The Harmful Effects Of No Child Left Behind

The Harmful Effects of NCLB

The No Child Left Behind act is the Bush administration's sweeping educational reform, aimed at improving the performance of the nation's public schools by introducing accountability. Supporters of the act claim that it will increase the performance of all school children by raising the standards and allowing parents greater freedom in choosing the school they want their child to attend. The act also puts in place a system of punishment for schools if their student body does not perform to the standards set down by the National government (NCLB act). As well as increasing standards, this act also encourages teachers to use a curriculum which the government developed with "scientifically based research" (a phrase that appears 111 times in the act) (Hammond 4). While standardized curriculum and increased standards seem like they would improve children's learning, in reality it hurts them by pushing them too hard academically instead of focusing on social development, and denying them specialized attention based upon their individual abilities.

No Child Left Behind was designed by the Bush administration to reduce the "learning gap" between different groups of students and to ensure better teacher equality. However, it sets fourth a method of measuring "Adequate Yearly Progress" which aims at 100% proficiency in 10 years time (from the start of the program) (Wood 4). These impossibly high standards cause greater harm than good. One adverse effect of these high standards is that they substantially weaken the safety nets for under-performing students in the nation's schools. As schools struggle to meet the act's impossibly high goals, many incentives to keep underperforming students out, or to hold those already in the school back present themselves. A disturbing example of this comes from King Middle School in Ohio. At this school the average scores increased from the 70th to the 72nd percentile from the 2002 to the 2003 school year. In addition, the amount of students in attendance who met the standards increased from 66 to 80 percent. While, on the surface, these results seem to indicate that the act is doing exactly what it is supposed to, there is one piece of information that is deeply troubling. Over the course of this year, not A SINGLE student improved his or her test performance. In fact, the scores of every single student in the school decreased over the course of the year. However, because the NCLB act looks only at school-wide averages, the national government praised the school for its marked improvement (Hammond 10). It turns out that the steep increase in test results is due to a large number of severely academically challenged students leaving the school. This pattern has arisen in the years since the ratification of the act. States with high stakes testing programs tend to exclude students who do poorly on tests, are not native speakers, have poor attendance, or family problems. This is achieved by counseling them out, expelling them, or transferring them out of the school (Wood 6). After reviewing these frightening statistics it becomes clear that the No Child Left Behind act is damaging the educational system. How are schools supposed to help under-performing schools if the only way they are able to keep the funding that allows them to teach is by removing the challenged kids from their schools altogether? This is an in-effective strategy and will only result in a further widening of the achievement gap.

Furthermore, for those students who do remain in the school, specialized attention is almost impossible, as teachers are required to teach directly to the state mandated tests, not student abilities. With the new pressure to succeed many schools have adopted curricula that teach directly to the state test that their students are required to take. This universal curriculum prevents teachers from giving students the individual attention that many of them sorely need. I clearly remember my mom coming home one day after work (she is a fifth grade teacher) and telling me that a test she was required to give to her whole class had reduced a special needs child to tears. She had wanted to tell him that he didn't have to take the test, and that he could do something else until the other children were done, but because of the NCLB act, she had to make him sit there for the entire test period while he cried uncontrollably. This type of overarching test not only prevents teachers from catering to lower-performing students; it also prevents them from challenging the exceptional students. When a teacher is required to teach all of the children at the same level, it prevents many kids from learning to their potential; instead forming an environment in which every child strives for mediocrity.

Many teachers complain that all of the joy of teaching, the very reasons why they went into the profession, have been replaced by prescripted lessons and impossible standards (Tyre 1). One teacher from Ohio describes how