No Child Left Behind Act - Proposals For Reform

Proposals For Reform

The Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind is a proposal by more than 135 national civil rights, education, disability advocacy, civic, labor and religious groups that have signed on to a statement calling for major changes to the federal education law. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) initiated and chaired the meetings that produced the statement, originally released in October 2004. The statement's central message is that "the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement." The number of organizations signing the statement has nearly quadrupled since it was launched in late 2004 and continues to grow. The goal is to influence Congress, and the broader public, as the law's scheduled reauthorization approaches.

Education critic Alfie Kohn argues that the NCLB law is "unredeemable" and should be scrapped. He is quoted saying "ts main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills".

In February 2007, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, Co-Chairs of the Aspen Commission on No Child Left Behind, announced the release of the Commission's final recommendations for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Commission is an independent, bipartisan effort to improve NCLB and ensure it is a more useful force in closing the achievement gap that separates disadvantaged children and their peers. After a year of hearings, analysis and research, the Commission uncovered the successes of NCLB, as well as provisions which need to be changed or significantly modified.

The Commission's goals are summarized as follows:

• Effective Teachers for All Students, Effective Principals for All Communities
• Accelerating Progress and Closing Achievement Gaps Through Improved Accountability
• Moving Beyond the Status Quo to Effective School Improvement and Student Options
• Fair and Accurate Assessments of Student Progress
• High Standards for Every Student in Every State
• Ensuring High Schools Prepare Students for College and the Workplace
• Driving Progress Through Reliable, Accurate Data
• Parental involvement and empowerment

The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), a working group of signers of the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB has offered an alternative proposal. It proposes to shift NCLB from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to supporting state and communities and holding them accountable as they make systemic changes that improve student learning.

While many critics and policymakers believe that there are major flaws with the NCLB legislation, it appears as if the policy will be in effect for the long-term; though not without some major modifications.

President Barack Obama released his blueprint for reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the precursor to No Child Left Behind, in March 2010. Specific revisions include providing funds for states to implement a broader range of assessments to evaluate advanced academic skills, including students’ abilities to conduct research, use technology, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, and communicate effectively.

In addition, Obama is proposing that the NCLB legislation lessen its stringent accountability punishments to states by focusing more on student improvement. Improvement measures would encompass assessing all children appropriately, including English language learners, minorities, and special needs students. The school system would be re-designed to consider measures beyond reading and math tests; and would promote incentives to keep students enrolled in school through graduation, rather than encouraging student drop-out to increase AYP scores.

Obama’s objectives also entail lowering the achievement gap between Black and White students and also increasing the federal budget by $3 billion to help schools meet the strict mandates of the bill. There has also been a proposal, put forward by the Obama administration, that states increase their academic standards after a dumbing-down period, focus on re-classifying schools that have been labeled as failing, and develop a new evaluation process for teachers and educators.

The federal government’s gradual investment in public social provisions provides the NCLB Act a forum to deliver on its promise to improve achievement for all of its students. Education critics argue that although the legislation is marked as an improvement to the ESEA in de-segregating the quality of education in schools, it is actually harmful. The legislation has become virtually the only federal social policy meant to address wide-scale social inequities, and its policy features inevitably stigmatize both schools attended by children of the poor and children in general.

Moreover, critics further argue that the current political landscape of this country, which favors market-based solutions to social and economic problems, has eroded trust in public institutions and has undermined political support for an expansive concept of social responsibility, which will subsequently result in a disinvestment in the education of the poor and privatization of American schools. Skeptics posit that NCLB has distinct political advantages for Democrats whose focus on accountability offers a way for them to continue to speak the language of equal opportunity, and to avoid being classified as the party of big government, special interests, and minority groups, a common accusation used by Republicans to discredit the traditional Democratic agenda. Opponents posit that NCLB has inadvertently shifted the debate on education and racial inequality to traditional political alliances. Consequently, major political discord remains between those who oppose federal oversight of state and local practices and those who view NCLB in terms of civil rights and educational equality.

In the plan, the Obama Administration responds to critiques that standardized testing fails to capture higher level thinking by outlining new systems of evaluation to capture more in depth assessments on student achievement. His plan came on the heels of the announcement of the Race to the Top initiative, a $4.35 billion reform program financed by the Department of Education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Obama recognizes how accurate assessments "can be used to accurately measure student growth; to better measure how states, districts, schools, principals, and teachers are educating students; to help teachers adjust and focus their teaching; and to provide better information to students and their families." He has pledged to support state governments in their efforts to improve standardized test provisions by upgrading the standards they are set to measure. To do this, the federal government will provide grants to states to help them develop and implement assessments that are based on higher standards in order to more accurately measure school progress. This mirrors provisions in the Race to the Top program that require states to measure individual achievement through sophisticated data collection from kindergarten to higher education.

While Obama plans to improve the quality of standardized testing, he does not plan to eliminate the testing requirements and accountability measures produced by standardized tests. Rather, he provides additional resources and flexibility to meet new goals. Critics of Obama’s reform efforts maintain that high stakes testing will prove detrimental to the success of schools across the country by encouraging teachers to "teach to the test" and placing undue pressure on teachers and schools if benchmarks are failed to be met.

The reauthorization process has become somewhat of a controversy, as lawmakers and politicians continually debate about the changes that need to be made to the bill in order to make it work best for the country's educational system.