Nclb Negative Effect

In 2009, one of the largest educational scandals in the history of the United States occurred. 178 school administrators from Atlanta were involved in correcting answers entered by students. Eleven of the 178 teachers were convicted on racketeering charges, resulting in jail time, community service, and a lot of fines. This was a result of the increasing pressure on schools to meet the high test score requirements set by the No Child Left Behind federal law (NCLB). NCLB, one of the biggest social engineering projects of our time, is an educational reform bill passed by the George Bush administration in 2002. This is significant because NCLB dictates how students are educated. NCLB has negatively affected how and what students are taught, the amount of funding the schools …show more content…
The answer to this can be determined by approaching it from five different ideas: the negative effect on students, use of test scores as the scale of educational quality, negative effect on teachers, the harmful punishment system set by NCLB, and how NCLB's goal is causing more harm than …show more content…
There are three ways this is happening. The first is that NCLB’s goal creates educational triage. Educational triage involves focusing on the students who are just below the proficiency level in order to improve their achievement so that they meet the state standards (Maleyko). Schools are tending to focus more on what are known as the "bubble students." These are students that either float right around or a bit below the passing mark. Some teachers focus exclusively on these students in order to improve their overall test scores. Not only does this leave behind students that are far from passing, but this also takes away time from the students that are proficient in that class. Teacher are so focused on the “bubble students”, that they completely disregard the