On February 25, 2009, Tiffany O’Neal, a New York Life Scholar at the Powell Center, hosted a panel of leading education experts to discuss the impact of “No Child Left Behind” policies on urban school systems. The New York Life Endowment for Emerging African American Issues sponsored the discussion, entitled, “Has No Child Left Behind Failed High-Poverty Urban Schools?” During the event, speakers debated the merits and weaknesses of the law and the degree to which the law has helped to close the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Speakers Marcus A. Winters, an education policy specialist and senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, R. L'Heureux Lewis, an assistant professor of sociology at City College, and Christopher Emdin of Columbia University's Teachers College, considered the law from their particular vantage points. All acknowledged that it has done little to close the achievement gap, but differed on whether its emphasis on accountability has been on the whole a positive development for the education of children in the U.S.

No Child Left Behind, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2001, shifted the regulatory responsibility for education from state and local authority to federal control. The program mandated exacting measures of student achievement. Supporters argue that the law ushered in an era of “no-excuse” accountability. Detractors suggest NCLB missed the mark by not addressing the root causes of the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.