Ten years later, schools are struggling to comply with the law while students have seen few improvements.

This Sunday marked the 10-year anniversary of the re-write of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, reauthorized as the more recognizable No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This single act dramatically changed education reform over the last decade, and its negative effects are still reverberating.

NCLB drastically reshaped the landscape of primary and secondary education. It introduced accountability and standardized tests and tied them to funding. States could either forfeit Title I funds or move their schools to having 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by 2014. The punishment for not achieving these yearly benchmarks were severe: after a number of years, offending schools would be legally mandated to restructure or close.

The basis for NCLB evolved from North Carolina and Texas, which had testing and accountability programs that created substantial academic progress for these states. However, once it was implemented, even those states failed to achieve gains, particularly in closing the achievement gap.

NCLB overstepped the federal government's role in education, which was previously to ensure equity, be it for poor, special needs, or minority students. This was accomplished previously through actions such as Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, IDEA (Individuals with Education Disabilities Act), and Title I funding.

Ten years after its passage, we find that a large portion of schools are not on track to achieve proficiency goals. While state-based standardized test scores have often increased, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a low-stakes national standardized test, have remained flat. So has the percent of minority and poor students achieving at the highest level on the NAEP. This isn't terribly surprising, as one of the biggest ramifications of NCLB is that it oriented teaching to students who are on the border of proficiency, rather than all students.

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But these increases in state standardized testing performance have not been sufficient to avert the weight of accountability measures. As a result, we've seen the federal government once again overstep its role of ensuring equity with waivers in exchange for substantial state policy adjustments.

Ten years later, we find our Congress in a different yet eerily similar situation. Just with the original making of NCLB, our decisions are rushed, and thoughtful decisions for the sake of the people are sacrificed for political appearances.

Future iterations of the law should consider the policy environment of North Carolina as a model for improving schools. North Carolina's schools receive more funding from state sources than do most others, which allows for more equitable funding across school districts. Also, North Carolina is unique in its efforts to improve its lowest performing schools. Following a case about poor school performance, a North Carolina Superior Court judge tasked the state with improving 40 of its lowest performing high schools. For almost a decade, he has been the impetus for an agency that focuses on these public schools. Beyond that, he's kept an eye on legislative action, crying foul when there was an attempt to cut funding for standardized testing in non-core subjects, something he claimed was necessary to ensure  academic quality in high school.

If the federal government desires involvement in education in excess of its charge of guaranteeing equality of educational opportunity, it should focus its efforts on uniting different branches and levels of government at the state and local levels to develop and reinforce our existing system of checks and balances to move coherently and robustly toward sustainable improvement.

Grayson Cooper is the Senior Fellow for Education Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and is currently a senior at the University of North Carolina.

Flawed policies intended to break down barriers to a good education are perpetuating other forms of inequality.

School choice has a troubled history in the U.S. It was first employed as a policy option to thwart desegregation efforts. Parents in the South, facing court-mandated school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, began enrolling their children in "whites-only" private schools. Yet now proponents of school choice argue that it is a solution to integrate schools, raise student achievement, or both. The achievement rationale is based on the idea that all parents deserve a choice in which school their child attends, especially poor and minority parents who may not have the financial option to move to a better school district or send their children to private school. The integration rationale is based on the fact that because many neighborhoods are racially segregated, eliminating neighborhood schools removes this de facto segregation of students in schools.

School choice policy takes several different forms, including inter-district choice, intra-district choice, charter schools, magnet schools, and voucher programs. To begin evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of these programs, let's take a look at how intra-district school choice policy has been implemented in my home city of Boston.

It's the start of a new year, so parents in Boston are beginning the process of registering their children for school in the fall. But this registration is not as simple as filling out a form at their school district office and sending their child to the neighborhood school. The Boston Public Schools system uses a controlled intra-district choice policy to assign students to schools, so where children go depends on a variety of factors, including their parents' ranking of schools. Boston's system is complex, so here is just an overview of what parents are up against.

Intra-district school choice allows parents to move beyond their neighborhood schools by letting them rank the top schools they'd like their children to attend. In its purest form, this policy creates an open district where students are assigned to a school based on a lottery and their personal ranking of schools. In reality, intra-district school choice is controlled and students are matched with schools based on a formula that takes into account priority factors such as siblings and walking distance to the school, as well as controlling factors such as socioeconomic status. In Boston, the priority factors include "walk zone," siblings, and random lottery numbers. This choice may help parents avoid failing schools near their home in favor of higher-performing schools throughout the district in hopes that their children will receive a better education. Additionally, proponents of intra-district school choice note that the policy has the potential to integrate school districts in spite of de facto segregated housing.

Intra-district school choice was first used to integrate schools after the intense outcry against the busing movement of the 1960s and 1970s. While parents were allowed to rank their school choices, the school assignment formulas included controlling racial and socioeconomic factors to achieve integrated schools while still presenting the option of parental choice. In Boston, intra-district school choice arose once the federal courts returned power to the district after the drastic desegregation efforts of the '70s led to white flight and race riots. As one of the nation's first intra-district school choice programs, Boston was commended on the policy. However, the ranking system meant to provide parental choice and desegregate schools has not achieved the academic success and integration hoped for. Instead, even today, many schools in the city lack racial and economic diversity and these are often the schools considered to be the worst performing.

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The criticisms of intra-district choice are numerous:

First, as with any policy, intra-district school choice has led to the creation of difficult-to-understand and often unknown placement formulas. Most school districts do not release their placement formulas, leaving parents wondering why their child is not enrolled in one of their ranked schools. This secrecy means that some intra-district school choice policies lack the accountability needed to ensure confidence in the policy. Further, most school choice formulas limit the options actually available to the parents. In Boston, requiring parents to only select from schools within their home zone or that operate citywide narrows the list of available schools. Further, Boston schools fill 50 percent of their seats from students within walking distance of the school, leaving only half of the seats open for children who live outside the walk zone. While intra-district school choice was designed to eliminate neighborhood schools segregated by race and socioeconomic status, home zone and walking-distance factors keep schools partly neighborhood-based. On the one hand, this limits the effectiveness of school choice, but on the other, it ensures that the schools remain tied to the area and that communities take ownership of their schools.

Second, intra-district school choice requires strong parental engagement and involvement, as parents need to know they have a choice and understand the different school options available for their children. In Boston, before making their school selections parents often visit schools and talk with teachers in addition to attending school information fairs. For middle-class parents, this level of engagement may not be difficult. But for poor families, immigrants, or students without stable homes, the amount of engagement and information required to make an informed decision is difficult to come by. While Boston does provide information fairs throughout the year and support through Family Resource Centers, informational asymmetries still remain. As Professor Curt Dudley-Marling notes, the intra-district school choice system is "rigged for parents who have the most resources." In fact, one of the strongest criticisms of Boston's intra-district school choice is that often parents do not make any choice at all, because if the paperwork is not filed in time, students are automatically placed without any ranked schools in their formula.

Finally, intra-district school choice has often failed to achieve equal access to schools for poor and minority families. Middle-class parents are often better equipped to deal with the realities of an intra-district school choice policy. They have the education, skills, and resources necessary to make an informed choice. More importantly, they often have the financial resources needed to remove their child from the district and enroll him or her in another school when the child is not placed in one of their ranked schools. On the other hand, poor, minority, and immigrant families are often forced to remain with the school their child is assigned to, as no other public school option is available.

The many flaws in intra-district school choice point toward much needed reforms. These reforms include providing easily accessible information for parents on their choices as well as curtailing the effects of home zone and walking priorities and improving schools throughout the district in order to increase the number of schools parents can choose from. In Boston, the school assignment formula has been modified throughout the years to make the effect of the parental rankings more prominent in the assignment of children to schools. Currently, the city is working to overhaul the school assignment process with help from a federal grant. While a change in the school assignment formula and the structure of the home zones was rejected because the policy would provide fewer options to poor and minority students in the city, the process of developing an improved assignment formula continues. Still, for parents in the process of registering their children for the fall 2012 school year, the old formula remains. They have to deal with the system as it is, improved slightly over the years by district and school quality policies but still limited in terms of true choice and effectiveness.

Amy Baral is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow performing legal and policy research on the Boston Public Schools, focusing on access to quality education and school choice. She is also a 1st year law student at Boston University School of Law.

The latest budget deal cuts Pell Grants, one more blow to the old system that helped students pay for college directly.

It's no secret that college graduates are struggling under huge debt loads. The overall debt owed is set to hit $1 trillion this year.

Rising debt loads are fueled by two simultaneous trends: soaring tuition and falling assistance. As James Surowiecki writes, "Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast as inflation." And the days when a college education could be financed through government assistance like the GI Bill or Pell Grants are quickly disappearing. Grants used to cover two-thirds of financing an education. Now two-thirds of college financing comes from loans.

In the face of these pressures facing graduates, the government might be expected to offer more assistance. And Obama announced an executive order in October that tries to ease burdens. It allows grads to cap repayments on their federal loans at 10 percent of their discretionary income come January (which is two years before it was already set to happen). After 20 years, all the remaining debt on those loans would be forgiven -- five years earlier than it would have been without his order. On top of this, some borrowers with more than one federal loan can consolidate them, which could reduce their interest rates (slightly). But even that most immediate impact, consolidating loans, is only likely to save the average borrower between $4.50 and $7.75 a month, a barely noticeable sum.

Now news came out this week that the last-minute budget deal to fund the government and avert a shut down included cuts to Pell Grants. The maximum grant will be preserved at $5,550, but changes to the eligibility criteria will make as many as 100,000 recipients ineligible. The maximum amount a family can earn without contributing anything toward tuition will drop from $30,000 to $23,000. It also retroactively limits the number of semesters that a student can use grants, from 18 to 12. In sum, these changes will mean less money for fewer people to pay for a college education.

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Even as the government has shifted further and further away from directly subsidizing higher education -- i.e. giving out money that doesn't have to be paid back -- it is still subsidizing education costs. It just does so through multiple tax breaks for student loans, which are far less visible to the average American. And the cost of these tax code subsidies isn't cheap. As my colleague Mike Konczal notes, the government shells out about "$22.75 billion... through the tax code to make college tuition and student debt more manageable." This means that in order to finance an education, the government is basically assuming students and their families will take on huge debt burdens.

Compare that number to the total cost of the Pell Grant program. It cost the government $36.5 billion in 2010. While that's a larger sum, the government is still shelling out both amounts -- but only looking to cut money from the aid that doesn't entail students miring themselves in debt.

Those tax subsidies should also be compared to what it would cost the government to simply provide free public higher education: by Mike's estimate, $15-$30 billion. If the government is looking to save money, it could do worse than shifting funds lost to tax breaks that subsidize indenture to giving out aid directly through either grants or simply free public ed. In fact, if it no longer had to lose money through tax breaks or pay out money for Pell Grants, the savings of free public colleges could be pretty nice.

Because this debt does have a real life impact on the students who carry it. As I've written before, research shows that higher debt loads narrow the career choices students make upon graduation. By cutting down on direct aid and therefore pushing more students toward debt, the government is complicit in Wall Street's brain drain. And this debt can hang over them for an entire lifetime. Almost 10 percent of people ages 55-64 still have student loan debt. The bankruptcy code doesn't allow this type of debt to be discharged.

As unemployment rates and income levels make clear, a college education is an important asset. The government has choices it can make in how it helps people finance those educations. One path leads to debt loads that skew students' life courses. Why would we choose that one?

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

Ensuring that women can make healthy reproductive choices benefits their economic independence and our society as a whole.

Last month, I was excited to see that the Ad Council is working together with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to promote the use of birth control as a tool for self-determination and empowerment. Finally some are starting to acknowledge that people have sex, young or old, whether for reproductive purposes or not, and with or without adequate information and resources. We have to provide them with comprehensive information and resources to make smart decisions and prevent any undesired outcomes. But then last week Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius overruled an FDA recommendation to allow emergency contraception to be sold over the counter. Meanwhile, Congress is attempting to increase dedicated funding for abstinence-only-till-marriage education. As Norman Ornstein said in a recent New York Times article, it appears that the Obama administration may be trying to assuage conservative and religious groups with Sebelius's decision. These groups are opposed to the new health reform law that requires health insurance programs to fully cover contraceptives, as they are now rightly understood as preventative medicine. Ornstein argues that the decision was motivated by the desire to create some political balance -- rather than by pragmatism, science, or regard for women's rights or pro-choice values.

This appears to be true for the push for the abstinence-only education as well. Despite the conservative mantra of economic self-sufficiency, pragmatism, and smaller government, their opposition to sexual and reproductive health once again reveals that their beliefs are driven by conservative and religious values. These values are dominating the debate on sexual and reproductive health, and progressives are left defending the vulnerable ground we have gained on this front. With the battle over political, moral, and religious values continuing over women's bodies, we need to make women's rights and sexual and reproductive health a more prominent issue on the progressive agenda and start dominating the debate.

A core progressive value is ensuring social justice through policies that facilitate every individual's ability to make choices in his or her life. This same struggle for equality and freedom of choice is at the core of feminism, to which economic and reproductive rights were and continue to be the main means. Moreover, we have to understand how these rights are intertwined. If women cannot even have bodily integrity, how can they have agency in other areas of their lives? From this perspective, it is even more important to talk about reproductive justice, rather than merely reproductive rights. Reproductive justice is grounded in a social justice framework and refers to everything necessary to have choices in one's reproductive life. This includes not only access to contraceptives and abortions, but more importantly it also demands access to comprehensive sex education and adequate pregnancy-related care, housing, nutrition, education, employment, health care, and social support in order to be able to prevent pregnancy or to have and raise children if one chooses to do so.

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Educational attainment, for instance, is correlated with increased contraceptive use and delayed and reduced childbearing. It is also correlated with increased income, which in turn is fundamental to economic self-sufficiency. That economic self-sufficiency means independence, which allows for women to make choices and have self-determination.

In addition to individual empowerment, promoting gender equality and sexual and reproductive health (or in other words, reproductive justice) is imperative for society as a whole. It contributes to a higher GDP, as a larger and more educated workforce increases productivity and consumerism. Gender equality also encourages women to enter politics in larger numbers, which increases equal representation and may lead to new approaches to the political landscape and policymaking that can promote political stability. Furthermore, gender equality implies investments in women's health, which improves public health. In fact, the maternal mortality ratio is one of the World Health Organization's core indicators in assessing the overall public health of a country. Environmental sustainability also appears to be positively correlated with gender equality, as women's expertise and skills can enhance agricultural and production practices, and women's disproportionate vulnerability to environmental hazards requires them to be more invested in a sustainable environment than men. Finally, preventing undesired pregnancies and STI transmissions means lower public healthcare costs for the taxpayer. It also leads to healthier and more educated, productive, and self-sufficient individuals and communities.

So rather than imposing abstinence-only education and preventing Plan B from being sold over the counter, let's follow the Ad Council's lead in acknowledging reality, trusting people to make responsible decisions, providing comprehensive information and resources, and recognizing the social and economic benefits of respecting women's sexual and reproductive rights. The progressive movement needs to once and for all understand and embrace how these issues are intertwined with all of our other causes and put these rights at the core of its agenda.

Minjon Tholen is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow and the Training & Development Specialist at Cook Ross Inc.