The No Child Left Behind Act and Educational Technology Essays

A never-ending issue has loomed over the head of our nation-- education. According to the Institute of Education Sciences, 63.7% of American students are below proficient in reading and 65.7% in math. In order to improve educational standards and increase student achievement, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) in 2002. Designed to increase the role of the federal government in education, it holds schools accountable based on how students perform on standardized tests. Statistics show that the average student completes about 110-115 mandatory, standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and end of twelfth grade (an average of eight tests per year). Standardized testing utilizes

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.

In 2004, coinciding with the conclusion of President George W. Bush’s first term in office, United States Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, released an essay depicting the successes of his administration. Paige’s department spearheaded the initiative sparked by the No Child Left Behind Act, a set of policies enacted to reform education and provide students with an improved degree of learning more suited to the evolving job market. Paige brings light to the findings of his administration, presenting what he considers to be evidence explicitly showing the successful nature of these programs. Through numerous faults with his argumentation and reasoning, however, Paige’s opinion on the outcome of said policies is highly debatable. To judge

“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

The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to test students on reading and math through grades three through eight and at least once in tenth through twelfth grade. “The exclusive emphasis on tests has left students sick with stress in even the youngest grades; some schools reported that on testing days, up to two dozen children vomit on their test booklets.” As stated by Robbins. Because of how emphasized tests are, a student’s performance is only based on test

No Child Left Behind, one of the biggest social engineering projects of our time, put fifty million students and their three million teachers under pressure ("A Failing Grade for No Child"). On January 8, 2002, President George W Bush’s NCLB Act was signed into law. NCLB is an education reform bill created to narrow the racial achievement gap. Recently, NCLB has made its way back into the news, simply because it has been up for renewal for over four years now and nothing has happened. This is significant because NCLB dictates how students are educated. NCLB has already affected student learning for many years now, and if renewed, it will continue to do so. The NCLB Act has failed in its mission to improve our schools and narrow the racial achievement

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is just an extension of the ESEA of 1965. NCLB was passed by the House of Representatives and Senate almost unanimously and signed into effect January 8th 2002 by President George W. Bush. The Act is the first time in the history of the federal government’s association with

Control of the public education system has been left to the State for most of the country’s history, it was not until the 1950’s that the federal government played a role in categorical programs, but the national government refrained from involvement in academics until the 90’s. Three days after taking up his position in office, George Bush announced his plan for the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) which was a consolidated reform of the 1962 Elementary and Secondary Education Act or ESEA (McGuinn, p. 1). ESEA focused on providing resources for the underprivileged students, whereas the NCLB act focuses on all students in public schools. On January 8, 2002, the No Child Left Behind act was enacted. The

The United States Constitution is silent on the role of the federal government in public education. Thus, each state and locality has assumed the responsibility of educating their children. The role of the federal government is largely to support the states in this extremely important endeavor, as long as each state does their job effectively. Several events, such as Sputnik and the A Nation at Risk report, have led to the federal government increasing their role in public education. The disparity in the quality of education among states and deficiencies in equitable learning among sub groups has amplified the involvement of the United States government in public education. This trend reached its ' climax with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. Over a decade has passed since the full implementation of this landmark legislation and many involved in education and pondering the true success of the program. Has the NCLB agenda improved the quality of learning in America or created a culture of failure that is hindering the efforts of educators?

As stated by the U.S Department of Education the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is the most recent iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the major federal law authorizing federal spending on programs to support K-12 schooling. The act requires states to implement statewide accountability systems covering all public schools and students (Clarke 2003). These systems must be based on challenging state A former teacher, President Johnson believed that equal access to education was vital to a child’s ability to lead a productive life. This piece of legislation constituted the most important educational component of the “War on Poverty” launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Through a special source of funding (Title I), the law allocated large resources to meet the needs of educationally deprived children, especially through compensatory programs for the poor. As Alyson Klein states, a writer for Education Week, the law’s original goal, which remains today, was to improve educational equity for students from lower income families by providing federal funds to school districts serving poor students. School districts serving lower income students often receive less state and local funding than those serving more affluent children. The purpose of the NCLB is to ensure that all children in the United States receive a high-quality education and to close the achievement gap that exists between children who

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.

No later than the 2013-14 school year, it was required that states bring their students to a level of proficiency on all parts of the state testing. Each state got to individually decide, what “proficiency” looked like, and the kind of testing used which lead to a big difference in standards scores. As a result, the amount of students who scored at the proficient level or above on the state tests changes completely depending on the state. This caused some states to

President Bush quoted, “Clearly, our children are our future…Too many of our neediest children are being left behind” (www.ed.gov). The “No Child Left Behind” Act expands the federal government’s role in elementary and secondary education. The NCLB emphasizes accountability and abiding by policies set by the federal government. This law sets strict requirements and deadlines for states to expand the scope and frequency of student testing, restore their accountability system and guarantee that every classroom is staffed by a teacher qualified to teach in his or her subject area. Furthermore, the NCLB requires states to improve the quality of their schools from year to year. The NCLB pushes state governments

The No Child Left Behind Act should tremendously be re-examined and amended because the focus on the standardized tests decrease the quality of other subjects not on the tests, the tests are not an efficient tool to make certain that a student is receiving an excellent education and the tests create unnecessary stress for the students, teachers and administrators. The purpose of No Child Left Behind is to provide every student with the opportunity to receive a top-grade education. This is a great proposal to strive towards but, legislation plans on achieving this proposal by making schools responsible for their students’ proficiency and to measure their proficiency with the use of standardized tests. After the students take the

There is now a strong emphasis on reading/ language arts, and mathematics. For school districts across the country, it is imperative that their schools show adequate yearly progress (AYP). In order for this to happen, students need to perform well in their state standardized testing. School districts are coming up with different plans to ensure that their students will be ready for the state testing that takes place each spring, which used to be known as STAR testing. In order to create more time to emphasize on the academic areas students will be tested in, many districts have gone to the extremes, and have reduced instruction time in science and have even cut enrichment programs like art and music. What the government officials don’t realize is that state testing does not report accurate information on what our students really know. In the No Child Left Behind: what we know and need to know, Maleyko and Gawlik claim that “There are some faults with the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as to whether or not AYP will be able to provide an accurate measurement of the goals that are stated in the Title One purpose statement of the NCLB legislation” (2011,