No Child Left Behind Act

¶ … No Child Left Behind Act

The NCLB Act of 2002 is not beneficial to the academic progress of the students.

The NCLB Act of 2002 is well intentioned but is not beneficial to the academic progress of (most) students. Undoubtedly, the aims of the NCLB Act are worthwhile; increasing literacy, improving the educational opportunities of underprivileged students, and holding public schools accountable for their program effectiveness are all valid goals. However, the methods through which the Bush administration attempted to achieve those objectives are, in the views of many educators and observers, extremely detrimental to the overall quality of American public education (Darling-Hammond, 2004; Murray, 2006; Sonnenblick, 2008).

First, the NCLB Act does not address the needs of students who are already achieving at a proficient level (Sonnenblick, 2008). There is a definite need to improve the ability of the public education system to help students who are not achieving reading proficiency, but doing so at the expense of all other students is extremely inadvisable Sonnenblick, 2008). Second, the experience with NCLB so far has been that the potential consequences of failing to achieve the required standards set for schools creates an incentive for schools to undermine the best practices capable of increasing actual learning for practices that do little besides train students how to perform better on standardized state-wide exams (Murray, 2006).

Even worse, it has caused educators to commit outright fraud through various types of cheating designed to improve students' test scores to avoid the consequences to the schools of failing to satisfy NCLB standards (Sonnenblick, 2008). Particularly because the goals of NCLB could probably be achieved through other means, the Act is not beneficial to the academic progress of many students.

The NCLB Act of 2002 is not beneficial for teachers or classroom instruction.

Even without the issue of cheating by teachers and school administrators, the approach to education that NCLB inspires is contrary to best practices in education, at least according to most contemporary educational theorists (Murray, 2006). In principle, it is now believed that the traditional emphasis on passive learning through lectures and textbook methods of instruction are far less effective than active methods of academic instruction. Whereas modern educators have been pushing for public education systems to move away from passive learning methods, the NCLB creates the exact opposite incentive: to waste classroom modules memorizing information for the test and practicing test-taking instead of learning (Darling-Hammond, 2004; Murray, 2006).