No Child Left Behind: Consequences And Effects Of Education Reform

Throughout the entire semester, our class has focused on No Child Left Behind. This act, signed in 2002 by President George Bush, was intended to change the educational system for the better. No Child Left Behind was suppose to hold schools responsible for the students’ academic progress. There were monetary consequences for any school that did not improve or meet specific standards and had many qualifications for teachers as well. They were required to be highly qualified, which did not necessarily match up with being highly effective. This past week, President Obama signed off saying that No Child Left Behind will no longer be in effect. This reform is very evident in schools and most likely will be for a while. Two elements that are seen …show more content…
According to NCLB, this was the most efficient way to eliminate the achievement gap and to improve overall academic performance. So, it was decided that annual testing was necessary to measure the achievement gap and to insure that it was narrowing. By measuring this, schools would need to meet an adequate yearly progress and needed to improve every year in order to receive proper funding. If a school fell short of progress, funding may be cut or other consequences may become present. However, the tests were not testing the students on their academic ability and these tests are not a good indicator to who the students, or even who the school, is. It did not serve as being a beneficial way to “punish” the schools who were not making adequate yearly progress. This especially hurt schools that were already under resourced. By losing some of their already small funding, they would not be able to provide the proper education for their students in order to succeed. This then becomes a vicious cycle. So, these schools would teach to the test. They would cut out almost all other subjects except for math, reading and writing and just focus on what will get them to pass. This would be very detrimental to the education of the …show more content…
In Ravitch Chapter 10, we learned about Walton, Annenberg, Ford and Gates. These four, of many, foundations had very good intentions. For example, The Gates Foundation, established in 2000 with a 30 billion dollar grant, wanted to create smaller schools. Bill and Melinda Gates, who really had no idea how to run a school or even knew what students needed in order to thrive, decided to take one school that was going to close and divide it into five schools. There were five buildings that were apart of the original school, so each building got a smaller school. The goals of this was to create smaller class sizes and to expand the ability to have more specific courses, such as advanced placement. However, this did not work at all. The schools could not afford to hire any more teachers or to buy any more resources, so everything was divided by five. When the school may have had five math teachers, now it only had one. That one teacher had to teach the basics to the whole school and could not teach advanced placement or elective math courses. Also, teachers felt that they had to sell their school to prospective families and students instead of focusing on the needs of the current students. The schools began to have specific stereotypes and students were no longer able to travel between buildings, or schools. This lead to many problems and the school eventually switched back to running as one, large school. When they did switch back,