2008 Woodie Awards
No child left behind act?
No Child Left Behind fails to reach its intended purpose
Jessica Lillie
Issue date: 3/1/07 Section: Opinions
The idea looked beautiful on paper: national comprehensive testing of students to reform educational standards. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), an act passed by President George W. Bush in 2002, was designed to improve education across the country while closing the racial gap in testing scores.
NCLB was supposed to complete this goal through high-stakes testing, advocates of which say that it gives students study incentives and raises learning standards. It was also supposed to prevent students from moving forward into a higher grade if they fail to pass the test standards, keeping these children from slowing down the next grade level. This allows them to take a second chance at gaining those abilities.
If an entire school were to fail the national or state-level standards, funding towards that school would be cut or the school would shut down as an incentive to raise scores. Individual teachers also faced the threat of losing their jobs if their students couldn't make the grade.
Meanwhile, schools that showed significant improvement would receive a certain amount of increased funding as reward, as well as to support its influx of children from schools that have closed.
With all these bubbling ideas, how could anything go wrong?
The plan seemed to work in the beginning. Schools whose students couldn't meet scores were caught red-handed and penalized and many were shut down. Test scores began to improve in some states, Wisconsin being one of them.
But soon, things began to go downhill. Teachers were cheating to avoid losing their jobs. Students' test scores were improving, while their classroom grades were falling. Schools that were doing well, especially in bigger cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, began to fail along with their counterpart schools that had been shut down.
Schools had originally proposed a budget to fund high-stakes testing, not including the necessary funding for various other school necessities promised in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is now NCLB. This amount derives from the calculations of states as to how much they would need to successfully test their students.
NCLB was supposed to complete this goal through high-stakes testing, advocates of which say that it gives students study incentives and raises learning standards. It was also supposed to prevent students from moving forward into a higher grade if they fail to pass the test standards, keeping these children from slowing down the next grade level. This allows them to take a second chance at gaining those abilities.
If an entire school were to fail the national or state-level standards, funding towards that school would be cut or the school would shut down as an incentive to raise scores. Individual teachers also faced the threat of losing their jobs if their students couldn't make the grade.
Meanwhile, schools that showed significant improvement would receive a certain amount of increased funding as reward, as well as to support its influx of children from schools that have closed.
With all these bubbling ideas, how could anything go wrong?
The plan seemed to work in the beginning. Schools whose students couldn't meet scores were caught red-handed and penalized and many were shut down. Test scores began to improve in some states, Wisconsin being one of them.
But soon, things began to go downhill. Teachers were cheating to avoid losing their jobs. Students' test scores were improving, while their classroom grades were falling. Schools that were doing well, especially in bigger cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, began to fail along with their counterpart schools that had been shut down.
Schools had originally proposed a budget to fund high-stakes testing, not including the necessary funding for various other school necessities promised in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is now NCLB. This amount derives from the calculations of states as to how much they would need to successfully test their students.
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