A national report, in 1983, entitled A Nation at Risk conveyed a potent message of America’s underachieving education. This report was created by the National Commission on Education as instituted by Secretary of Education T. H. Bell. The mission of this committed was to investigate the quality of education within the United States and deliver it’s findings to the nation within eighteen months. The results shocked Americans.
The committee firmly declared “knowledge, learning, information and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce” (The National Commission of Excellence in Education, 1984, p. 7). However, despite this bold pronouncement, the committee found great discrepancies between the mission and reality. Not only are 23 million American adults functionally illiterate, 13 percent of all 17 year olds are also functionally illiterate and the figure may jump as high as 40 percent among minorities. There is a continual decline in SAT scores beginning in 1963 through 1983 with a considerable drop of forty to fifty points in mathematics and verbal skills. The evidence of an underperforming educational system continues with the stark realization that most high school graduates could not perform higher order thinking skills (ibid.).
These findings led to the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). There are five primary goals of the NCLB.
- First, all students will achieve high academic performance in reading and mathematics by 2013-2014 school year.
- Second, by 2005-2006 academic school year all teachers will be highly qualified.
- Third, all classrooms will be safe and conducive to learning.
- Fourth, all students will be proficient in English.
- Fifth, 100% of students will graduate from high school (Yell & Drasgow, 2009).
The absolute nature of this law makes it an unattainable goal as it does not provide space for error or for individual choice. Within a country without a national language, how can we expect every student to be English proficient? Additionally, wouldn’t it have been of more value to set more realistic goals to raise the competency of our students than to set an absolute goal such as 100%? How can we, as educators and politicians, supersede the impact the family has on students as they are the greatest contributor to the educational well-being of an individual?
NCLB may have been designed to address many of these questions but it fails miserably in it’s delivery. The largest concern, despite the intent to rectify a failing educational system, is that the failure to take a sincere look at the greatest contributor of all -the family environment. Educational responsibility seems to fall completely onto schools, districts and administrations.
To increase the effectiveness of meeting the NCLB goals, several areas should be addressed which have been neglected. First, being the family involvement in the students’ education. By creating in-service meetings for parents, professional development opportunities for parents, and other educational resources, educators can promote more parental involvement.
Another point touched lightly within the NCLB is the essential nature of introducing reading at an earlier age. Yet, few requirements and restrictions are placed upon administrators and educators within early childhood education. Reading needs to be taught at an earlier age. Pre-school and day care facilities should receive more direction and guidance for curriculum.
Much of the No Child Left Behind Act is based on the need for continued assessment within the classroom. Effective teachers need to utilize a variety of methods in assessment such as testing, portfolios, rubrics, written work -including daily homework assignments, presentations and other oral means. As education morphs to accommodate the needs of society, the methods of assessment also increase to demonstrate student achievement in relation to instructional effectiveness. A large contributor in assessing educational effectiveness is through questioning. “Effective teachers ask more questions than less-effective teachers. In one study, effective junior high school mathematics teachers were found to ask an average of 24 questions per class period, whereas their less effective counterparts asked an average of only 8.6 questions. Questions are important in keeping the students engaged and alert in the classroom and for checking understanding” (Armstrong, Henson, & Savage, 2009, p 158).
Standardized testing methods also use questions to gauge the impact teacher instruction has on students. Taylor and Walton (1999) concur that tests can do just this provided “that the information be used in conjunction with our professional judgement.” Yet despite this support there are many critics to this point of view. Popham states that standardized testing bears the risk of “measuring temperature with a tablespoon” (Taylor & Walton, 1999).
In another piece of work, Popham (2008) lists the difficulties in using standardized testing to govern instructional effectiveness. Standardized exams compile an inordinate amount of curricular objectives and aims from state and federal standards to create a sampling of these guidelines. In many cases, the exams completely eliminate teacher emphasized content. Despite attempting to monitor crucial student knowledge, the goal is often missed as blanket exams have the inability to cater to individual knowledge. Lastly, Popham demonstrates many questions linked into students’ socioeconomical status. He uses the example of the word ‘field’ within one exam question. For learners whose parents have careers, generally within a higher socioeconomical status, the connotation of the noun is easily recognized in comparison to their counterparts of lower socioeconomical statuses whose backgrounds may not have introduced them to the application of the term within this context (p 338).
Yvonne Siu-Runyan (2009) concords with James Popham’s analysis of standardized testing. “Since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), high-stakes testing continues to be a great distraction to education as well as a great moneymaker for the test publishers. Huge resources in time, energy, and money are spent prepping students for tests, taking the tests, scoring the tests, and reporting the results of tests. Schools have been shut down, teachers have left the field, and funding has been diverted as these test data are being used for tracking, promoting, retaining, and graduating students.”
The initial foundations of the No Child Left Behind Act “enacted by the Congress of the United States of America” was “the hope of closing the achievement gap, and providing disenfranchised groups the opportunity for successful educational attainment” (Mayers, 2006). Each school is required to prove this through reaching their yearly benchmarks for their annual yearly progress (AYP) “toward English proficiency and state educational standards” (Mayers, 2006).
Colorado’s Department of Education (2012) reports “The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires that each state develop and implement an accountability system that is effective in helping to ensure that every school district and every school makes Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as defined by the federal legislation and approved by the United States Department of Education (USDE).” This is accomplished through the administration of “the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) to measure the progress students are making in achieving proficiency in Colorado’s Content Standards. The CSAP assesses third through tenth grade students in reading, writing and mathematics. Severely disabled students (about 1% of the student population) may be eligible to take the CSAP Alternate (CSAPA), which assess students in modified state content standards” (Colorado Department of Education, 2012).
However, Popham (2008) who established a research group which specialized in the development of standardized tests admonishes instructors to be cautious in using these measurement tools. “For standards-based tests to be instructionally sensitive, those tests must possess three attributes. First, the skills and/or bodies of knowledge being assessed must be sufficiently few so teachers do not become overwhelmed by too many assessment targets. Second, the skills and/or bodies of knowledge being assessed must be sufficiently well-described … Finally, the test results must permit teachers to identify whether each assess skill and/or body of knowledge has been mastered by an individual student. If a standards-based test does not possess all three of these attributes, that test won’t be instructional sensitive” (p 341).
The best way to judge effective instructional methods is through personal interactions within the confines of the classroom. Mayers (2006) shares “In my over forty years of teaching experiences, the best indicator (and I have tried many) of students’ educational proficiency involves authentic evidence collected over time from everyday learning experiences and work products, coupled with students’ self- examinations regarding their learning and the evaluations of teachers and parent(s)/ guardian(s). Together, the students, the teachers, and the parents/guardians provide a multidimensional appraisal of student learning, which no single NCLB high-stakes tests can begin to provide.”
References
Armstrong, D.G., Henson, K.T. & Savage, T.V. (2009) Teaching Today An Introduction to Education (8th Edition). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Person Education.
Colorado Department of Education. (2012). No Child Left Behind State Report Card 2002 -2003. Retrieved February 01, 2012 from http://www.cde.state.co.us/FedPrograms/Reports/download/NCLBRptCrd/NCLBRprtCrdsFull0203.pdf
Mayers, C. (2006). Public Law 107-110 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Support or Threat to Education as a Fundamental Right? Education, 126(3), 449-462.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1984). A Nation at Risk: The Full Account. Portland, Oregon. USA Research, Inc.
Popham, J. (2008). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know. (5th ed.). San Francisco: Allyn and Bacon.
Siu-Runyan, Y. (2009). Taking Testing’s Temperature. Urbana, 86(5), 393-395.
Taylor, K., & Walton, S. (1999). Reflecting on Test Scores. Instructor, 111(6), 16.
Yell, M. & Drasgow, E. (2009) No Child Left Behind: A Guide for Professionals (2nd Edition). Boston, Massachusetts. Pearson Education.
By Tracy Atkinson
Tracy Atkinson, mother of six, lives in the Midwest with her husband. She is a teacher, having taught elementary school to higher education, holding degrees in elementary education and a master’s in higher education. Her passion is researching, studying and investigating the attributes related to self-directed learners. She has published several titles, including Calais: The Annals of the Hidden, Lemosa: The Annals of the Hidden, Book Two, Rachel’s 8 and Securing Your Tent. She is currently working on a non-fiction text exploring the attributes of self-directed learners: The Five Characteristics of Self-directed Learners.
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