The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, was intended to bring much needed improvements to the American School System. Its goal was to raise the educational standard and close the achievement gap between students of different races and economic groups. When NCLB was first introduced one of the main objectives was to ensure that all students reached 100 percent proficiency with in twelve years, by 2014. Regrettably, NCLB has not met its intended objective, nor has it been successful in raising educational achievement.
Critics of NCLB have warned that it will actually do the opposite. According to Linda Darling Hammond, the author of an article entitled Race, inequality and educational accountability: …show more content…
NCLB has replaced the Bilingual Education Act and now requires that all English Language Learners participate in statewide academic content testing. According to No Child Left Behind and English Language Learners: Challenges and Consequences the main implications for ELL students is that they are required to participate in state wide assessments. Students who have been in the country for more than one year must take the same content area test as native speakers (Menken, 2010, p. 122). This poses two problems 1) students are not able to obtain proficiency on these exams because they have not mastered the English language. Therefore, these exams are not a true measure of their ability but of how they measure up to fellow students. 2) The second problem related to requiring ELL students to take content knowledge assessments is that this brings down the over all score for schools. Commonly, schools that have a high poverty rate, a high special needs populations and a high teacher turn over rate are the schools that serve English Language Leaners. School may feel more inclined to not accept or push out students who need these
Critics of NCLB have warned that it will actually do the opposite. According to Linda Darling Hammond, the author of an article entitled Race, inequality and educational accountability: …show more content…
NCLB has replaced the Bilingual Education Act and now requires that all English Language Learners participate in statewide academic content testing. According to No Child Left Behind and English Language Learners: Challenges and Consequences the main implications for ELL students is that they are required to participate in state wide assessments. Students who have been in the country for more than one year must take the same content area test as native speakers (Menken, 2010, p. 122). This poses two problems 1) students are not able to obtain proficiency on these exams because they have not mastered the English language. Therefore, these exams are not a true measure of their ability but of how they measure up to fellow students. 2) The second problem related to requiring ELL students to take content knowledge assessments is that this brings down the over all score for schools. Commonly, schools that have a high poverty rate, a high special needs populations and a high teacher turn over rate are the schools that serve English Language Leaners. School may feel more inclined to not accept or push out students who need these