Parenting & Family Quote by Dianne Feinstein

Accountability talk always sounds like moral clarity, and Feinstein leans into that sheen: “ensure,” “all students,” “highest potential.” The phrasing borrows the language of civil rights while smuggling in the machinery of standards-and-testing reform. “No Child Left Behind” wasn’t just a slogan; it was a governing philosophy that treated measurement as virtue. Feinstein’s line is built to make disagreement feel indecent. Who, exactly, is going to argue for leaving children behind?

The specific intent is legislative and tactical: fold special education students into the same accountability regime as everyone else, so districts can’t quietly warehouse them, under-serve them, or hide them in statistical blind spots. “Should not be left out” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s inclusion. Underneath, it’s a warning to systems that have historically gamed metrics by excluding students most likely to depress scores.

The subtext, though, is the tension at the heart of NCLB: equality of expectation versus equity of circumstance. By positioning special education students inside “these accountability mechanisms,” Feinstein is endorsing the premise that transparency and pressure will force improvement. Critics heard a different implication: that children with disabilities could become levers in a compliance project, reduced to data points and used to punish schools without supplying commensurate support, staffing, or accommodations.

Context matters: early-2000s bipartisan zeal for “closing achievement gaps” met a long record of special education being segregated, underestimated, and inconsistently funded. Feinstein’s sentence is an attempt to close an escape hatch in policy design - a move that reads as protective, but also reveals how much modern education reform depends on coercion dressed as compassion.