Nick Taillon
Cultural Event #3
No Child Left Behind
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2000 was implemented to raise math competence and literacy rates in our nation’s children to the levels of their European peers. It promised to do this by focusing on yearly assessments that would increase accountability of schools not meeting goals. Schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) consistently would be forced to provide tutoring and relocation programs to address student needs. However, it is this intense focus on AYP that has plagued actual gains in knowledge. Schools facing blacklisting often fail out students that would lower scores thereby giving false positives and completely dismantling the goal of the original act. Faced with these failures experts agree that a major overhaul of the provisions must be undertaken, with a greater emphasis on teacher qualification and curriculums that provide practical and real world knowledge rather than the current teach to the test method.
The focus on assessment was originally intended to ensure that all students, regardless of ethnicity or socio-economic status, would receive equal attention. “Assessment results and State progress objectives must be broken out by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and limited English proficiency to ensure that no group is left behind”(ed.gov). However, as stated in this excerpt, it is less about universality than separating groups by those very distinctions. In theory this would enable school systems to identify which groups need the most assistance, but it is often exploited by allowing schools who have not made AYP to fail out groups who would hinder them. “Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students’ education”(Darling-Hammond p.2). While some people may debate that this practice is simply unintended and that no system can be completely free of exploitation is moot, as the reason for this misuse is self-preservation. The school systems are simply doing what they must to avoid budget crises; if they kept these students in their schools it would only end up doing more harm than good in the long run as the school would be caught in the vicious cycle of sub-par education as a result of a thin budget, caused by substandard AYP. They can do the most good by identifying students who are most likely to graduate and giving them the best education possible. “School districts and schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward statewide proficiency goals will, over time, be subject to improvement, corrective action, and restructuring measures aimed at getting them back on course to meet State standards”(ed.gov). What this really means is that they are forced to allocate funds for transporting high-achieving students to schools making AYP as well implementing supplemental academic programs for students needing additional aid, but the school does not get to select which programs get assigned, the parents do. In most areas where schools are not making AYP it is because they are in habitually low-income and crime ridden areas, naturally parents may not take the greatest interest in their child’s education as they may be working multiple jobs simply to put food on the table. If you were to ask these parents to take additional time out their schedule to select a tutoring service most would likely reply that that is the school’s responsibility. All of this leads to a vicious cycle in which the punitive conditions of NCLB create further distress by forcing schools to make the decision between idealism and practicality; helping all students regardless of ability or giving those most likely to move on to higher education the best possible preparation by trimming the fat.
In addition to causing the exclusion of the students that need the most help the assessment central policies of NCLB narrow school curriculums to drilling and memorization. Instead of learning to apply skills to real-world problems students are forced to learn things that will prove utterly useless in the job market. “The Education Department has discouraged states from using more instructionally useful forms of assessment that involve teachers in scoring tasks requiring extensive writing and analysis. Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Nebraska and Vermont, among others, had to wrestle with the department to maintain their sophisticated performance-based assessment systems, which resemble those used in high-scoring nations around the world. Connecticut, which assesses students with open-ended tasks like designing, conducting and analyzing a science experiment (and not coincidentally ranks first in the nation in academic performance), sued the federal government for the funds needed to maintain its assessments on an “every child, every year” basis. The Education Secretary suggested the state drop these tasks for multiple-choice tests. Thus the administration of the law is driving the US curriculum in the opposite direction from what a twenty-first-century economy requires”(Darling-Hammond p.2). The intense focus on supposedly necessary skills has only made students less adept to deal with real problems. Instead of learning how to think critically and communicate effectively they are forced to memorize strategies and information that is only useful in one scenario or problem. While NCLB may raise graduation rates it paradoxically decreases the value of a diploma by making the skills acquired irrelevant.
NCLB argues that a narrowed curriculum reduces the risk of poor education because of teacher incompetence, but is a standardized curriculum really the way to affect change? It is more important to have a qualified teacher than a fool-proof curriculum; a teacher is able to adapt to the varying needs of individual students but a rigid program cannot. If the education system has faith in their teachers than student assessments become irrelevant; a good teacher will know what is important and how to get the knowledge through to individuals and when we can trust teachers to do their jobs our faith in public education will also increase. “A Marshall Plan for Teaching could insure that all students are taught by well-qualified teachers within the next five years through a federal policy that (1) recruits new teachers using service scholarships that underwrite their preparation for high-need fields and locations and adds incentives for expert veteran teachers to teach in high-need schools; (2) strengthens teachers’ preparation through support for professional development schools, like teaching hospitals, which offer top-quality urban teacher residencies to candidates who will stay in high-need districts; and (3) improves teacher retention and effectiveness by insuring that novices have mentoring support during their early years, when 30 percent of them drop out”(3). As Darling-Hammond illustrates teacher reform is the way to achieve results, not reform from the student end. Students are required to be school, and most are reluctant to be there in the first place, while conversely teachers have chosen their occupation. Therefore it should not be the student’s responsibility to affect change in the system but the teacher’s. Contrary to what proponents of NCLB say these measures can be reasonably funded: “For an annual cost of $3 billion, or less than one week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually—enough to fill all the vacancies taken by unprepared teachers each year; seed 100 top-quality urban-teacher-education programs and improve the capacity of all programs to prepare teachers who can teach diverse learners well; insure mentors for every new teacher hired each year; and provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools by improving salaries and working conditions”(3). While this may be more expensive than NCLB in the short-term, in the long-term it will proved more valuable by raising the value of high-school diplomas and increasing social capital.
The No Child Left Behind Act was implemented to address our nation’s pressing concern of declining intellectual capital relative to fellow industrial nations. However, its reform was oriented in the wrong direction; they aimed to increase literacy and competency by rigorously enforcing basic skills, but all this truly accomplished was a further decrease in critical thinking skills. A more effective approach to reform is through teachers. If we can attract qualified teachers to areas whose students are most in need and allow them to teach broader skills that last past graduation we can achieve the change that NCLB strove for.
Works Cited
Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Evaluating ‘No Child Left Behind.” The Nation (May 2, 2007) http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/darling-hammond/3
(accessed April 21, 2010).
http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html (accessed April 21, 2010).
