What is your opinion of the No Child Left Behind Act, and in what ways has it affected you?

Answer 1

Ok well I hope you in the mood for some reading. Ill try to give you the short version of my long rant.
Basically it sucks. I knew it would suck when first initiated. I knew this because when I was a kid growing up in Texas, where GW Bush was govenor he passed all these laws about Texas Education (similar to NClB) and it seemed all we did was study and prepare for the damn TAS test.
Anyway as it is now teachers are forced to teach to the test. I have seen these tests as I work in education and last year I had to scribe (write) for a kid and let me tell ya the crap on these tests is insane. Teachers and adminstrators are stressed and so are kids. Last year in this district all schools did not meet AYP (annual yearly progress) on the math sections so now this year its like all the schools are focusing on math. In the meantime other subjects get shoved aside. All I hear about is CRT (our test) and my kids even get homeowork sent home with comments like "Not in CRT format" even though they got the questions right.
I think in the long run if we continue with NCLB type education they we are going to produce a generation of kids that only know how to perform for the test. Which is great if you dont want your kid to have no problem solving skills.

Answer 2

I'm the son of a school superintendent. Here are my thoughts.
(a) It gets federal money to schools, directly (avoiding the state bureaucracy). Yay.
(b) The "quality control" and "accountability" measures are stupid, STUPID. One reason is because each state sets its own quality control measure (so Midwest states, it's 75 percentile, other places it can be 30 or 40), and most states set it so high that it was doomed to failure. Further, special needs students (physically and mentally handicapped) are tested and included in the same way, so if your district has lots of those, there's nothing you can do, you'll fail. Most states have revisited the standards, recognizing that nearly every school will be failing. Finally, taken to its extreme, every school will be required to improve EVERY YEAR. And you get to a plateau such that there's no more room for improvement, then what?
(c) I think a lot of NCLB was a ploy to get public schools labeled as "failing" to allow the more widespread use of vouchers (which is merely an attempt to expand religious private education in this country). Remember that private schools don't have to take students with special needs, or disabilities, so it's a lot easier for them to meet standards (although studies recently released note that private schools are no better than their comparable public schools in teaching reading math and science.)

Answer 3

It is a good concept that just has not worked very well.

Just because you test people repeatedly does not get them to learn any more than if you were not testing them.

Also no funding was put forward for the schools to implement this additional testing and the school districts and the state are having to come up with this extra money for testing at the sacrifice of teachers salaries, educational supplies and books.

So what was meant to get kids to learn more is actually depriving the students of the educational materials for them to learn in the first place.

Can you say counterproductive?

Answer 4

It allows special needs children to get the help they deserve. It requires schools to provide extra help for those that are handicapped. No child left behind allows parents to get services for children that were denied before. Speech therapy, reading tutors, extra helpers for those in wheel chairs. Without No Child Left Behind schools would go back to putting all the handicapped children in one room and forgetting about them Now they are held accountable that every child gets educated.

Answer 5

i think its a good idea to keep track of the students progress. However N.C.L.B fails to take into account other factors that contribute to a students sucesss or lack there of. It has affected me because I have to take more state tests. It seems to me that the people that made that law belive that if you test kids more, they will get smarter. Its like thinking that if you weight something more, it will get heavier.

Answer 6

As a tax payer I love it! I think its time that educators feet were held to the fire. Too many idiots coming out of high school that could barely spell their names. I hope they get even tougher.