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Add to FavoritesThe No Child Left Behind Act, passed by the US Congress in 2001 and signed into law in January, 2002 by President George Bush is a massive piece of legislation that has drawn both critics and supporters. Although 1000 pages in length and covering a vast array of educational issues, the primary component of the NCLB act is the accountability component that requires states to administer standardized tests in Reading and Math to measure student achievement. The question that is being batted around by both sides of the NCLB debate is, "Is the No Child Left Behind law beneficial for children?" The answer is a resounding, YES.
Teacher groups have a long history of opposing the use of test scores as a measure of accountability. Their fear is that schools will use student progress on standardized tests as a measure of teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Although worthy of a debate on its own merits, this has not been the case. Certainly student learning is part of teaching effectiveness, but it is invalid to consider teacher performance as the only variable affecting student learning. It is, however, one variable, and it ought to be considered in the overall evaluation process of both teachers and schools. Accountability is an integral part of evaluating anything, and how students perform on subject area tests is "a measure" of teaching effectiveness.
Having a goal in mind regarding a standard of achievement, albeit minimal, such as having students pass the end-of-year standardized test, teachers are more likely to meet the standard. The common complaint is that "we are teaching to the test." This complaint is basically just noise because no one requires teachers to only teach to the test. Differentiated teaching techniques allow teachers to teach basic core concepts as well as expand their application to the same classroom audience without holding back anyone. Slower students might only grasp the basic content while more advanced students grasp not only the basic concept but learn to apply it in higher level applications as well when teachers use differentiated instruction techniques to teach "past the test."
Many of today's "about to retire" teachers in the United States began their careers in the late 1960s and early 1970s when schools were graduating students who could neither read, write, nor do math. As a result, numerous law suits were filed across the nation by some of these high school graduates who were unable to obtain and hold jobs because of their skill deficiencies. In many cases the students won these law suits because they were able to demonstrate in a court of law that their schools had merely "passed them on" without expecting them to learn basic skills. There was no accountablility other than teacher grades which were often highly inflated.
Annually reports come out of our nation's capitol that US students do not fare as well as European and Asian students on national exams in math, reading, and science. Regardless of which side of the debate one takes, it is accepted that if the US is to continue its place as a world power, it is imperative that we graduate students who have a solid skill base in these core courses. Some measure of accountability must be in place that prods not only schools, but students and the American culture to expect more of the learning process. Placing expectations in place throughout the educational process that students pass basic competency exams, such as are found in the NCLB act is one such measure.
In states where measures have been implemented, and in schools where teachers and administrators have high expectations of their students, the NCLB act is prodding continued improvement. Through incremental increases in the number of students who must pass annual course exams in math and reading, schools have had to focus on the individual needs of specific students as well as on their curricula in general. Schools, that in the past, took for granted a percentage of their students would fail, for a variety of reasons such as poor attendance, lack of parental participation, learning problems, or even ambivalence on the part of the student are implementing programs to address these needs because of NCLB expectations.
Part of the NCLB act allows schools to apply for grants to address the reasons for student failure. Grants are available to local schools through the NCLB act for tutoring, mentoring, parenting, truancy, as well as school safety and counseling and guidance. The belief that some students will fail regardless of the educational process is unacceptable. The NCLB act provides schools and communities with a blueprint of how to address the needs of these students so they are more likely to be successful. When implemented, the programs are effective in promoting student success. The problem is not the NCLB Act, but the failure of schools to implement appropriate intervention programs that meet student and community needs. Many schools and educators still hold to the idea that some students are destined to fail no matter what - that it is OK to leave some students behind.
Accepting that some students will fail in the classroom or that some will fail to graduate as an excuse for not implementing interventions is unacceptable. The NCLB act addresses that by holding schools accountable for not implementing a modicum of these programs. It is not a strong-arm policy of strict governmental intervention. Rather, it is a guide that demonstrates to schools how they can create, direct, and measure student success. Those schools that are unable to achieve success under their own direction are "re-directed" by educators who are capable of creating an atmosphere of success. Schools are not "taken over" via the NCLB Act until they have demonstrated an inability to promote student success by addressing the factors that impede student success.
Yes, the No Child Left Behind act is beneficial for students because it requires that schools recognize the importance of academic success and the responsibility of the school to implement programming that assures success. When students are properly taught and appropriate interventions are in place for those who struggle, success for every child is possible. That is the goal of the NCLB act. When the culture of a school accepts that "some" students cannot learn or even that they will not learn, the school fails. No Child Left Behind means exactly that no child, regardless of the reason for his struggle to learn will be overlooked, allowed to fail, or judged for his difficulty. The school will find a way to promote success for every child. How many of us want to be treated by a doctor who believes that many of his patients will not recover, or an attorney who believes that some cases simply cannot be won? How many of us want to volunteer our child to be the one "left behind?"
The name of the act, in itself, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, is beneficial because it raises our awareness of the importance of every single child while accentuating the citizen's role in monitoring the educational process. The nation that is willing to allow some of its students to fall behind educationally is the nation that will fall behind itself. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is not perfect, but it is definitely movement in the right direction. It holds schools and communities accountable for the success of every student while promoting a culture of successful expectations for students, schools, and communities.
Learn more about this author, James Lynne.
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No
No Child Left Behind is a miserable, stop-gap piece of legislation in a long line of similar items. It makes the assumption that: a) all any student needs to be successful is a good teacher and a good curriculum, b) that the rate of absorption of material can be assessed using a yearly test, and c) that it is possible to legislate good teaching/learning.
I was fortunate in my education. I was born into a family that valued books and learning; I was read to from infancy; I attended a very small school my first year, and had an incredible teacher who was smart, funny and caring. My next four years of education were spent with a teacher who was competent, but neither especially kind or caring. She was overworked, having 4 grades in one room, adding up to 45 students. My next teacher had three grades in one room-again adding up to around 40 students, but she was very different from the second teacher. We all adored her, and she was a marvelous teacher. High school was a mixed bag, but I had six wonderful teachers: two of whom taught speech and drama, two art, one taught English and the other taught algebra. (No fault to the last one that my comprehension of math ran aground on the concept of imaginary numbers, and stuck there forever.) In twelve years of public school education I had only one teacher who seemed clueless about the process of education. His idea of teaching was to give the assignment, then go down to the teacher's lounge for a cup of coffee. At the college level, I saw a broader variety of teaching styles, and saw a greater number of teachers who, frankly, had no clue how to teach.
When I began teaching, I had two standards of educator that stood out for me above all the others: my first grade teacher, the one who taught 13 students in a little one-room school; and my high-school honors English teacher. Both were dedicated and innovative in their teaching in ways that are scarcely possible in today's teaching environment.
I began my teaching career as a second career, after my children graduated from high school, so I had a fair amount of real world experience to draw on in making my assessment of current education practices. While not an earth-shatteringly successful educator myself, I have the good fortune to be acquainted with some excellent teachers; I can state with good authority, that they are the wonderful educators that they are because of their caring, skills and talent in that area, and in spite of No Child Left Behind and similar legislation.
Good teachers facilitate the learning process; they have become adept at rescuing intelligent students from "don't care" attitudes, encouraging those who can, and helping those who can't get the most possible from the material at hand. Good teachers without exception care about the students they teach whether they learn or not, and about the environment in which their students learn. Good teachers teach their biological children as automatically and constantly as breathing. Being a teacher is part of who they are more than what they do. Career assessments, professional examinations, and examining boards can assess depth of knowledge and understanding of theory; they cannot assess that indefinable quality that makes a good teacher.
In my childhood school there was a family that lived in a two-room house. There were eight children who frequently came to school dirty; if there was head-lice or impetigo they would be the ones to have it. The middle boy stuttered; all were violent, ignorant, and possibly intellectually challenged. Every school has this family (or families).
I grew up in a small farming community. No one was rich in our neighborhood, but it was a matter of pride to send the children to school in clean clothing, with a decent lunch-even if the lunch was in a brown paper sack. Our skills varied-from the girl in the grade just ahead of me who won all the "cipher" matches with her lightning skill at division and square root, to myself with hardly any math skills at all, but reading everything I could get my hands on (thank goodness for public libraries), right down to the little Down's Syndrome kid who sort of lodged permanently in the middle room where his mother taught.
Some of the intervention programs now available could have helped the stutterer, but no amount of legislation was going to make the teacher's little boy grow into real independence. Added teachers or even some aides would have evened out the workload for these hard-working caring ladies, but some children in this world are going to be left behind because some accident of birth and inheritance has created for them a permanent inequality. Passing more laws is not going to change this.
Standardized testing may not be the worst idea that has been legislated, but it certainly does limit the curriculum. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to develop a standardized test that will correctly assess children of varying backgrounds and learning styles. Tests do not, for the most part, assess potential; they assess acquired knowledge. A child from the inner city will have a different body of knowledge than the child from a farming community. A child of hispanic background will have different cultural references from a child descended from Vietnamese immigrants, and so on. Children who have grown up in households that prize intellectual development will approach learning differently from those that prize physical prowess or the ability to acquire money. Educational history is rife with examples of college entrance exams being seeded with culturally specific references with the express purpose of excluding segments of the population. If a standardized test makes allowances for those differences it ceases to be standardized; if it does not make allowances it has the potential of becoming unfair.
Knowing this, teachers spend much of their year making sure that students acquire the kind of language in which test directions will be couched. They try to make sure students understand quotients, how to find the difference between two numbers, and can respond to a "constructed response" (which is nothing more than what we called "essay questions" or "short answer" when I was an elementary child). Skilled teachers manage to work in the fun stuff that keeps children interested and learning; they become adept at making a history lesson (history isn't an area tested, by the way) incorporate math, English, vocabulary and maybe even a little philosophy or public speaking; they keep up a schedule of learning in spite of assemblies, snow days, illness, fire drills, intruder drills, and bona-fide emergencies. They grade papers long into the night; they sponsor after-school events; they chaperone ball games and dances; and many of them maintain a second job because their teaching pay doesn't stretch far enough in today's economy.
One of my mentors early in my teaching career said that you teach for all you are worth all year long; you get to know the students, you care about them. Then, at the end of the year you let go-because they are only yours for a few short hours each day, for one school term. Teachers care about their students. It is not possible to legislate caring.
A lot of things get left out of those standardized tests and "back to the basics" philosophy of education. Classes in public speaking and drama got shunted into extra-curricular activities in many schools. Budgets for music and art got slashed. Even libraries have taken a hit as the economy gets tighter. Cutting out these things, where will we get our architects? Our entertainment? Where will we get our public servants and statesmen? How are we going to open the doors to creativity for our inventors?
No Child Left Behind has succeeded in limiting our curriculum and burdening our teachers with unnecessary added teaching. And it has not addressed the issues of children born permanently challenged or teachers who are giving their all in overcrowded, underfunded classrooms.
Learn more about this author, Daisy Peasblossom.
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