The connection between the national level and quality of education and the future development of the state has been obvious ever since ancient times. The up-stream approach dominant in a variety of fields today encourages the professionals of various spheres to look for the roots of contemporary issues and address them to improve future outcomes. In the field of education, many professionals have been focused on identifying the main causes of low academic performance. Several reforms and special programs have been implemented to overcome educational difficulties for students coming from low-income families, learners of diverse cultural backgrounds, children whose native language is not English, students with disabilities and health issues. No Child Left Behind Act created in 2001 and ratified in 2002 is the most well-known program designed for the improvement of basic skills assessment for the students of elementary and secondary schools. To enhance the impacts of education assessment and get to the very root of the issues it was decided to create special programs targeting the youngest learners, one of which is called head Start. Early childhood education today is viewed as the most effective human capital investment. This paper is designed to discuss the impacts of standards and accountability on early childhood education, their positive and negative features, and their influences on students and educators.
The Impacts of Standards and Accountability on Early Childhood Education
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is designed to improve the level of literacy and academic success in American schools. Its targets are not only students but also their parents and teachers as the Act enforces the improvement of professional development, education technology and encourages parental involvement in the children’s education (Morrison 2012). The Act works through an accountability system based on results and outcomes which mainly relies on tests in mathematics, reading, and science designed to determine the quality of education and schools (Miller & Smith, 2011). The program proved to make a difference. The accountability standards added structure and precision to the work of educators, besides the progress or its absence can be monitored due to the test results. It is worth mentioning that the No Child Left Behind Act implies flexibility of achievement standards as it does not dictate any particular generalized standards. Instead, each of the American states is to develop and establish their achievement standards.
At the same time, the education children obtain in preschool is one of the major factors that impact the test results of primary school students. This is why it was decided to alter testing standards for NCLB and address preschool education. One more reason for the creation of programs targeting the youngest learners was the efficiency of the implementation of educational enhancement for preschoolers demonstrated by the rates of return (Miller & Smith, 2011).
Head Start is an educational assessment program created for the learners of preschool age. The program was first created in the middle of the 1960s during President Johnson’s War on Poverty (Hinitz, 2014). The upstream approach of this program explored the influence parents and environments create on young learners targeting families living in poverty. The purpose of this program was to provide opportunities for a good education for the social classes unable to afford it. Hinitz (2014) noted that the views about Head Start varied, some of its creators were convinced that parental influence on the participating children should have been minimized, the others claimed the opposite, and feminist opinion pointed out that the whole approach lacked female presence. Today, Head Start has grown to impact the professional development of educators, facilitate parental involvement and collaborate with parents of the participants to empower the families living in poverty. The program responds to the emotional, social and academic needs of the learners, and advances children’s intellectual and physical competence.
Positive and Negative Features
Early childhood assessment standards and programs are being created, researched, and improved to effectively address what is called a quiet crisis. This phenomenon is described as a slowly but surely developing achievement gap and shortfalls among the American schoolchildren which is going to affect the future of the whole nation (CCSSO, 2012). To ensure the future wellbeing of the country, early childhood education needs to be improved on many levels and the improvement needs to be implemented today. Programs such as Head Start and NCLB have demonstrated several positive features. First of all, the outcome-based accountability provided using scheduled testing allows careful evaluation of the progress of each school. Careful monitoring is required to detect lowering academic achievements among the learners or ill-performance among the teachers and identify its causes right away. Besides, the policies targeting students coming from poor families, learners with low English language proficiency and culturally and socially diverse classrooms make education available for all kinds of students erasing the social class division in this aspect. Equity is a constant focus of contemporary education in the United States that is responsible for the future elimination of social conflicts based on cultural and ethnic inequalities and stereotypes. Programs such as Head Start target the groups of learners with lower opportunities and provide them with equal chances of acquisition of good quality education for further development.
Politically, Acts such as No Child Left Behind are created to facilitate transparency and reveal information about the issues in modern education, yet regardless of the data collected by the Act, the politicians are reluctant to actively address the problems. It took years for the educational reforms to start being put into practice since education issues may remain an unrecognized general interest and be put aside to wait while more significant problems are addressed. At the same time, the equal accountability of schools implies that all of these facilities are equally financed, which is not true. As a result, the schools with limited financial abilities may show lower results and to resolve this, the federal government needs to reevaluate their financing policies. Besides, the disciplines included in the standards for accountability include literacy, science, and math; this is very basic and does not facilitate much of academic improvement. Such aspects as health, physical and emotional development and learning capacity should also participate in the research. Finally, the academic achievements of the American students have the limits of lowest performance and those of the highest performance. It seems like most of policies and standards oriented and the education improvement are focused mainly on the bottom limit line. This way, the success of low-performers is monitored, while that of high-performers is left out (Dahlin, Xiang, Durant, & Cronin, 2010). This might lead to a decrease in the overall level of academic success due to the minimization of the number of high-performing learners.
The Impacts on Students and Teachers
Under the increased attention towards the academic success of the learners enforced by the programs and standards, the teachers are more challenged to deliver positive results. Parental involvement provides better collaboration between the educators and the learners’ families. This also affects the students making their education an ongoing process. At the same time, the learners whose success is not at a disturbing level and who do not come from poor families might lack academic stimulation. This is likely to lead to a decrease in their results and the statistical level of the American school and preschool education overall. Besides, higher demands may create pressure on the teachers and result in the increase of burnout rates among educators which leads to depersonalization, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, indifference and high turnover rates among school teachers that, in turn, negatively affect the learners and their academic performance.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the accountability and implementation of educational standards are massive positive impacts for the quiet crisis the American education has been approaching for decades. The programs target the learners who need assistance, challenge the teachers to deliver better education, and the student’s families to participate in the educational process. After decades of political reluctance, the state finally pays more attention to the education of the nation. The currently enforced programs might be imperfect, yet their results and efficiency are researched and constantly improved so more progress is to come.
Reference List
CCSSO, (2012). Confronting the quiet crisis: How chief state school officers are advancing quality early childhood opportunities. Web.
Dahlin, M., Xiang, Y., Durant, S., & Cronin, J. (2010). State standards and student growth: Why state standards don’t matter as much as we thought. Web.
Hinitz, B. S. F. (2014). Head start. Young Children, 69(2), 94-97.
Miller, L. J., & Smith, S. C. (2011). Did the No Child Left Behind Act miss the mark? Assessing the potential benefits from an accountability system for early childhood education. Educational Policy, 25(1), 193-214.
Morrison, G. S. (2012). Early childhood education today (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.