No Child Left Behind Act (Public Law 107-110, 115), is a Congressional Act signed into law by George W. Bush in January 2002. The Bill was a bi-partisan initiative, supported by Senator Edward Kennedy, and authorized a number of federal programs designed to improve standards for educational accountability across all States, districts, and increase the focus on reading. Much of the NCLB focus is based on the view that American students are falling behind in educational basis when scored are compared globally. Contrary to popular opinion, NCLB does not establish a national achievement standard; each State must set its own standards, but in order to receive funding, the States must meet a basic criteria of performance (Abernathy, 2007).[footnoteRef:1] [1: See: "Fact Sheet on the No Child left Behind Act," from the U.S. Department of Education, Cited in: http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/factsheet.html; Also see: "NCLB: Conspiracy, Compliance or Creativity?" Cited in: http://www.middleweb.com/HMnclb.html.]
The national school reform No Child Left Behind directly addresses teacher quality (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), placing importance on effective and accurate teacher evaluation practices. Identifying predictors related to teacher evaluation systems that lead to teacher job satisfaction would assist school administrators in designing school programs and policies to retain quality teachers in the classroom. The high attrition rate on the supply and demand of technology teachers, most especially in the rural areas of North Carolina, is quite alarming (Weston, 1997). As the years run steadfast and unprecedented rapid technological innovation takes its course, the problems that still remain unaddressed on the supply and demand of technology teachers must now be quickly addressed to make sure that children will not be left behind academically.
With the implementation of "No Child Left Behind" legislation in 2001 came a significantly intensified emphasis on teacher accountability and evaluation, measured predominantly by student performance on standardized...
One of the paradigms of 21st century pedagogy and educational policy in the United States focuses on diversity within the student population and expanding the principles of constructivism to view each learner as being unique, with different past knowledge, culture, and needs within the modern school environment. Constructivism allows for this individual uniqueness, and encourages diversity as part of the educational process (Dougimas, 1998). Students are encouraged to write their own opinions, backing them up with facts and knowledge and to move from the rote learning of the past, upward through Bloom's taxonomy of learning until they are using knowledge to synergize, analyze and even create new ideas and products. Students must also take on some of the responsibility of the learning process- a teacher cannot be with a learner 24/7, and thus must impart the skills necessary to succeed while still following a prescribed curriculum and approach to basic skill sets. This, of course, requires multiple evaluation measures that both improve teacher effectiveness and student performance (Partee, 2012).
Many have questioned the responsibility put on teachers to increase student test scores at the risk of ignoring other factors that influence those scores and other roles that effective teachers play. However, Marzano (2003), in responding to the question of what works in schools, concludes that the research does unquestionably link successful schools with teacher effectiveness. "Although most attempts to answer this question [of what works in schools] arrive at slightly different quantitative estimates, all researchers agree that the impact of decisions made by individual teachers is far greater than the impact of decisions made at the school level." (Marzano, 2003, p.63) In an earlier study which analyzed the achievement scores in mathematics, reading, language arts, social studies, and science for over 60,000 students across grades 3 through 5, S. Paul Wright, Sandra Horn, and William Sanders (1997) concluded that the "most important factor affecting student…
