No Child Left Behind Act's ineffectiveness in American education reform

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).

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.

Works Cited:

Crawford J. (2004). No Child Left Behind: Misguided Approach to School

Accountability for English Language Learners. National Association for Bilingual Education. Retrieved January 24, 2010, from:

http://www.nabe.org/documents/policy_legislation/NABE_on_NCLB.pdf

Darling-Hammond L. "NCLB Implementation Challenges: The Local Superintendent's

View." Peabody Journal of Education, Vol 80, (2004): 156-169.

Murray C. "Acid Tests: No Child Left Behind is Beyond Uninformative. It Is Deceptive"

The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2006. Retrieved January 25, 2010, from:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008701

Schroeder U. And Spannagel C. "Supporting the Active Learning Process." International

Journal on E-learning, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2006): 245.

Sonnenblick, J. (2008). "Killing Me Softly: No Child Left Behind" School Library

Journal, May 1, 2008, Retrieved January 24, 2010, from:

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6555540.html

USDOE (2001). United States Department of Education No Child Left Behind Overview,

Retrieved January 25, 2010, from the USDOE public website, at:

www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/index.html.