How the Failure of the No Child Left Behind Act Leaves Every Child in the Dust

A Beautiful Disaster:

How the failure of The No Child Left Behind Act leaves every child in the dust

By Kristin Hughes

2014

On January 8, 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA). While this was technically a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) also introduced a number of new measures seeking to improve the quality of the American education system, such as required standardized tests to measure student progress annually, delineating teacher qualifications, grading individual schools, implementing a "reading first" program, and changing the way in which schools are funded. In addition, the law requires that school be performing up to standard by the 2013-2014 school year. Now that the deadline imposed by NCLB has passed, the question to be addressed is: are schools, in fact, any better than they were 15 years ago? Has NCLB fulfilled its rather lofty goals? Is this an effective piece of legislation and, if not, what should be done to ensure that American children are receiving quality education? While the rhetoric around NLCB is far reaching, research shows that NLCB has primarily been a failure because test score increases are minimal at best and not a reliable measure of student learning; because teachers are forced to "teach the test," in some cases going to extreme measures to ensure passing marks; and most importantly, because NCLB completely fails to address the underlying problems of underperforming students and schools.

A large component of the No Child Left Behind act focuses on what the act refers to as accountability. Accountability, as defined by NCLB, means that every student must demonstrate academic proficiency by the 2013-2014 school year. This is measured via standardized test scores given annually to all students in grades 3-8 and at least once during grades 10-12. The Act requires that students meet a pre-prescribed level of progress on an annual basis, known as adequate yearly progress (AYP) to ensure that the far reaching goal of all student’s proficiency is met in the prescribed time period. The baseline for which AYP will be measured was testing done in the 2000-2001 academic school year.  After the passage of NCLB, states would be given 12 years to achieve the extremely unrealistic goal of every student receiving academic proficiency, with no regards to socioeconomic status, students receiving special education services, or English language learners. All students, barring the 1% deemed “severely disabled” and thus granted an exemption, are required to take the same test for their grade level and meet predetermined benchmarks in order for schools to meet AYP.  Schools that do not meet AYP are subject to increasingly harsh sanctions, up to and including closure and/or replacement of all staff. The main issues accountability via standardized tests are that while individual states are showing modest gains in their own state test’s reading and math scores, students are unable to show gains beyond pre-NCLB levels on a national test given randomly, that due to wording in the Act itself, states are free to lower the cut score that determines the “proficient” level at will, and that the tests scores for any given year are not only invalid, but unreliable, factors discussed more in depth below.