preview

Federal Elementary And Secondary Education Act Essay

Decent Essays

The last century in American history has yielded educational reforms, federal legislations, school improvement plans and interventions, which consistently influence best practices in school systems. After the report, A Nation at Risk (1983), the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was reauthorized in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). This reauthorization was a call to attain educational equality for all American students and to lessen the achievement gaps between and among ethnicity groups, children of poverty, and disabled populations (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Additionally, because of this increased scrutiny of student performance, other classification categories emerged such as gender.
Investigating college-readiness by looking at the data for particular groups pinpoints definite achievement gaps. The profile of a college student in the United States reveals that about 60% of recent graduate are “not college-ready” (Kirst, 2007). High school graduation data broken down by ethnicity indicates that 97% of African Americans and 90% of Hispanics are not college-ready upon high school completion (Collins, 2009). This percentage compares to 33% of Caucasian and 25% of Asian students being college-ready at high school completion (Bettinger & Long, 2007). Further, an investigation of gender disparities reveal that males and females tend to perform similarly on college readiness

Get Access