Nclb Standardized Test

NCLB Standardized Test

In 2002 the “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB) was signed by George W. Bush to ensure every child would have the equal opportunity to the benefits of education with out race, gender, or status discrimination. According to the Act, its purpose is to benefit both students and educators. First and foremost, a standard requirement of educators to be “Highly Qualified”, meeting the license and certification requirements of the state where they teach and posses a Bachelors Degree (Public School Review, 04 December 2007). Providing both criteria and monetary support, the NCLB Act provides federal funding to public schools across the country, as long as each school achieves the NCLB’s pre determined annual standards set-built around Communication-Arts and Mathematics programs. A mandate for all students to be proficiently at or above the NCLB standards are required to be reached by the school year of 2013-2014 (Public School Review, 04 December 2007). All schools have a mandatory assessment of their Mathematics and Communication-Arts programs done by NCLB that is reviewed annually to compare the increase or decrease of individual school ratings. Each school is held accountable for its academic annual improvement based on the skewed expectation of continuous student score improvement. Any school that doesn’t show improvement of any sort will begin to under go a series of budget cuts until the school is unable to operate-becoming “non-existent” for federal funding (PBS News Hour, 21 August 2005).

The Act caused many eyebrows to rise because of its illogical designed proposal to create better education. The National Education Association acknowledges that standardized testing is needed for academic improvements. With this, the NCLB should perhaps make it a priority to revise the standards if they truly want to achieve their main goal of creating a positive change in education. Such improvements could lead to the rewarding of educators for their success, providing smaller class sizes, each classroom with a “highly qualified” teacher (public and private), family and community interaction with schools, and adequate financial and academic resources for the following school year (Public School Review, 04 December 2007). The NCLB has many intended positive aspects, but after its introduction the Act received a lot of criticism, involving many arguments of how mandatory assessments are unfair-not contributing to the positive impact of what people interpreted about the Act, and creating a detriment not only to the students future, but also the future funding of schools nation wide.

NCLB has become known for the unfair treatment and judgments passed towards students. The assessment has become one of the major traits of judgments against determining the future of a student. Its job is to rate the skill level and development pace that a student