No Child Left Behind Act

No Child Left Behind Act and Its Effect on English Language Learners

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Its Effect on English Language Learners

The United States is no longer a "melting pot, but has rather emerged in the 21st century as a "salad bowl" where many minorities may not readily become as assimilated into mainstream American society as in years past. The implications of these trends for the public school system in the U.S. has been profound, particularly in view of the recent mandates established by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (hereinafter "NCLB," or alternatively, "the Act"). According to Arce, Luna, Borjian and Conrad, "Proponents of the No Child Left Behind Act claim that its mission is to close the achievement gap by holding school districts and states accountable, encouraging the use of flexible educational approaches, and supporting parents' rights to school choice" (p. 56). Less than 13% of teachers in American classrooms currently possess even minimal ESL training, though, and just 8 to 10% of teachers have bilingual or ESL certification (Rice & Pappamihiel, 2004).

Furthermore, the number of ELL students in American classrooms continues to increase faster than the system can accommodate them. In fact, more than four-and-a-half million students were identified as English language learners (ELLs) attended school in the educational system in the United States, prekindergarten through Grade 12, in 2000-2001, accounting for almost 10% of the total public school enrollment (Komatsu & Witt, 2006). In addition, during the period from 1989 to 2006, the ELL population has approximately doubled, a trend that these researchers predict will continue for at least the next two decades (Komatsu & Witt, 2006). While special language programs are provided for more than 400 different language groups in American classrooms, approximately 80% of ELLs today are Spanish speakers (Ortiz, Wilkinson, Robertson-Courtney & Kushner, 2006). In this environment, identifying the impact of the NCLB on ELL students represents a timely investigation as described further below.

Tentative Research Questions

The following tentative research questions are based on the preliminary review of the literature and may be subject to changes, deletions or additions as the research process progresses:

What are the specific requirements of the NCLB for ELL students for individual subject areas?

What are the responsibilities of the ELL students?

What are the responsibilities of the ELL teachers?

What are the responsibilities of the school districts and administrators?

What changes have taken place in standardized or high-stakes testing scores since the enactment of the NCLB?

What has been shown to be effective in helping ELL students achieve improved performance?

Rationale for the Study

Because resources are by definition scarce, it is vitally important for educators and administrators at all levels to use the resources available to their maximum advantage in achieving the performance mandates established by the NCLB. In this regard, Kesson and Ross (2004) emphasize that, "The diverse responsibilities of public schools present a huge challenge to educators, and even when schools are performing well, it is difficult, if not impossible, for them to deliver all the expected results when their mission necessarily entails contradictory purposes" (p. ix). Likewise, as Mayers (2006) emphasizes, "Ideally, each citizen would have the opportunity to be taught by a well trained educator, and teachers would be equipped with an ability and liberty to apply the fruits of their teaching experience to their process as they tailor the delivery of curricula to the idiosyncratic needs of their students. A benchmark of success might be identified and adequate resources supplied to achieve educational goals" (p. 449). Far more importantly, though, young English language learners are not products and schools are not factories, and there is no room for false starts and little room for experimentation when it comes to these children. Therefore, identifying the impact of the NCLB on English language learners represents a timely area of investigation today, and can identify opportunities for improvement where deficiencies exist and provide a best practices guide for busy educators seeking superior alternatives.

Significance of the Study

In an increasingly multicultural society, developing laws that are equitable and fair is becoming harder than ever, and even the most well-intentioned legislation may have some unintended or unexpected consequences, and the NCLB is no exception. In this regard, according to Abedi and Dietel (2004), "One of the most controversial aspects of NCLB is its performance requirements for subgroups within the general student population. The NCLB requires that all children, including English-language learners (ELLs), reach high standards by demonstrating proficiency in English language arts and mathematics by 2014" (p. 782).

In an era of increased demands for accountability on the part of teachers and students alike, this date is not a suggestion or a recommendation, but rather a fundamental mandate that must be met. As a result, it is the responsibility of school districts across the country to help ELL students in particular achieve ongoing progress toward this objective, as gauged by student performance on a wide range of high-stakes state-level tests, or face serious consequences for their failure (Abedi & Dietel, 2004). In this regard, Rice, Pappamihiel and Lake (2004) report that, "Growing demands for accountability, such as that called for in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 will soon make it impossible for school districts and teachers in the United States to ignore their responsibilities to provide appropriate assistance to all students, including ELLs" (p. 121). The consequences for failure are in fact serious - and expensive. According to Imber and Van Geel (2004):

The federal statute known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) imposes on states and school districts a complex set of requirements intended to ensure that all children achieve academic proficiency. Students in schools that fail for two consecutive years to make 'adequate yearly progress' must, under the NCLB, be given the option to transfer to another public school in the same school district, including a charter school if permitted under state law, that has not been identified under NCLB as needing improvement. The school district must provide or pay for transportation for the student to attend the new school. (p. 34)

The introduction of high-stakes testing regimens has made these costs even more severe, and their link with the NCLB is made clear by Rice and her colleagues: "With the advent of the No Child Left Behind legislation, reading and mathematics have assumed a critical importance to standardized tests" (p. 121). According to Cochran-Smith (2005), a growing body of evidence has identified what seems to be a discernible pattern across the country as a result of the NCLB's impact on ELL students: "New regulations requiring that graduation rates be included in NCLB accountability provisions are not being enforced, whereas incentives for removing low-scoring students are rigidly followed. This means that there may now be perverse incentives in many states to push low-performing students out the back door so districts can avoid test-driven sanctions" (p. 99). Based on the foregoing, it is clear that educators, administrators and students alike are confronted with some significant challenges when it comes to meeting the requirements established by the NCLB, and these issues are discussed further in the preliminary review of the literature provided below.

Review of the Relevant Literature

In reality, it is difficult to find fault with the apparent goals of the NCLB. In this regard, Cochran-Smith (2005) points out that, "Nearly everybody agreed with the bill's purpose -- 'to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to attain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments,'" a worthwhile purpose that was to be accomplished through complex funding methods and the provision of more federal resources to high-poverty and struggling schools (p. 99). According to Chamberlain (2004), the two primary goals of the NCLB are: (a) to raise standards across U.S. schools; and, (b) to decrease the achievement gap between those students who traditionally perform well in school and those who traditionally have been considered underachieving (the latter group generally includes students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, students from low-income families, urban students, rural students, and students with disabilities).

Certainly, one way to achieve this decrease in the achievement gap is to lower the bar, but this would defeat the purpose of the legislation and run contrary to the fundamental purpose of providing a quality education in the 21st century. Nevertheless, the latter group of students described by Chamberlain (2004) does in fact represent a particularly difficult demographic to educate for a wide range of reasons that are beyond the scope of the instant study; these harsh realities, though, adversely affect the ability of many of these disadvantaged students to compete on the same basis as their advantaged counterparts across the board. Despite the enormity of these challenges, though, the NCLB is the law of the land and the mandates are clear. For example, in their timely study, "Challenges in the No Child Left Behind Act for English-Language Learners," Abedi and Dietel (2004) report that the NCLB has established some difficult mandates in an attempt to reduce the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students; although these are worthwhile objectives, these authors also emphasize that achieving these level of performance requires substantive improvement in student learning for many English language learners. These authors note that the obstacles for ELL students are particularly challenging, given that they include both educational and technical issues. These challenges include the following:

Historically low ELL performance and very slow improvement. State tests show that ELL students' academic performance is far below that of other students, oftentimes 20 to 30 percentage points lower, and usually shows little improvement across many years.

Measurement accuracy. Research shows that the language demands of tests negatively influence accurate measurement of ELL performance. For the ELL student, tests measure both achievement and language ability.

Instability of the ELL student subgroup. The goal of redesignating high-performing ELL students as language-proficient students causes high achievers among ELL students to exit the subgroup. The consequence is downward pressure on ELL test scores, worsened by the addition of new ELL students, who are typically low achievers.

Factors outside of a school's control. Research shows substantial nonschool effects on student learning even within ELL subgroups. Schools are therefore unable to control all the factors related to student achievement.

Given these constraints, it would seem that schools that are able to achieve the performance standards required by the NCLB in the established timeframe are going to be the exception rather than the rule, and at least some authorities suggest that the true purpose of the legislation is to create a situation where students, teachers, and schools alike are going to fail because the standards are impossible to achieve. For example, as Kesson and Ross (2004) suggest, "Current federal educational policy, embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act, sets impossible standards for a reason. Public access to institutions of learning helps promote the levels of critical civic activism witnessed during the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the power of the state and the corporations that it primarily serves" (p. xiv). These authors even go so far as to suggest that the same corporate forces that are driving the privatization of the nation's prison and jail system are at work in Congress: "The current reform environment creates conditions in which public schools can only fail, thus providing 'statistical evidence' for an alleged need to turn education over to private companies in the name of 'freedom of choice'" (Kesson & Ross, 2004, p. xiv). Indeed, these researchers maintain that the NCLB represent the tip of a conspiratorial iceberg with the privatization of the nation's public schools as its ultimate goal: "In combination with the growing corporate monopolization of the media, these reforms are part of a longer-range plan to consolidate private power's control over the total information system, thus eliminating avenues for the articulation of honest inquiry and dissent" (Kesson & Ross, 2004, p. xiv).

Other educational authorities have tended to agree with this overall assessment of the NCLB as well, if not on the level of a conspiracy, at least on the level of high-governmental meddling that has resulted in less-than-desirable coverage of the true impact of the NCLB on the nation's schools in general and ELL students in particular. For instance, as Mayers (2006) observed recently, "Despite the grim reality of the implementation of the No Child Left Behind act: the general public appears to be largely misinformed. This is due, in part, to what appear to be deliberate efforts on the part of the Bush administration" (p. 449). In this regard, Arce and her associates (2005) emphasize that, "The Bush family has taken a particular interest in education by directly and indirectly supporting the implementation of the NCLB legislation. This president, who is publicly propagandizing against public institutions (especially education and social security), sponsors legislation that directly profits his family, but punishes poor children and public school educators. NCLB is the pinnacle of investment schemes" (p. 56). According to Ascher (2006), the impetus behind this "NCLB as investment scheme" is nothing less than the co-opting of nation's schools by the powerful elitist-headed conglomerates that are running the country today:

The federal out-of-school tutoring program features free-market strategies promoted by the Bush Administration: parental choice, money following individual students, and the privatization of educational delivery. Created in response to low standardized-test scores, the requirement for supplemental educational services also reflects NCLB's lack of interest in the wider goals of public schools or students' school experiences. Just as NCLB has forced high-poverty schools to narrow their academic offerings to ensure that students make 'adequate yearly progress' in English and math, the two subjects currently tested, the supplemental services provision extends this narrowed educational agenda into students' out-of-school hours. (p. 136)

As noted above, even assuming that there is no hidden political or economic agenda behind the NCLB, the private sector continues to benefit from the mandates established by the NCLB at the expense of those who can least afford it, and the consequences of failure are profound and can have lifetime implications for those ELL students that are unable to achieve satisfactory performance in these subject areas. In response to these issues and disturbing trends, a number of educators have searched for superior alternatives to existing approaches to delivering educational services to ELL students, and a representative sampling of such studies is provided below.

Investigation

Paradoxically, many already overworked teachers are increasingly being required to provide individualized instruction for dozens and dozens of students with incredibly diverse learning needs with "one-size-fits-all" curricula. For example, in their study, "Lesson Adaptations and Accommodations: Working with Native Speakers and English Language Learners in the Same Science Classroom," Rice, Pappamihiel and Lake (2004) report that, "One could easily find classroom strategies to use with ELLs as well as science strategies to use with native English speakers (NESs). Many are innovative and clever. However, in a search for strategies that are effective for both ELLs and NESs, it is difficult to find the right integration of theory and classroom. Yet, this is the challenge faced by thousands of science teachers each day" (p. 121).

Based on their empirical observations of how ELLs learn, these researchers emphasize that using traditional teaching methods that may work well in other settings, will not be appropriate for ELLs. According to Rice and her associates, "Simply applying 'good teaching' strategies indiscriminately without an understanding of why they work with individual children will not suffice" (p. 121). Although most school districts are providing inservice training opportunities that focus on effective strategies that teachers can use immediately in their classrooms when working with ELLs, in many cases these teachers meet with little success when using these strategies in their own classrooms. Some teachers may continue to use these strategies, or resort to what they know best, or as these authors note, some may simply give up trying: "Or worse, they simply give up on the strategy and/or the student when the strategy does not produce the desired results. Our job as classroom teachers and teacher educators is to move beyond this superficial Band-Aid notion. We know that these strategies constitute good science teaching; now we need to understand how to make them bring forth good science learning for all students" (Rice et al., 2004, p. 122).

In their study, "Considerations in Implementing Intervention Assistance Teams to Support English Language Learners," Ortiz and her colleagues (2006) report that, "English language learners have such limited English skills that they cannot benefit from general education instruction provided entirely in English without special language program support" (p. 53). Therefore, ELL students are usually provided with education in either bilingual classrooms (where they receive both native language [L1] and English as a second language [ESL, or L2] instruction), or they are enrolled in general education classrooms and provided with supplemental instruction by ESL teachers. According to the results of their study, these researchers found that, "Intervention assistance teams can help teachers design and implement interventions to improve the performance of ELLs who are experiencing academic or behavioral difficulties, providing the supports needed to resolve many such difficulties within the context of general education" (p. 42).

In those cases where such interventions are unsuccessful and ELLs are subsequently referred for placement in special education classrooms, the eligibility decisions that drive such placement will be substantiated by appropriate documentation that students did not make adequate progress despite general education problem solving and that students' problems cannot be explained by such factors as limited English proficiency or cultural differences (Ortiz et al., 2006). The authors caution, though, "To be successful, however, IATs must accurately interpret data about ELLs and design culturally and linguistically responsive interventions. This article presents considerations in implementing IATs for ELLs, including team membership, the knowledge base needed by team members, intervention design, and recordkeeping" (Ortiz et al., 2006, p. 53).

A study by Artiles, Rueda, Salazar and Higareda (2005) entitled, "Within-Group Diversity in Minority Disproportionate Representation: English Language Learners in Urban School Districts," cited the inordinately high placement of ELL students in special education classrooms for one reason or another and found that ELLs placed in English immersion programs were more than twice as likely to be placed in less restrictive services than their ELLs counterparts who were placed in modified English immersion models and almost three times more likely than ELLs in bilingual education programs.

According to these authors, ELLs that were place in modified English immersion programs were 31% more likely to be placed in Resource Specialist Program (RSP), a category that included students who receive special education and related services outside the general education classroom for at least 21%, but not more than 60%, of the school day classes than their counterparts in bilingual education (Artiles et al., 2005). In addition, the authors also report that, "In addition, ELLs in English immersion programs were 32% more likely to be placed in more segregated programs than the peers receiving modified English immersion and 19% more likely than ELLs placed in bilingual education programs. It is interesting to note that ELLs placed in modified English immersion were less likely to be placed in special day classes than their counterparts in bilingual education programs" (Artiles et al., 2005, p. 283).

Finally, the need to ensure that ELLs are provided with the level of instruction they require to achieve compliance with the mandates of the NCLB may require some changes in how these students are referred to remedial or special education services. In some cases, ELL students may not be learning disabled but rather remain deficient in the language skills needed to understand what is taking place in the classroom around them. This was the focus of a recent study, "Assessing Effects of Directive Complexity on Accuracy of Task Completion in English Language Learners," wherein Komatsu and Witt (2006), investigated the accuracy of ELL student responses in an experiment designed to determine whether some ELL students may be unable to achieve the standards established by the NCLB because of unidentified disabilities related to their communication levels.

In this study, twenty-four students between the ages of 5 and 11 years from two elementary schools located in the Southeast participated in this study, 14 of which were ELLs (the 10 English-speaking students served as the control group). A critical problem for school-based diagnostic decision making is to determine the extent to which a student's problem is disability or merely language facility (Komatsu & Witt, 2006). The researchers suggest they demonstrated the potential usefulness of using a functional assessment process to identify ELL students whose difficulty following directives in the classroom was based on language rather than other disabilities; in addition, they suggest that the results of this study also have implications when considering early childhood education and early intervention (Komatsu & Witt, 2006). The authors conclude that, "The limitations of standardized testing are magnified when assessing young children, and functional assessments offer a more meaningful and contextual alternative" (Komatsu & Witt, 2006, p. 552).

Discussion

Given its universality in seeking to promote improved performance among American public school students, it is little wonder that the NCLB has received a great deal of attention in the peer-reviewed and scholarly literature. One of the most prominent issues to emerge from the flood of studies that has emerged in recent years is the requirement to address the specific needs of English language learners in individualized ways that will help them meet these established goals of the NCLB. Some of the other issues to emerge from the review included the requirement to use a "one-size-fits-all" curriculum when delivering educational services to classrooms full of students with incredibly diverse needs and the difficulties associated with distinguishing ELL students with learning disabilities from those with language deficiencies that can be resolved through additional instruction or alternative placements.

While it may not be reasonable to attribute the inability of the nation's schools to accommodate all of the requirements of the NCLB for all of the students all of the time, it is in fact difficult to argue with the loftiness of the goals and the overall intent of the law. It is also difficult to argue with the impossibility of achieving these goals for some schools that have historically been unable to meet even the barest minimum requirements for the best-performing students. For example, notwithstanding the political agenda implications discussed above, a more objective analysis of the law, according to education scholars, supports the contention that the NCLB is specifically harmful for the children described as "disadvantaged students," which are the same socioeconomic groups that have historically received inferior education. This point is also made by other researchers. For instance, according to Arce and her colleagues (2005), "In fact, NCLB's goals are highly restrictive for lower-income families whose children attend low-income schools. Therefore, identifying a suitable balance between the extremes of having the country's schools privatized in the interests of Halliburton et al. Or having tens of thousands of ELL students fail to achieve the standards established by the NCLB appears absolutely essential, and the sooner the better.