Education Law aims to improve the basic skills of the public school children in the nation, especially poor and minority students. In 2003, fewer than two in 10 kids at Stanton met state reading standards. But by the year 2005, about seven in 10 did. The law turns 5 years old today. It is going to have a tough future as Congress prepares to re-authorize it. A group of 100 education, religion, and civil rights leaders already announced an effort calling for “major changes.”
It is too early to say whether education is improving nationwide or not. Many schools didn’t get around to enacting most of its more than 1,000 pages of regulations until two or three years ago. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says the law wasn’t being fully implemented in all 50 states until 2006 (Toppo, USA Today). But no Child Left Behind has certainly had a major influence on the daily experience of school for millions of kids.
According to the teachers, most of the frustration comes as a result of the stress of mandated math and reading tests. All children should be virtually tested each year, starting in third grade as required by the law. It may result in increased penalties if schools don’t raise scores each year. Therefore the test day is fraught with tension in most of the schools. Many state rating systems nowadays end up celebrating the same schools the federal law slams. The law has even spawned an online petition after 5 years that had more than 22,500 signatures of people urging Congress to repeal it. Teachers’ unions have often been the loudest critics of this law. A leading National Education Association official once entertained the NEA’s 2004 conference in Washington by appearing onstage with an acoustic guitar and singing a protest song, “If we have to test their butts off, there’ll be no child’s behind left”.
It’s not just teachers who complain. The year 2006 saw even the most ardent supporters of the complaining for a very different reason. According to them, states and school districts easily game the system by lowering their standards.
The law allows each state to set its own pass-fail bar on skills tests. The percentage of Missouri fourth-graders at or above “proficient” in English is only 35%, but 89% of Mississippi fourth-graders meet that state’s standards. In math, only 39% of Maine fourth-graders are proficient or better; in North Carolina, 92% are.
Brown University researcher Martin West this fall compared federal data from 2000 and 2004. He found that since No Child Left Behind, elementary schools have spent, on average, 23 fewer minutes a week on science and 17 fewer minutes on history. Also, to test history and science each spring, teachers spend about half an hour more a week on each subject. Schools actually spend a few minutes less a week on math after a large jump in the 1990s. But they still spend more than twice as much time on math than on either history or science.
The law gives $1 billion a year to schools in order to spend on reading, and it is focused on 5,600 schools that serve the poorest 1.8 million kids in the nation. It starts with kids as soon as they enter school, has already trained 103,000 teachers on “scientifically based” reading strategies heavy in phonics, step-by-step lessons, and practice.
Bibliography
Schmidhauser, John Richard. Rand McNally, 1963. p. 266.
Selakovich, Daniel. “The Schools and American Society”. Blaisdell Pub. Co, 1967. Page 194.
Smith, Mary Lee. “Political Spectacle and the Fate of American Schools”. Routledge, 2003. Page 8. ISBN 0415932017.
Toppo, Greg. “How Bush education law has changed our schools”. USA TODAY, 2007.