Posted by BEN BEAUMONT – Clinton School assistant professor Keith Nitta is teaching an education policy seminar this semester and asked his students to write position papers on how to fix No Child Left Behind. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting the top five papers from Keith’s students. First up is Ryan Lewis:
Too Many Children Still Left Behind–By Ryan Lewis
As No Child Left Behind (NCLB) becomes eligible for renewal, it is time to label this legislation a failed experiment in education reform and reinvest our time and resources into new strategies. Upon its creation, NCLB was a calling by policymakers for a “failure-free educational system” (Tyack, p. 123.) The large problem that this line of thinking did and still does ignore is that the American education system is not a well-oiled machine in need of a minor tune-up toward perfection, but a struggling and internally-conflicted system in need of major renovation.
NCLB’s largest flaws can be seen in its key ingredients. Success under NCLB is measured almost solely upon standardized test scores, yet it has proven extremely difficult to produce tests that accurately measure student knowledge. “Developing tests that adequately assess what pupils have learned is a costly, difficult, and time-consuming task, and teaching students to do well on a poor test is a waste of time” (Tyack, p.125.) Also, high-stakes tests have proven to be unfair to students without access to prescribed subjects (Tyack, p.126) and differ greatly between states due to a lack of framework or guidelines to standardize the standards nationally (West & Peterson, p.8.) Making such large decisions as funding and offers to pull children out of schools on such shaky grounds is arbitrary and unconstructive.
While standardized testing can still serve a role in monitoring progress and assessing educational focus areas, the emphasis in education must move toward meeting the needs of our children and away from existing arbitrarily determined standards. Resources devoted to NCLB should be re-routed toward properly boosting consistently struggling and underperforming schools. Simply offering struggling schools, which most commonly feature large populations of students below the poverty line and majority percentiles of children who are academically behind, equal opportunity in access to resources is not enough. These schools must be targeted for two different opportunities: increased funding and access to ideas that work. There are many examples of schools with high low-income and minority populations that have made sizable and replicable progress in closing student achievement gaps. These schools should be “encouraged and emulated. But so long as school resources continue to reflect the gross inequalities of wealth and income in this country, major achievement gaps will persist between the prosperous and the poor, and too many students will continue to be now, as in the past, thoroughly trained in failure” (Tyack, p.126.)
A steady flow of increased resources from the federal government would allow struggling schools to offer what is direly necessary in closing achievement gaps: funds for recruitment and reward of quality teachers, health and nutrition programs for children and the ability to offer extra academic support and counseling services to steer students toward success. Without NCLB, education officials could also concentrate their efforts on improving and developing new tools for underperforming schools and making these schools aware of the wealth of knowledge already available for use. Banks of scientific research, proven ideas and guides for informed education decision-making already exist online through the US Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse” and the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices but commonly go unused.
The name No Child Left Behind offers a noble goal. We must rework our strategy to truly enable success in equaling opportunities and achievement for all children.