While the intent of Public Law 107-110, a bipartisan bill otherwise known as the 2002 “No Child Left Behind” act, is to impose outcomes-based education on individual states, it has also imposed a number of questionable practices. States have generally abandoned the pursuit of excellence in education for something that more closely resembles quality assurance metrics. We no longer care if students can compete in the global workforce or can master calculus or a second language. We now seem fixated on metrics to reduce the variability and defect rate (six sigma in QA parlance) of the widgets on our educational assembly line. Complaints that NCLB lowers educational goals, cheats students, and forces schools to “teach to the test” are all well-founded.
In addition to this myopic focus, NCLB forces schools to provide student information to military recruiters (one “outcome” of this is death), and drives up educational costs as teachers flock to educational mills to get masters degrees in education – not necessarily the subjects they teach – to become more “highly qualified.” These professional development costs are then passed along to the schools. NCLB also mandates the use of specific types of educational studies (again seemingly based on statistical/QA principles) and arbitrarily equates the adoption of expensive computer technology with excellence in education. Yet many school technology plans do not tie computer technology to particular uses or outcomes, merely hoping that computers will somehow prepare kids for the future.
Other provisions of NCLB claim to help minority and disadvantaged students, although in eight years it would appear that only the testing has improved – and then only by employing creative statistics – while dropout rates continue to rise, programs for medium- and high-performing students have disappeared, and school budgets have increased in order to comply. And here again, NCLB is of little help, since these additional costs must be borne by each state and school district. Individual programs within NCLB, such as the reading program, were flops. nochildleft.com lists 17 areas in which NCLB actually lowered standards, raised dropout rates, reduced teaching time, and made some of the best teachers leave for private schools.
It’s time for NCLB to be totally scrapped.
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