Is The No Child Left Behind?

With the NCLB’s focused emphasis on English and math standards, other educational areas such as the arts and sciences have been overlooked. The No Child Left Behind Act also focuses on bringing the lower scores up and not helping in raising the scores of those students who are already at higher levels leaving these higher achieving students behind in a push for equality. Although test scores have risen and the achievement gap between minority and white students has decreased, the No Child Left Behind Act has damaged the United States educational system by not addressing the needs of all students, forcing curricula to exclude arts, civics, foreign language and sciences, and emphasizing testing and not learning. It is time for a change.

The American public educational system is filled with an assortment of problems. Most students are graduating with less knowledge and capability than similar students in other industrialized countries. Classroom disruptions are surprisingly common, and in some classrooms, nearly continuous. The public education system is having difficulty adjusting to the no child left behind act. The No Child Left Behind(NCLB) is a landmark in education reform designed to improve student achievement and change the culture of American’s schools.

"Making Sure That Schools Measure Up." Education Week, vol. 36, no. 16, 4 Jan. 2017, pp. 18-20. EBSCOhost. PDF. In this periodical article, Alyson Klein, reporter for Education Week, reflects on Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), an update to the K-12 education law, in the one year since it was passed in 2016. Klein discusses how the ESSA was designed to improve shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the previous version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Klein also examines concerns over greater flexibility given to states and districts regarding issues such as standardized test, school choice, marginalized students. The Obama administration wrote how the accountability portion of the law would work, allowing states to pick their own goals, both a long term goal and short term goals. These goals must address students’ proficiency on tests, English-language proficiency, and graduation

The purpose of this paper is to address the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 10, 2015. The paper will also address the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002. The paper will talk about some of the key components of ESSA in comparison with NCLB and identify some possible strengths and weaknesses in ESSA’s new approach.

When assessing educational legislation and whether it is good or bad law can be muddled by the fact that some part of the law is good versus some being bad. Also, the passing of time can change the viewpoint of such legislation. For instance, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was largely accepted as a good piece of legislation when the law was enacted, but with the passing of time, we have seen that the NCLB has its problems. The lack of truly funding the legislation, coupled with the fact that standardized testing given to each student, regardless of disability or English as a second language (ESL) status causes issues within some areas of the education system. Even so, there are still parts of the NCLB that are good for education as a

Initiated in 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 intended to prevent the academic failures of educational institutions and individual students, as well as bridge achievement gaps between students. This act supports the basic standards of education reform across America; desiring to improve the learning outcomes of America 's youth. This act was supposed to help the kids with their math, reading and math skills, but it just adds more pressure to the students especially for the children with learning disabilities (LD). The state has the students take the keystone exams which used to be called the PSSA`s.

More than a decade after President George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act in efforts to improve the United States’s performance in education, the nation is still only ranked 27th in math and 17th in reading internationally. Amazingly average. The question is, how can the United States improve its ranking? The federal government turned to standardized testing to assess students, as NCLB mandated annual standardized testing for all students in grades three through eight. However, overwhelming evidence and arguments clearly show that standardized testing does not improve education in the United States.

How could the idea of No Child Left Behind Act and standardized testing become such a terrible problem, that it has led to a generation of students that are not properly educated and prepared for college and the “Real World”? My Working thesis is that standardized testing should be removed from the school system because it is not testing what children know but teaching them how to test.

The "No Child Left Behind Act" (Public Law 107-110, 115), is a Congressional Act signed into law by George W. Bush in January 2002. The Bill was a bi-partisan initiative, supported by Senator Edward Kennedy, and authorized a number of federal programs designed to improve standards for educational accountability across all States, districts, and increase the focus on reading. Much of the NCLB focus is based on the view that American students are falling behind in educational basis when scored are compared globally. The Act does not establish a national achievement standard; each State must confirm its own set of standards, but in order to receive funding, the States must meet a basic criterion of performance (Abernathy, 2007).

On January 8, 2002, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law (also known as the NCLB). The No Child Left Behind Act was the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a federal education bill addressing the nation’s schools. At his signing ceremony, Bush stated, “There’s no greater challenge than to make sure that every child—and all of us on this stage mean every child, not just a few children—every single child, regardless of where they live, how they’re raised, the income level of their family, every child receive a first-class education in America.” Although his pledge became the hope for improved education reform, effects have only been negative and contradictory to what they have promised.

Under the most current statewide mandates of the No Child Left behind Act (NCLBA) (Bush, 2001) educators in the public school system must raise the bar for teaching. This means teaching classroom lessons to effectively educate all styles of learning and bringing students to proficient levels of being educated. Schools are expected to meet these challenges by hiring qualified teachers who are well trained and educated to instruct daily assignments for students. In March of 2010, the Obama Administration sent to Congress a reform amendment of the public schools, NCLBA, to help close some achievement gaps. President Obama has called on Congress to fix the laws to benefit and prepare all students for college or career readiness.

First, within the context of the video discussions, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) represents a top-heavy approach to education with the federal government mandating reform and placing emphasis on testing outcomes. Indeed, NCLB is part of the accountability movement that has led to the development of ongoing measures that are designed to create statewide assessment systems to measure student performance in mathematics and reading and thus address areas for improvement among students not performing at passable levels in such subject areas (Ravitch, 2014). This framework has extended into the Obama administration (i.e., Race to the Top – RTTT), with an even greater importance attached to outcomes, where high-stakes testing remains the basis by which student success is defined (Ravitch, 2014). Second, measuring student progress has historically been a prevalent feature of the American public education system with respect to policy and practice. However, the underlying assumption of present accountability systems is that attaching consequences to education reform will elevate student achievement (Hursh, 2010). Using high-stakes assessments to retain/promote students and to withhold a student’s graduation diploma for not passing an exit-level examination are examples of how the current NCLB/RTTT accountability framework supposedly ensures that high school

Information such as this still sparks several controversies around the country and various approaches to reverse this trend have been presented. One such approach is the No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB is widely regarded to as “a universal movement towards government-regulated standardization and high-stakes assessment.” (Rubin n.pag). The Act was intended to better the ranks of United States’ students through a leveled measurement of academic understanding, however after more than a decade; it is widely reported as having done more harm than good. One such report states,

This study will focus on the effectiveness of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). The NCLB Act of 2001 was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) (www.newamerica.org). The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was a Great Society program that allocated federal funds for education and looked to hold schools accountable (www2.ed.gov). The NCLB Act of 2001 was passed through Congress in 2001 with bipartisan support and greatly increased the Federal Government’s role in the education system and almost 95,000 public schools to include standardized testing and holding these schools accountable for student proficiency (www.newamerica.org).

Education is a common topic and is frequently studied, especially since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 by President George W. Bush. Mississippi is often ranked near the bottom of the list when compared to other states in terms of education quality and performance. In a report by Ladner and Myslinski (2014), Report Card on Education, Mississippi was ranked number 43 out of 51 (50 states plus the DC area) for the 2013 school year. While this is an improvement compared to 2011 when we were ranked number 48, there is still much work to be done.