According to The New York Times article, “Rename Law? No Wisecrack Left Behind,” the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) needs a more appropriate title. Andrew Rotherham, who previously served as the Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Clinton administration, announced a contest for the renaming of the law on Eduwonk.com. The New York Times cited such notable contestant ideas as the Double Back Around to Pick Up the Children We Left Behind Act, the Rearranging the Deck Chairs Act, the Teach to the Test Act and the Could We Start Again Please Act.

Many of the original NCLB policies date back to 1965. After Clinton, President George W. Bush also re-named the act, adding more required tests and accountability mechanisms.

However, since his popularity dwindled, education and government officials as well as the public began to mock the name of the NCLB. Yet people feel more comfortable making fun of Bush’s legislation than agitating for policy change.

Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education of the Obama administration believes that the program needs to be “re-branded.” But so far the new administration has not proposed policy changes.

Simply renaming the program only serves to create a new veneer for the same issues, whether or not the program was ill-served by the Bush Administration.

Currently the debate about the NCLB involves two major camps. According to Rotherham, many educators and advocates believe that public schools should not be held accountable for poor test results due to other more serious social factors, such as family problems, poor healthcare, and students’ poor diets.

Others believe that the education system needs stringent consequences for schools who fail to meet the state’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards. These deterrents include relocating students to other schools, using school funding for tutoring programs, forced restructuring of the school or, after a certain amount of years of failing to meet AYP, even shutting the school down.

Although AYP requirements for test scores seem to be a strong effort by the government to oversee student progress, each state can decide its own standards, and have different tests.

At first, allowing students to relocate to other institutions seems to provide a safety valve for students. However, in places such as Chicago where this has come into practice, only one percent of eligible students could take advantage of the transfer option, because higher-performing schools were too full to fit in new students.

Revoking school funding because of a school’s failures seems counterproductive to an education system that desperately needs more money and better organization.

If the laws in place to help struggling students are not working, I wonder why the government is not enacting policy changes instead of simply making the title appease the public.

“Sometimes renaming can be a powerful indication of substantive change; sometimes renaming only gives the appearance of change,” said Nancy Yoder, visiting associate professor of Education Studies.

“I think if educators (and all citizens) want meaningful change to NCLB, they need to be politically active – to be talking with people who can influence the legislation, insisting that only a name change is not enough,” said Yoder.

The current situation for many students reflects that need for such political action.

“With dropout rates of nearly 50 percent for minority youngsters, and yawning gaps in achievement between white students and minority students, educational equity must be at the forefront of any effort to expand opportunity in America,” Rotherham said.

Although re-branding may signify that lawmakers and government officials recognize the inefficacies of the NCLB, a new name will only be covering up for an education system laden with overly flexible standards, and safety valves that fail in practice.