The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was established in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty. Federal funds were directed to poor schools, communities, and children.

In 2002, ESEA was reauthorized and amended under George Bush's administration as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The pillars of the bill were accountability, to ensure that disadvantaged children achieved academic proficiency; flexibility for the schools in using federal funds to improve student achievement; research-based education, to ensure that schools used programs and practices that have been deemed effective; and parent options, giving parents of students in Title I schools more choices.

Now, in 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hopes to have ESEA   reauthorized and amended again.

Duncan's version seeks to ensure effective teachers and principals for underperforming schools, expanded learning time, and an accountability system that will measure individual student progress and use data to inform instruction and teacher evaluation. Duncan credited No Child Left Behind for "exposing achievement gaps, and requiring that we measure our efforts to improve education by looking at outcomes, rather than inputs. . . . [However] it places too much emphasis on raw test scores rather than student growth."

Secretary Duncan has already been to thirty states as part of his "Listen and Learn Tour." More meetings are being scheduled this fall with Duncan's top deputies and the policy community, hopefully again to listen and learn.