No Child Left Behind

As with the importance of selecting a highly qualified principal to help raise test scores and closing achievement gaps, the selection and support of staff is also critical. Gregory F. Branch, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin’s 2013 study “School Leaders Matter” examined the effectiveness of many principles’ leadership and the effect they had on student achievement ratings. “A primary channel through which principals can be expected to improve the quality of education is by raising the quality of teachers, either by improving the instruction provided by existing teachers or through teacher transitions that improve the caliber of the school’s workforce” (Branch, pg.4). A principal must be able to continually seek out professional development, to research best practices and new educational theories to support their staff and students. If principals are to close the achievement gap, they must be willing to inform and instruct their staff on new teaching strategies. Mr. Canada, from his TED talk, “Our failing schools. Enough is enough!”, states: “You go into a place that has failed kids for fifty years and say: ‘so what’s the plan?’ And they say: ‘Well, we are going to do what we did last year, this year’. What kind of business model is that?” (TED, 2013). The principal willing to venture into new, uncharted waters may succeed or fail, but at least they

Educating, empowering, and engaging students to be successful in a global, dynamic world is an overarching theme in the 21st century. However, our curricular standards are not keeping pace with the expansion of technology. School improvement is a topic of collegial conversations across the board and yet

“Ornstein and Levine (2008) expressed their concern with NCLB and its effect on public education.

When President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law in 2002, the legislation had one goal-- to improve educational equity for all students in the United States by implementing standards for student achievement and school district and teacher performance. Before the No Child Left Behind Act, the program of study for most schools was developed and implemented by individual states and local communities’ school boards. Proponents of the NCLB believed that lax oversight and lack of measurable standards by state and local communities was leading to the failure of the education system and required federal government intervention to correct. At the time, the Act seemed to be what the American educational system

In view of the fact that we have a new President, new legislation has been implemented since the previous NCLB legislation established in 2005-06 by Former President George W. Bush. The No Child Left Behind ordered educators must be “highly qualified” by the end of 2006 school year with their license and meet all certification prerequisites of the state in which they teach. The educator must also have a bachelor’s degree and must pass state certification to be eligible for the 2006 school year. Teachers, who do not meet those qualifications, will not be permitted to teach again until they have met those prerequisites.

Since the No Child Left Behind Act, also known as NCLB, has come into effect, it has caused some concerns with teachers and parents alike on how well it is working for the students. There have been issues that have arisen that needed to be addressed and instead been overlooked when a child does not meet with the school’s standardized testing and is pushed onto the next grade level.

“Unintended Educational and Social Consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 311. EBSCOhost. In this peer-reviewed academic journal article, Liz Hollingworth, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Iowa, explores the history of school reform in the United States, and the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Hollingworth states that the great promise of NCLB is that schools will focus on the education of low-achieving students, reducing the gap in student academic achievement between White students and African-American, Hispanic, and Native American student populations. Hollingworth states that an unintended consequence of NCLB was that teachers and school administrators had to shift curriculum focus in an effort to raise test scores, but in some cases, they had to also abandoned thoughtful, research-based classroom practices in exchange for test preparation. NCLB also affected teachers, highly qualified teachers left high-poverty schools, with low performance rates especially those schools where teacher salaries are tied to student academic performance. Hollingworth concludes her article by stating “we need to be wary of policy innovations that amount to simply rearranging the deck chairs on the

Opponents of NCLB, which includes all major teachers' unions, allege that the act hasn't been effective in improving education in public education, especially high schools, as evidenced by mixed results in standardized tests. Opponents also claim that standardized testing, which is the heart of NCLB accountability, is deeply flawed and biased for many reasons. That stricter teacher qualifications have exacerbated the nationwide teacher shortage, not provided a stronger teaching force. The NCLB law has set a 2014 deadline for states to make public school students proficient in math and reading, but each state decides how to meet that goal. are from achieving proficiency.

The No Child left Behind Act was intended to close the achievement gap in elementary and secondary schools by allowing each and every student the opportunity to have the best education possible. This law was signed by George W. Bush in 2001 who described it as a law that will, “Ensure that all children have a fair, equal and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education”(Neill 2). The No Child Left Behind Act was only intended to help the students, but it is clear, not only to teachers, parents, and professionals, that it is time for a reauthorized law; One that each and every student can benefit from. The achievement gap in America’s school systems still exists. For the sake of America’s future, the school system must make a change now or the future of this country will suffer.

Good intentions are no excuse to continue a fail policy. Since the No Child left Behind Act (NCLB) became in effect, teachers have been restricted to teach in a certain way.

While NCLB appears great in principle, it is failing in actuality. The main purpose of the Act was to close the achievement gap between White and minority students, especially Black and Latino students, by increasing educational equality. The differences in the achievement gap is to be measured yearly through the use of standardized testing. As each student is unique, the use of standardized tests to measure whether students reach 100% proficiency is unrealistic. Teachers, principals, and school boards are so worried about being “proficient” that teachers are now teaching for the test, not teaching a rounded curriculum. With schools afraid that they may possibly receive sanctions, schools are now cheating the system by finding ways to bolster their scores to improve state AYP rates. Paul D. Houston explains in his article “The 7 Deadly Sins of NCLB,” that the Act relies on fear and coercion (2007). Teachers, school boards, and states are so afraid of receiving a failing grade that they are willing to skew results in their favour. Not to mention that states are allowed to choose their own statistical method to analyze their scores. Due to many unforeseen variables, these differences make it almost impossible to imply causation that students are reaching proficiency due to the NCLB Act.

However, even if the federal government met the financial obligations to fully fund NCLB, and remove harsh sanctions for schools which do not meet AYP standards, it still would not fix the problem of NCLB focusing solely on teaching to the test. Under the NCLB Act teaching has gone from learning about a wide array to subjects to a “drill and kill” system (Smyth 134). A drill and kill system is when teachers solely focus on teaching to the test by giving assessment after assessment. When teachers teach to the test and require students to only regurgitate information, the students are not using higher level thinking skills. The students are only learning how to take test,

As with all big measures, it is hard to qualify NCLB as a huge success or monumental failure; instead, it lies somewhere in between. Based on the statistics over the past decade, the experts nearly all agree that NCLB played a role in increasing the mathematics scores of younger grades, with a pronounced effect on areas with a large, concentrated population of African-Americans. NCLB also forever changed the face of education by making testing an integral part of school; while there are many critics there is no question that this shift will be felt for a long time. However the language of the bill that allowed each state to set their own benchmarks meant that the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) in math and reading that NCLB warranted was in many instances gamed and back loaded. Also teachers, in an effort to meet these standards, began “teaching for the test” instead of say reading novels or creative exercises as in the past. It’s largely for these reasons that Congress failed to renew NCLB and President Obama waived many of the bill’s central provisions. In my opinion, NCLB had good intent in trying to improve accountability of failing schools systems, providing more info for parents and better allocating money. However, I would not have tried the one-size-fits-all approach of sanctioning schools; instead, I would have really focused on

While the enactment of the NCLB of 2001 attempts to “ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education." The consequences of the statute may instead deny access to adequate education for a large portion of the population. Its implementation, primarily through its system of rewards and punishments, may actually inhibit educational opportunities for the very population it was designed to serve the “low income students.” If its provisions are enforced, the statute could practically force low-income students to remain in poor-performing public schools while failing to address their real educational needs, thus decreasing the chances of them ever attaining academic proficiency.

Another major problem of NCLB is the people who create the tests. State senators across the country make different tests and decide what should be in the learning curriculum. To become a state senator you do not need a degree, and the senators that do have degrees are typically degrees of business or law. Why did senators make the tests and not teachers? Many of the state senators writing the tests do not have the educational background needed to write tests. And because every state senate makes a different test for every state, students who move out of state are supposed to be able to pass a test that they have not learned about.