No Child Left Behind Concept

No Child Left Behind Concept in American Education

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush pledged to overhaul the American education system by the turn of the century. A decade later, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) hoping to finally fulfill the goal announced by his father. Unfortunately, the specific approach to improve education at the heart of the NCLB initiative has proven to be ineffective and have been widely criticized in principle.

There is little doubt that the American education system must be improved, but many experts believe that NCLB methods are fundamentally incompatible with achieving meaningful education reform. In some respects, NCLB maintained important objectives, such as improving basic literacy rates. However, the manner in which NCLB sought to do that probably undermine the larger goal of increasing learning and broadening the range of intellectual talents in students. In all likelihood, improving the American education system will require less reliance on rote memorization, drilling, and passive learning, rather than more reliance on those elements.

The Purpose and Intent of the NCLB Initiative

By the turn of the 21st century, the quality of U.S. education had dropped below approximately 20 other nations, some of whom had only recently become part of the developed world. The explosive growth of information technology (IT) in particular required more science graduates and the shrinking of the business environment attributable to globalization intensified the importance of bridging the gap between American science and technical program popularity and their foreign counterparts.

In 2001, the Bush administration announced the NCLB program and defined its goals as ensuring higher literacy rates by requiring states to conduct standardized testing in reading and arithmetic throughout the states' school systems in the 4th and 8th grades in conjunction with various consequences to the institutions for failing to maintain acceptable levels of proficiency in those essential academic areas (USDOE, 2001; Crawford, 2004). According to various reports, then President Bush had become convinced of the value of this approach to education improvement during his tenure as the Governor of Texas (Murray, 2006).

In principle, the idea was simply to identify all poor readers at the 4th Grade and 8th Grade levels and provide remedial instruction to all students who are not achieving grade-level proficiency in literacy at those points. The President Bush believed that this is the most effective way to ensure high literacy rates and to increase educational achievement on a national level (USDOE, 2001).

To avoid constitutional problems with respect to the limits of federal authority and state sovereignty, NCLB does not set out specific federal testing requirements or standards (Darling-Hammond, 2004). Instead, NCLB requires that each state establish empirically valid testing methods and measures to conduct federally mandated testing in reading and mathematics. The consequences of failing to achieve acceptable levels of proficiency among the tested student population pertained mainly to publication of the information and to the rights of parents to transfer their children to higher-performing schools. Students not achieving at the proficient level receive remedial instruction intended to improve their performance and to prevent the gap between their progress and their classmates from widening during the crucial middle school years (Crawford, 2004; USDOE, 2001).

Conceptual Problems with the NCLB Approach to Improving Education

The NCLB concept was, in the view of many, fatally flawed in its design and the experience since its implementation has only supported that belief. The NCLB program does not include any meaningful consequences capable of motivating state education program administrators or individual schools to invest the necessary effort to improve poor-performing school (Sonnenblick, 2008). On the other hand, the negative publicity of being included on the "Needs Improvement" list has proven plenty motivation for educators to undermine the educational value of their programs for the sake of avoiding inclusion on that list.

One of the most damaging results of the NCLB program was the way that many schools began focusing on standardized test preparation through drilling instead of on substantive academic subjects (Sonnenblick, 2008). In many states, educators began devoting inappropriate amounts of time to preparing students to perform well on the state-wide tests while neglecting their primary academic purpose of teaching. Unfortunately, the increased attention to reading, writing, and arithmetic necessarily reduced the amount of time available for other subjects; it also increased reliance on passive learning, rote memorization, and testing mechanics (Sonnenblick, 2008).

Meanwhile, the weight of contemporary educational research suggests that the exact opposite approach to education is what is necessary to increase student interest and achievement in school. Namely, the key to improving modern education lies in expanding the range of subject matter and the spectrum of human cognitive intelligence beyond the traditional narrow focus on linguistic intelligence and symbolic logic (Schroeder & Spannagel, 2006). Likewise, modern educational theorists have reached a consensus that the traditional model of public education based on passive learning primarily from lectures and textbook assignments is much less effective than more active, hands-on teaching methods. In particular, the more inquiry-based active learning methods are much more conducive to promoting and cultivating student interest in scientific and other technical fields (Schroeder & Spannagel, 2006).

By comparison, critics of the NCLB program have argued that the Texas data upon which the Bush administration relied so heavily in justifying NCLB were scientifically flawed at best and deliberately deceptive at worst (Murray, 2006). At the state and local level, several high-profile instances have come to light where teachers purposely drilled their classes using actual questions from the scheduled state examination; in other instances, teachers had actually changed the answers of students on scoring sheets to help maintain satisfactory ratings for the school (darling-Hammond, 2004).

Conclusion

There is no question that the quality of American public education needs improvement on a national scale. However, the NCLB initiative is not capable of achieving that objective. Instead of promoting greater interest in academics by presenting broader subject matter NCLB narrows the focus of educators even further; instead of increasing the attention available to cultivate academic interest among students with diverse intellectual talents, NCLB emphasizes only linguistic skills and mathematics. Similarly, the NCLB program discourages creative teaching or increased incorporation of more active and intellectually stimulating types of learning environments. It reduces teaching to test-taking coaching and gives educators more incentive to worry about what is good for their schools instead of what is good for students.