Who here, like me, thinks No Child Left Behind is an abyssmal failure?

Question

For years, U.S. schools haven't been instilling many students with the basic math, writing, and reading abilities they need to succeed in our world--and we're improving very little.

Oh sure, it might be helping "poor" schools bring up their test scores. But, they're not an honest, holistic assessment of students' analytical capabilities. I'm not against testing, per se. But, NCLB forces teachers to teach kids to know how to handle the test and prevents teachers from developing and strengthing the intellectual and creative abilities of their students. The VAST majority of my new college classmates still DID NOT feel prepared for college at all! Talk about large federal infringement by my fellow Republicans.

In Kentucky, where I live, schools have to meet a goal of 100 points by 2014 to be labeled as "proficient." Ky.'s testing accountability rules were changed in '07 to bring the state closer to meeting NCLB stipulations. Read here: http://www.kentucky.com/211/story/196788.html

Answer 1

As an educator I am not sure where you get that we were improving because from where I stand we have been falling further behind. NCLB isnt the problem, teachers unions and poor parenting are. Half of my coworkers go about their business of teaching students, the other half run around complaining about this test, that test, NCLB, this politician and that and so on- Who does a better job teaching??? One guess.
Liberal society with no standards and that looks down upon holding people accountable are another large part of the problem. Parents need to be less selfish and start working with their kids while others need to stop being friends with their kids rather than parent to them. Discipline is the cheapest way to improve education, it costs nothing and delivers amazing results.
States LIE about graduation rates and intentionally chose the easiest tests- can they really be trusted???

Answer 2

Define abyssmal failure? By all measures, students across the board have shown increases in reading, writing, and mathematics scores. More so - at risk groups have made even more increases.
To me, there seems to be an alternate way to look at the tests. Often, people say that "high stakes testing" causes teachers to teach to the test. In fact, the test makers are trying to make a test covering the areas that they are supposed to test to meet the standards that the state wants students to be at.
People often forget that part of it. If teachers are covering the material that they are expected to cover, then there is not a need to "teach to the test" - what they are teaching will cover the test anyway.
Another positive area is that it forces schools to make changes. The biggest complaint is that the federal government doesn't foot the bill for NCLB. That is not entirely correct. School districts can always opt to not take part in NCLB. However, if they do, then they do not receive federal funds. NCLB is a prerequisite just like having a mandated speed limit (with enforcement) is a requirement for highway funds.
In addition, the US spends, on average, $10,000 per student per year. Where the issue is has to do with spending priorities. It is always easier to say "give me more" instead of reorganizing what you have.

As far as your state goes, I believe that it is only a matter of time before there is a national test instead of state-wide ones. Much as the state-wide test gives a standard view of every district, so would a federal test do the same with the states.

Answer 3

The thing that bothers me about no child left behind is the fact that the students who truly need specialized attention are not getting it and those that should be further along are being held back because of those children. Now I am not saying that it is the children with special needs fault, it is the fault of a president who has no idea what he is doing and takes the word of lobbyists that this is the right course of action.

If this "act" works so well then why is this once great nation falling further and further behind to the rest of the world? As it stands we are going to become a nation of people that cannot read above a junior high school level (if that) and our science and mathematics levels keep falling more and more every year. While I am all for arts and putting on plays and sporting activities those things should be focused on until a child has reached a certain grade level (ie 8th or 9th grade at the earliest) and have course taught by competent teachers as well.

If a child wants to play a musical instrument they should be academically eligible to do so, the same as sports.

Answer 4

I hate NCLB!! The school where I work is a "school in need of improvement" because we can't get enough special ed kids to pass the test! UH HELLO! That is why they are in special education,in the first place!

The state mandated that we get outside tutoring services! So we have offered free tutoring to.....any kid that gets a free and reduced lunch! Whether that child has passed the state assessments or not, whether that child is special ed or is not, it just doesn't matter!

They want us to differentiate learning yet tests are not differentiated to the child's level. It's a big hypocritical MESS!

I'm a third year teacher and I'm trying to figure out if this madness is really for me.

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Answer 5

I'm with you on this one. As a teacher, I understand the desire to want concrete results like standardized tests, and I understand the desire to have rigorous requirements for teaching certification, and I understand the desire to put an entire chunk of educational policy under one umbrella that applies to all schools (though it is up to each state, I know).

I get all that. What I don't understand is how we could have been doing this for several years with no evidence (that I find credible) that it's working. Students spend more time preparing for a high-stakes test than learning skills that will help them for the rest of their lives. In my English class, I have to spend more time on the 5-paragraph essay (a format that becomes essentially useless after high school or sometimes college) than on creative writing and a whole host of other "less important" areas of study. My students could argue a brilliant point about how the movie version of a book fails to capture a character's flaw, but that isn't on the test. Especially if that argument is verbal...forget it! Presenting a coherent verbal argument with the application of public speaking skills (tone, volume, mood, posture, etc) is one of the most important non-text-based things I can teach in my class, and yet it gets less time than literary term vocabulary lessons because *those* are on the test.

I teach in an alternative school in Boston where most of the NCLB regulations and requirements don't count, which I suppose is fortunate for me and the students. I must get them to the point where they can pass our state test, the MCAS, but I also have enough freedom to be able to teach them things they actually need, like how to make resumes or how to answer interview questions or how to construct a "complement sandwich" to avoid offending people with criticism (we did that today!). As much as the NCLB regulations affect me less than they do most teachers, it still troubles me that the rules are made by those who are so obviously out of touch with the reality of education in the U.S. today.

Answer 6

I agree with you 100%. My mom is a 3rd grade teacher in the Denver area, and her job has gotten increasingly difficult over the years after NCLB went into effect. Now, instead of teaching her children the basic skills they need to succeed at their grade level, she spends much of her time having to go back and do some heavy review of concepts that the children should have had in place at the end of first grade, such as basic addition and subtraction facts, simple sentence structure, and rudimentary reading skills. While most of her children are right on or above grade-level, there are always a handful of children performing well below the third-grade standards set forth by the school district, which in turn brings down the average standardized test score of the whole grade. Also, there seems to be at least one child per school year who is so far behind the rest that he/she can't even read the simplest kindergarten-level book or write a coherent sentence. These are the children who would have benefited greatly from repeating a grade level, perhaps first grade, in order to reinforce the basic skills. Yet, thanks to NCLB, they got moved along with the rest of their class, regardless of whether they were adequately prepared for the next grade, and it now falls to my mother and other teachers like her to catch them up, which is a feat nothing short of impossible in most cases. And then the district acts all shocked when schools don't meet the requirements to be "proficient." Maybe it has something to do with the children who obviously can't handle the work their grade level presents being allowed to continue being promoted to the next grade regardless of their lack of skill mastery?
I was actually considering following in my mom's footsteps and becoming a teacher, until I saw how it is these days. Instead of instilling a basic love of learning in children and teaching them things they need to know in order to be successful adults, teachers now have to be consumed with teaching to the test, meeting or exceeding arbitrary standards set forth by a government who clearly has no idea what actual, average children are capable of doing, and trying to raise children who are hopelessly behind up to a ridiculously high standard of achievement so they can do well on an extremely subjective battery of tests. Luckily for the school system, it still employs teachers like my mom, who can somehow still make learning fun even with the bureaucratic woes hanging over their heads.
I, for one, think it is not working, and I hope that the NCLB act gets repealed once we get a new President in office.

Answer 7

NCLB is a one size fits all "solution" to the problems of education. Since not all students are equal in the ways they learn, how quickly they learn, etc., it really is not a good thing. I am a teacher and we are no spending so much time administering standardized tests that there is no time to teach the material that is on the standardized tests . . . . except maybe to help students to "cram" for these tests. There is no time to help students actually internalize the material.

Answer 8

I have a child who is in the 4th grade who is add. She is at the 2nd grade level on reading and about the same in math. But with this stupid program, she is so far behind. In two years she is in the middle school and is going to be lost.

What happend when we were in school ( 70's-80's) when if we weren't caught up, they kept us back. why can't they still do that now??

With computers and text messaging, these kids are going to be going nowhere fast. Ok granted with the higher test scores, we get more money, but even with my community having high scores, we still have to vote on a referendum. How sad is that?

Answer 9

I think No Child Left Behind is one of the worse acts ever intiated. I am a first year second grade teacher in Maryland. Our school is following the America's Choice curriculem in order to bring up our test scores by 2014 and I absolutely hate it.

It's far too lengthy to go into details about here, but it's awful.

Answer 10

I agree...one of my children has struggled with reading all through elementary school and was never brought up to reading on his grade level. Now he is in junior high, and although he is doing fine now I worry that when he gets into higher grades he will stuggle more. The summer school "reading programs" in my area are a joke. They don't even focus on reading...my child had a gym class, art projects, and put on a play in a summer school reading program and gained nothing as far as reading skills. It's very disturbing.