ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the many twists and turns in federal education policy, as it was being crafted and revised to close the achievement gap. It explores five major policy trends affecting the federal government's efforts to close the achievement gap. The first of these policy efforts was to improve student access to quality, effective instruction. A second policy area was to address the effects of the culture of poverty. A third set of reforms addressed the culture of schooling itself and the importance of raising expectations for all students. These three trends ran, sometimes in parallel, from 1965 to 2002. In 2002, while still a part of The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the policy known as No Child Left Behind significantly changed federal interventions into schooling. These were again changed in 2009 as President Obama's administration focused on ideas of how best to focus on schools that were historically failing.
