While reading chapter one, the section that stuck out to me most was the portion on educational policies. As future teachers it is imperative that we are aware of the new policies being passed by the government and what these policies will entail. The main policy introduced towards the end of chapter one is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed in 2002. I found an online article from
Education Week that does a great job explaining the No Child Left Behind Act, it's goals and objectives, as well as it's short comings. This article can be found by clicking
here.
"At the core of the No Child Left Behind Act were a number of measures designed to drive broad gains in student achievement and to hold states and schools more accountable for student progress. They represented significant changes to the education landscape (U.S. Department of Education, 2001)."
As
Education Week points out, NCLB was created with the intent to improve several aspects of public schools, such as; annual testing, academic progress, teacher qualifications, and funding changes. And from the outside the No Child Left Behind Act looks great, but the reality is is that nothing works out perfectly.
As shown above the percentage of public schools in the United States that have failed to make what the No Child Left Behind Act considers "adequate yearly progress" has and is continuing to increase. Unfortunately by 2011 several states were seeing failure rates of over 50%. And as someone who cares about children and their education this angers me to see that year after year these children are not getting the proper education that they deserve. So this leaves me curious, how do the rest of you feel about the No Child Left Behind Act?
I find the article that you choose is really insightful. It had so interesting information that I was not aware of previously. Following the missing the mark graph it makes me curious what the more recent numbers would be. Especially if in 2011 some states were seeing failure rates of over 50%. If there was that much of in increase from 2010-2011, then has the percentage only grown over the past four years? I agree that it looks great form the outside, but we still aren't meeting these new expectations.
ReplyDeleteThis is the article I spoke about in class with regard to NCLB. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/09/everything-you-need-know-waivers-flexibility-and-reforming-no-child-left-behind . The article talks about waivers and one particular thing that caught my eye was this quote NCLB "...is five years overdue to be re-written by Congress." What? Why are we continuing this policy if it obviously is not working and it can be amended at this point. Politics is linear so NCLB will probably be around for a long time but that does not mean we cannot change it. IN reality our government has the ability to change it!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Haley!
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