No Child Left Behind

Gay, Geneva. “The Rhetoric and Reality of NCLB.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 10.3 (2007): 279 – 293.

In this article, Geneva Gay presents a multifaceted attack on No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind, considered the most significant educational policy ever implemented by federal government, was instituted with the purpose of ensuring excellent education regardless of race, ethnicity, or intellectual ability. However, as Gay lays out in this article, NCLB has failed to achieve what it set out to do. Diversity and the development of the well-rounded child is sacrificed, as teachers are forced to constrict lessons to the standardized tests. Teachers have less freedom to use imagination in the classroom, as “many feel too burdened down and consumed by the demands of NCLB to do anything but teach to the tests.” Lastly, studies by psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that high stakes testing induces stress among elementary-aged students, leading to psycho-emotional problems such as “anger, hostility, boredom, sadness and alienation.” So, as Gay puts it:

the rhetoric of NCLB is enticing but its realities are frightening. It is fueling that which it claims to be destroying—that is, disparities in high-quality educational opportunities and achievement outcomes for diverse students.

As a teacher at a charter school facing restructuring if we do not meet AYP, I feel the influences of NCLB on a daily basis. Our extended learning time (ELT) is filled with longer blocks for reading and math – the content that will be on the standardized tests this spring. A high level of pressure is placed upon everyone from administrators to students, as there is almost a “do or die” atmosphere that has been created. What disturbs me about the policy is that it plays such an extreme influence in our classrooms, yet there seem to be clear flaws. At a school such as mine that did not meet AYP last year, it is unrealistic to think that students can on average progress multiple grade levels in one year. It seems that a better measure of a school trajectory would be the overall progress students made in the past year, rather than a count of how many students met proficiency levels. As Gay lays out in this article, there clearly are many flaws in NCLB and in my opinion, such a flawed policy should not play such a large influence in the education of our nations children.