By Molinna Bui, guest writer
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is one of the most controversial pieces of federal legislations imposed on the states. States have opposed the national government’s role in education and are completely against their current participation. Education is a state’s right; the federal government should not have as much involvement as it does now.
The NCLB Act was created in 2001 and signed off in January 2002 by President George W. Bush. The Act sets federal standards for education and makes federal grants available to states that agree to achieve these new national standards by the end of each year. Results on standardized tests allow the U.S. Department of Education to see how every public school/ school district is doing in the country — this is known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Failure in meeting these standards results in reduction or loss of education funding for the state from the federal government.
No Child Left Behind should either be completely rewritten, possibly even removed, and the federal government should be giving funding to the states for education in block grants. NCLB is hinged entirely on standardized test scores and with these national test scores, there was a goal of achieving 100% by 2014. The scores that were recorded from last year only increased by a few points from when the legislation was passed in 2002. This proves that the legislation did not achieve its goal and that the law should be repealed.
While the NCLB Act has definitely increased general availability of data on test scores and has proven to have an effect on fourth through eighth graders, by the end of elementary or secondary school, there was no lasting effect. Teachers are sick of “teaching to the test,” and students are sick of taking standardized
tests. “Teaching to the test” ruins the whole learning process — no one is attending school to actually learn/gain more knowledge. They are simply going to school just to get good grades and get good scores on standardized tests to be then accepted into college.
NCLB has a “one size fits all” mentality. Everyone is different — why implement an education system that teaches these students like they are all the same? NCLB is a system. We are not teaching kids according to their needs; we are teaching them according to a standardized test.
Though the original intention of the No Child Left Behind Act was to increase student achievement, it failed miserably. The rewrite/removal of NCLB is long overdue, and, thankfully, Congress is finally trying to do something about it.