The No Child Left Behind bill needs some help in the US and Obama is the one to help. It was first passed in the Johnson administration and took on a major change when Bush took over in 2001. Now it is Obama’s turn to try and find a better way to make sure that kids in America are being educated and retaining the knowledge they are being taught.
George W. Bush changed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to make it focus on standardized test scores in school. This became know as the No Child Left Behind bill. They focused specifically on the minority students and how they were doing on these test. They test children in 3rd grade through 8th grade and each year every school is expected to show improvements until they get all the way to 100% of students passing. If they fail to beat last year’s score they missed the government’s goal and they are marked down as failing and the government doesn’t do much to change that.
Teachers are frustrated with emphasis on these standardized tests that aren’t helping to prepare students for the future. “Teaching” for these tests often takes away from teachers actually trying to teach their students. Standardized tests are a great idea but in actuality it doesn’t work. When it comes down to it, schools are trying to get all their kids to pass them and they end up have to teach students different list and have them just memorize the information they are given. A lot of the time it doesn’t expand much beyond applying what they are learning and students usually forget the information right away.
Obama plans to wipe the slate clean and stop identifying schools as failing and instead focuses on how to help improve those schools. Obama wants to focus more on the teachers and how they are teaching the students. He needs to step up and follow though with his ideas and find a way that is going to help students learn and keep them from failing, not just classify them as failing as Bush’s “No child Left Behind,” ended up doing and got mocked for it.
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In Amanda’s “no child left behind” commentary, she points directly at some of the policy flaws, and offers some plausible and simple solutions. She implies that in theory, the policy holds merit, but the current implementation is not practical. The goal: “…belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education.” (Wikipedia)
ReplyDeleteAnecdotally, I have acquaintances in education that have very negative opinions of NCLB; in general, they think it is a “one size fits all” solution to a very complex learning environment. That it is inadequate, especially for teachers who choose to exceed standards for their students, because they are forced to adhere to limited expectations and “tunnel curriculum”. Also, and almost direct words from Amanda, this structure does not teach children to think critically, rather to get by on rote memorization, and then just dumb the info.
A special note-it is a hornet’s nest to find believable or trustworthy data on the actual positive or negative impacts of NCLB; it’s fairly new and highly politicized, so it’s tough to trust any source at this time. Can we really say that children have benefited due to this policy without question, when most are not even on the job market yet? Hence, why her commentary relies on anecdote and subjectivity for the most part.
There is something to be said for the ingenuity and free spirit thinking of the “American”, and I think our educational structure has been a critical part of that. Are we raising the bottom up, but lowering or capping the top? If so, we ought soon to find out what that cost is. Most elementary teachers that I have spoken with would beg for liberation form a policy that they believe limits their abilities goals.