NCLB, ESSA and the Complexity of Spontaneity (Paper)

Creativity & uncertainty in Standardized testing

*This is a prematurity to further papers on dialectics (originally written 10/14/25)

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2014 is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The law attempts to update ESEA to modern standards and is itself a replacement of the previous reauthorization, the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) of 2001. This paper will compare ESSA to NCLB as well as to the Race to the Top program (RTTT) of 2009, arguing that, while an improvement, ESSA fails to address the need for teacher/student/parent ‘spontaneity’ in the classroom, particularly in locality. While testing and teacher accountability are necessary aspects of any educational process, the need for teacher/student/parent interest, of a conscious/subconscious ‘spontaneity’, allowing for teacher/student/parent excitement and engagement within both logical and dialectical parameters, is equally important.

Terms & Conditions (Historical Origins)

The idea that spontaneity has some role in American education goes back to its founding. I define ‘spontaneity’ in education as the ‘attitude of allowing for random acts of thought or creativity, without losing the primacy of the original act or thought,’ although this definition should be expanded. Horace Mann’s insistence that schools be places of ‘character education’ (Spring, p. 39), in addition to an education of the more classically technical nature, is indicative of a form of education not so easily testable.

Testing joins a slew of considerations concerning education. Should schools teach a specific religious charter? Should teachers express to students their political beliefs? What is the balance of power between federal and local authority in public education? Stretching all the way back to Plato’s cave in one sense and Zhuang-Zi’s butterfly in another, these questions are still debated today, most recently in the debate between ESSA and NCLB

NCLB vs. ESSA

Passed in 2001 as a reauthorization of ESEA, NCLB was critiqued as having given the federal government too much power. NCLB mandates that states provide high-stakes testing with an emphasis on character education (ibid.), school accountability (Yeban), and producing ‘high quality teachers.’ Critics have argued that this gives the government too much power over education (ibid.; Mathis & Trujillo p. 13), and that education should not be contained to such rigid terminology or systemic power struggles. No less, as Spring notes (p. 39), the process of defining ‘character education’, lest the process of becoming a ‘high quality teacher’, does not always lead to the most formal results. As such, NCLB was difficult to implement (Viteritti, p. 2097-2099).

ESSA attempts to remedy this by giving more power to the states. It mandates that schools prepare students for post-secondary school education and/or professional careers and requires that students be held to high academic standards and encourages punitive measures for schools falling behind. However, while NCLB places more power in the hands of the federal government, requiring more testing and adherence to its stipulations than ESSA, its terms and its methods are not as refined, suggesting that education happens via ESSA more concretely at the local level.

Strengths and Weaknesses of ESSA

If locality is central to any transition or communication between individual and collective, ESSA’s attempts to take the specificity of NCLB and allocate it to states is a logical improvement. Teacher autonomy would be the most obvious counterpoint to teacher accountability. Further, ESSA places a greater emphasis on ‘non-academic indicators’ (Mathis, p. 3). This would include anything that might hamper a student’s ability to learn that doesn’t have to do with the student’s ability to learn directly and is not covered by NCLB. This gives schools a much more defined path toward providing equal opportunity to all students.

However, critics argue that the law still places too much emphasis on high-stakes testing. Monty Neill (Spring, p. 194-195) argues that testing has in a way become the nexus of school culture, turning schools into “test coaching centers, caught up in this frenzy of trying to look their best,” (ibid.), while W. James Popham that tests cannot serve as objective measurements (or: proofs of learning) (Spring, p. 191). Both point toward an education where spontaneous perspective and individual thought are equally as important as objective perception and action.

Hence the difference between the objective and the spontaneous as the subjective relativizes both the relationship between teacher/student and that between teacher/parent. If education is equally ‘certain’ as it is ‘uncertain’, just as the evolution in thought after leaving Plato’s cave or dreaming Zhuang-Zi’s butterfly (i.e. logical as dialectical), the ‘spontaneous-as-subjective’ is more complicated than ‘objectivity’ as itself opposed to mere ‘subjectivity’. There’s an additional dimension of complexity. This dimension is delineated via perception under logical and dialectical precursors (Hegel, p. 95-101; Radhakrishnan, p. 349-350, 388-389, 441; Aristotle p. 136-139, 398). Via its emphasis on state-power, teacher autonomy and its extended vocabulary, ESSA would be the more ‘complex’ of the two laws, because it is perceived under a more complex ‘type’ or ‘category’ (Aristotle, p. 711, 230-233, 7-39; Coutinho & Hagen, p. 84-89): the teacher is ‘certain’ only as a three-dimensionally ‘conscious’ individual, where the student/parent is the ‘uncertain’ outline, and vice versa. However, this is speculative and saved for another time. The point for now is that ESSA attempts to accommodate both logical and dialectical parameters, whereas NCLB relies almost entirely on the logical.

RTTT

The RTTT initiative takes a similarly more complex, yet more simply ‘dialectical’ approach than both NCLB and ESSA, however to a more polarized extent. Unlike the two reauthorizations of ESEA, RTTT was a grant program designed to incentivize new standards and philosophies (Viteretti, p. 2102). As such, it doesn’t have the logical/dialectical detail of ESSA, nor the granting of federal power of NCLB. Essentially creating a competition between schools over funding based on testing results, critics again argued that the program gave the federal government too much power (ibid., p. 2103) and that it was too ambitious. On the other hand, proponents argued that it gave a greater focus on quality teaching and helped to consolidate the normalization of national standards (ibid., p. 2105). In all, the RTTT initiative consolidates the subjectivity at the center of the individual but surrounds it with analysis. On a larger scale, this could be an example of the some of the same problems in both NCLB and ESSA concerning the psychological implications of recent studies.

Dialectical ‘Spontaneity’

At the bottom of any relatively ‘complex’ concept is the question of ‘consciousness’. Early-to-mid Twenty-First century psychologist Carl Jung postulated that the ‘unconscious’ (the ‘consciousness’ underlying all consciousness and uniting it a priori), “doesn’t think, it creates a spontaneous image.” (Jung, 1966, 182-183) “What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates it’s a priori presence spontaneously.” (Jung, 1959, p. 31) In other words, spontaneity in part underlies consciousness, and that ‘consciousness’, both objectively and subjectively, though to varying degrees, plays a large role in education (Jung, 1964, p. 52-55, 139-141, 150-152)[1].

This would suggest, at least subconsciously, that accountability, autonomy and spontaneity all come down to the local level as well at least as much as the more collective. In ‘Improvising: A Grounded Theory Investigation of Psychology Students’ Level of Anxiety, Coping, Communicative Skills, Imagination, and Spontaneity,’ Olga Temezhnikova argues that spontaneity is in part improvisation, and that the relations between the two are similar to those found in other ways of coping with stress/anxiety (Temezhnikova). Alleviating stress/anxiety stresses growth, but education is a lifelong endeavor, ultimately inevitable at least for three-dimensional human consciousness, in many ways fundamental to the logical/dialectical question of the ‘conscious’ vs. the ‘unconscious’ in Jung (Jung, 1959, p. 53), the success of a prosperous society in Mann and Jefferson (Spring, p. 4-7), or even of all thought or ‘philosophy’ itself (Plato, p. 747-750; Coutinho & Hagen, p. 280-284).

Conclusion

Where NCLB gave more power to the federal government over education yet suggested a more direct ‘type’ of spontaneity in character education, ESSA gives more power to states/schools/teachers and provides a more three-dimensionally ‘complex’ logical/dialectical procedural plan. As such, NCLB presents a more ‘logical’ take (albeit underdeveloped and even contradictory in cases like its approach to character education), while, for the most part, ESSA attempts to incorporate both logical and dialectical systematizations. ‘Spontaneity’ as both an attitudinal educational instrument and an arbiter between human three-dimensional ‘consciousness’ and its various forms, is a relatively ‘complex’ concept recalling the difficulty of providing and maintaining a national education system. While ESSA may outline this difficulty in more detail than NCLB, it still ultimately fails to outline the details of the relationship. Considering of the advent of modern technology and the near fundamental differences in perception it’s proven since its widespread application around the turn of the millennium, this prospect of accommodating spontaneity as both ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ in the sphere of education will likely only increase in dialectical complexity in the future.

Bibliography

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Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Science of Logic (G. Di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

 Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches Into Phenomenology of the Self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1964). The Development of Personality: Papers on Child Psychology, Education, and Related Subjects (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

 Jung, C. G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Mathis, W. J., & Trujillo, T. M. (2016, November). Lessons from NCLB for the Every Student Succeeds Act. National Education Policy Center. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED574684.pdf

Philosophers of the Warring states: A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (K. Hagen & S. Coutinho, Trans.). (2018). . Broadview Press.

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Spring, J. H. (2023). American education. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Radhakrishnan, S. (1989). A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (C. A. Moore, Ed.). Princeton University Press.

Temezhnikova, O. (2022). Improvising: A Grounded Theory Investigation of Psychology Students’ Level of Anxiety, Coping, Communicative Skills, Imagination, and Spontaneity. The Qualitative Report, 27(4). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5128

Viteritti, J. P. (2012). The Federal Role in School Reform: Obama’s Race to the Top. Notre Dame Law Review, 87(5), 2087–2121.

Yeban, J. (2025, March 19). No Child Left Behind vs. Common Core. Findlaw. https://www.findlaw.com/education/curriculum-standards-school-funding/no-child-left-behind-vs-common-core.html

[1] Please note that while there is some controversy over Jung’s psychological theories, I’m using Jung more as a dialectician.