios, so it hardly surprising that among the businesses who have scored record profits, McGraw Hill is a standout.  That would be the same McGraw family that has enjoyed close familial relationships—and equally profitable political/business partnerships—with the Bush family for several generations now.

            Such alliances are untangled and detailed elsewhere—as in the suggested readings below—and again, DeBray had no obligation to consider them.  However, the reader would be unwise to consider this text as an thorough picture of even the political history of NCLB.  Not just relationships among politicians, but among politicians, business, and think tanks—and the key players who move easily from one of those realms to another and back again—need to be considered in far more detail to provide a broader understanding of the forces at play in the political landscape.  DeBray’s work is interesting and well-documented; it is simply too narrow to provide an understanding of the legislation’s history in its larger, far more complex context.

Suggested readings

Bracey, G. W.  (2005).  No Child Left Behind:  Where does the money go?  Retrieved November 5, 2007, from http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/EPSL-0506-114-EPRU.pdf

Gluckman, A. (2002, January/February). Testing…Testing…One, Two, Three: The Commercial Side of the Standardized-Testing Boom. Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice.  Retrieved November 5, 2007, from  http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2002/0102gluckman.html

Metcalf, S.  (2002, January 28).  Reading between the lines.  The Nation. Accessed November 5, 2007, from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020128/metcalf

Olson, D.  (2005).  Testing companies score big profits.  Minnesota Public Radio.  Accessed November 5, 2007, from http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/04/18_olsond_testingagain/