Education Laws

¶ … educational laws that has been signed by the U.S. president in the last decades is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This act represents a comprehensive approach towards both providing aid for disadvantaged students and towards improving overall scores in tests for students throughout the educational year. The main provision of this legislative act is that it ties federal funding with results in public schools. The first phase of the process is that a test is applied annually to all students.

This is a standardized test that aims to monitor results comparatively, primarily from year to year. The usual threshold is the previous year's result, in the sense that the students need to do better than these results to be labeled as positive. If the benchmark is not met repeatedly, then a mechanism is triggered towards improving the performance of the schools (Dillon, Rotherham, 2009).

This mechanism is varied depending on the number of times that the school misses the threshold, referred to as the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the way that the school has progressed as compared to previous year results. For each time that the school doesn't meet its result threshold, there are particular policies that will be implemented.

As such, a second year of missing the threshold requires an action plan towards improvement, while a fifth year of missing this already labels the schools as not abiding by requirements and being in need of restructuring. The legislative act obviously has important effects on teachers. One of the most important ones is that this act increases accountability for teachers. Their activity, their teaching approach is linked directly with concrete performances, with concrete levels of results that their students need to reach.

At the same time, students are given more flexibility when it comes to changing a school that is underperforming. Another important legislation is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This legislative act is a specific one, looking to make provisions for children and students who have certain disabilities. It aims to provide guidance to a wide category of children, ranging from birth to 18 or 21 years of age.

The main provision of the act is that students who are found eligible of such treatment, under the provisions of the act, must receive a specialized educational approach to match the disabilities that the student has and to ensure that these disabilities do not affect his or her educational process. The legislative act creates additional chores for the teacher: the requirements of the legislation imply that teachers have to focus on individual needs and adapt the educational approach for each and every student in the classroom. For the same.