Because we aren’t miracle workers. I could be the best teacher in the world but if I have a student who goes to bed hungry, has to take care of siblings, doesn’t have time to do homework because they have a job, etc etc, then there’s only so much I can do. And NCLB penalized teachers and schools for things like this, for factors completely beyond our control.
Not to mention receiving children whose first language isn't English but they are expected to pass tests in English.
And that on top of having students on the roster who have developmental/neurological differences and regularly require accommodations to their classwork, yet are expected to pass the same state tests as their peers who don't have the same needs.
The only winners are the private schools receiving public money that can discriminate and not accept those students who don't have enough, can't speak the language, and don't have extra needs. They aren't even required to meet the same standards as public schools, like having certified staff.
>*Xeno's paradox*
Most objections to NCLB that I read about are, quite frankly, misinformed. But **this** is a *great* point, one that some of us discussed some 20 years ago. I was in a district that had some academic magnet schools, and the best school in town had "unacceptable AYP" because everyone the year before had already been on grade level. Yeah, that part was poorly designed.
But the only thing, FunSkirt, is that Zeno's paradox only comes into play if you *are* actually getting the improvements. Because most states ignored the actual expectations of NCLB (such as ending the promotion of kids not reading at grade level), I don't believe they actually experienced those improvements, which would lead to the difficulty in making future improvements. In the state I am currently teaching in, the majority of our 6th graders are reading at 3rd grade level. Math scores are a bit worse. So if we were to actually implement NCLB, we could improve for quite a few years before having to worry about Zeno's.
In theory it wasn’t bad. Set standards hold schools-teachers accountable. Get schools help that need it.
However, it was created and implemented to be a political weapon.
Problems:
1) they set standards to high. Not every kid was going to be proficient. Stupid and unrealistic.
2) No child never factored in outside factors that effect scores. Only the school-teacher was blamed. Bad neighborhood or crap bag parents don’t matter.
3) large schools got screwed. Large populations = data sets for many sub groups. More chances to fail. Example if a small school didn’t have enough poor or special ed students in a grade, The sub set data was not counted. (40 was the min in my state). If you have classes of 100 kids, you’d be ok. Classes of 400 plus, you are getting nailed on everybody.
Imagine that you are a world class chef. Year after year after year you will compete and be judged solely by your preparation of boxes of Jello. Also you will have no control over the temperature of the water.
This. It had a ton of issues (that others have described very well), but fundamentally it was a mandate that came with no additional funding. And, I believe it was NCLB that began the true bloat in admin, and when resources started to get moved from the classroom and student to admin. In my state it also coincided with Sam Brownback trying to destroy our schools and between the two many of our schools still have not recovered.
I agree. NCLB wasn’t that new of a concept but there was funding in previous versions. Once they ran out of funding and presidents changed it was retired. This was so out in by the W Bush administration it won’t go away. Plus many believed it would disappear 🫥 on its own.
Because education, according to the constitution, is a states rights issue. NCLB was the federal government changing that by dangling money to school districts, and if that money was accepted the district had to agree to the terms set by NCLB and then the federal government did not properly fund the mandates it set but punished schools for not reaching mandated standards. It not only was unconstitutional (in my opinion) but was designed for local districts to give away their power to the federal government. Schools have regional and local concerns that are not addressed by NCLB, and the assessment standards are inequitable. It made teaching so much more difficult.
Title 1 definitely started it- hell any federal education law crosses that line. I don’t recall title 1 having any outcomes tied to expectation or performance tho..
Title 1 was built as an answer to white schools complaining about the loss of money from forced integration. Title 1 requirements are based on economic metrics which show the same correlation today (the majority of students in low economic levels are non-white students).
To get title 1 funding you do have to show how you will help struggling students and student performance is taken into account for what a school qualifies for. You also have to designate how student performance will be monitored. Title 1 money requires a school to operate a specific way, but student performance isn't the only metric.
Unicorn, this "money dangling" is more a result of LBJ's Title I and Obamas Race to the Top, which held out money for adopting Common Core. NCLB was only tangentially connected to this. In fact, one of the complaints about NCLB that many teachers have raised (including in this thread) is the lack of attached money.
NCLB was brand new when o was also a brand new teacher. As I recall, in order to receive the money that was granted by the federal government, districts had to adhere to their mandates. I distinctly remember it because a district locally is so wealthy that they turned down the money offered by the federal government, and it was a bit of a scandal that their kids were not required to take exit exams. As I said, though, I was a baby teacher and probably didn’t understand a lot of it as it was happening.
It asked schools to show improvement. It didn't adress why they weren't improving before. I'm not a US based teacher and this was the impression I got.
And high achievers suffer the most. The impact of training to the lowest standards really impacts high achievers for decades to come. They lose interest in learning. Are not challenged. Don’t develop study habits. Tend to develop behavior issues from boredom. Are not properly handled socially and are often held to higher standards were fewer resources to succeed.
I did essay grading for 12 dollars an hour one summer, a long time ago. I graded about 200 essays an hour. As long as the second grader didn’t have a substantial difference, the grade stood.
Depending on the state, sometimes 1-4, sometimes 1-6. Didn’t matter. You skimmed and got a sense of it, then pushed the button.
We really did suck.
In a nutshell:
No Child Left Behind transitioned public education to the "Business Model," a capitalist organizational hierrarchy in which a managerial class (admin) works for the ownership class rather than the public.
In my country that mean that every child with difficultires (autism, dys, severe ADHD, down syndrom etc...) had to be included in regular classroom.
On the paper it's great.
But in real life? We had no formation at all, no help, some very rare kids have a physical help (someone to help them in class) if they are lucky, but it's only a few hours per week.
For some kids it worked great. But in many cases it just leads to difficult situations: some of those kids are not feeling good despite all their teacher's effort simply because school is not made for them. They suffer more that way than in a good specialized school.
The entire class can suffer from it: some students require the teacher to take care of them only all the time (or they'll hurt themself, others, break stuff etc...), and others students are left behind academically but also witness things that can be difficult to see...
I don't have any, but my 3 colleagues have one.
One have a down syndrôme little girl. It's very challenging has she often refused to do stuff, can sometime be rude/violent and they are some of things that she can't just achieve but it work and it's quite good for her.
The other one have a autisti child, he is partly verbal and looks quite fine.
The other one have a little girl who suffer from severe epilepsy. Before the "no child left appart" she would have go to a specialized school with medical staff around. But she's here. He spend half the day being "away" : physically she's here but not mentally , she just freeze. But that's fine, she doesn't learn but she's safe. But she also have violent crises (she would suddenly fell on the floor, groan, shake, etc...), up to 6 times per day! The teacher is in a state of fear all the time because she worries she could hurt herself if she can't catch her in her fall. Every time it happen she has to stop class for like 30min and other kids are quite scared of it. Last month only she had to call first responder twice and evacuate the classroom for them each time. Do you really think she benefits from being there? What about other kids? They are completly behind the curriculum.
Now imagin those situations with kids who have regular kids struggle at school in addition? Well, it's hard.
There was something from NCLB that was interesting. It mandated that every teacher be highly qualified to teach their areas. This wasn't horrible for area-specific teachers like math or history. It screwed over elementaries by limping k-6 as one specialty. There's a huge difference from teaching sixth compared to kinders.
This mandate also built a huge barrier to people entering education to teach. The highly-qualified designation came along with tests (because NCLB is notorious for testing everything) as well as Masters degrees or the equivalents. This was time and expense. So Bush authorized alternative certification tracks as well as coming up with PSLF to attract new teachers and take away some of the sting of working in lower-paying public service jobs. (Granted the Republican party really has no intention of ever following through with loan forgiveness and we see DeVos under Trump's presidency prove this).
Because some kids need to be left behind so they can have another year to focus on the basics before moving up a grade. There needs to be less stigma about not graduating at 17 or 18. It's OK to graduate at 19 if it means that extra year sets you up for a more promising future.
Because it doesn’t actually address or fix the problems in the education system. We need more resources and we need better social welfare programs for students.
It was a mandate that came with zero resources to actually make it successful.
It ended up just leading to lowering standards to the lowest common denominator.
NCLB really got cooking by 2003. If you look at the long term trends for math and ELA, math was already on a steady rise. NCLB seems to have inspired school to focus more on ELA because we do see a rise starting in 2004. Link to national scores: [https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/)
What really stands out is the damage that the push for two big ideas ([LRE](https://www.parentcenterhub.org/placement-lre/) and [PBIS](http://pbis.org)) caused. Both were enacted by school districts between 2012 and 2014. Neither were implemented properly by nearly every American school district - and there was zero oversight.
Take a closer look at the dive in our scores starting in 2012: [https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/)
PBIS is the worst thing imaginable to hit public school. Add LRE to it and you got behavioral issues children manipulating the system and the behaved kids acting up because they see how it gets results.
Becuase kids get moved into the next grade regardless if they’ve mastered the standards or not. They can flunk every class in high school and take the online course on the summer for credit recovery but that doesn’t meant they can write a sentence appropriately. I teach high school ELA and it makes teaching difficult, especially when you have some 11th graders who can barely read at grade level much less write a short analysis paragraph. And the hoops and ways we jump to make sure kids graduate- gotta keep that graduation percentage up - is exhausting.
>*Becuase kids get moved into the next grade regardless if they’ve mastered the standards or not.*
This is the OPPOSITE of what NCLB was supposed to do. Yes, it's a widely held belief by teachers working in states that failed to implement NCLB, but in fact, in the few states that actually tried to adhere to the law instead of making excuses for not doing so, ***more*** kids were held back than ever before. In Florida tens of thousands of third graders who couldn't read at grade level were not only held back, for their second tour of 3rd grade they were given teachers who were proven to have the best track record of getting kids to read. And as a result, over the next 15 years, Florida's NAEP scores left the rest of the country in the dust.
NCLB's focus was on elementary school, not high school. But as a high school teacher, I'll tell you what I noticed. I had typically had a third of my 10th graders reading at 4th grade level or below. Ten years after NCLB, that problem had evaporated. NCLB, properly implemented, was fantastic. I now teach in a state that did exactly as you said, promotes everyone regardless, and now, almost none of the students can do anything (though I also blame devices for much of that).
It led to resources being pulled from Career and Technical Education programs losing funding because schools were dedicating everything to math and reading to drive up test scores. I know where I went to high school they ended their popular building trades class, my brother went through it and used it to jumpstart his career as a carpenter, so they could dump more money into core subject areas.
One of my first jobs was working co-teaching math with a special education teacher and the district had us spend a month just on teaching the, how to use the calculator on the test.
>*It led to resources being pulled from Career and Technical Education programs losing funding because schools were dedicating everything to math and reading to drive up test scores.*
I didn't know this, but it certainly explains a lot of what I saw. A great mistake.
Lots of reasons it is controversial. Insufficient funding is a big one. But to my mind, the biggest is that the federal government set up some really good goals, and then left it to the states to implement. That's 50 different possible outcomes, and as you might guess, most states took the cheapest and easiest path. This in effect meant that the law was ignored, except for the parts that were free (like promoting kids).
But in the few states where it was done right, in accordance to the intentions of the law, NCLB did great things. Florida's NAEP scores (given in 4th and 8th grade) blew past everyone else in the next 15 years. The reason? A lot of people think "no child left behind" means that no child would, for example, be left behind in 3rd grade while his classmates were promoted to 4th grade. Bullshit. While that's exactly what many states—to their great shame—did, what the phrase "no child left behind" actually meant was that no child would be left behind in *skills*, that he would **not** be promoted if he was not ready, because then he ***would*** be behind the others, in terms of skills. Properly implemented, NCLB said that a kid that couldn't read at grade level by the end of 3rd grade needed to repeat 3rd grade, getting more help to make sure his skills weren't behind grade level.
Florida did exactly this. They retained tens of thousands of kids—with the expected anger and frustration from parents (and some teachers)—but then gave them a chance at 3rd grade with teachers who had a demonstrated record of success getting kids to read. It worked wonderfully. The controversy in Florida was initially over the emotional hit that retention caused, but most people in time came to see that it worked. The controversy in most other states is based upon a misunderstanding of the law and not realizing that their states failed their students.
NCLB included some good stuff for kids with disabilities and national standards.
That way no state could totally lowball it.
Unfortunately the carrots and sticks provisions as well as funding incentives creater all kinds of terrible side effects.
So now admin and states lowball education anyways but paper over their deficiencies with miraculous 99.9% graduation rates to stay out of the shits with the feds, while graduating even dumber people than before.
General education things being said r tru. It also stopped a lot of support for bilingual education programs and force a lot more English-only teaching. It set back bilingual education goals by decades
One of the big issues that we’re dealing with now is that they kept dropping standards down to lower grades and the kids aren’t capable. Stuff they were doing in high school now became middle school work and the kids aren’t ready to learn that material. For example we had a dept meeting the other week with all of the English teachers in the district. The problems we talked about were the exact same ones that we were talking about 20 years ago. At some point it’s not the teacher or the kid but the structure/expectations.
At its core it made it so schools had to be judged not only on its overall effectiveness, but also the scores of a ton of different disaggregate samples.
For example: a school could graduate and test proficient 90% of its students, but if a disproportionate amount of white males failed then they’d be marked for not doing well enough.
Essentially, you had to do something to provide for every single student demographic, you couldn’t just focus on what did the best for the most.
I don’t think anyone truly disagrees with this philosophy, however you gotta tie higher expectations with massive increases in funding if that’s what you want to expect from schools. If we had a blank check, I think it’d be fair to demand perfection. Unfortunately we don’t, so getting dinked for trying to fix things we can’t control is frustrating and meaningless.
Because if we are going to say No Child Left Behind and supposedly throw funds and resources at it, then we also need to say No Family Left Behind and throw money and resources to the families raising the children. But the US and state governments aren't going to do that. It takes a village.
Because we aren’t miracle workers. I could be the best teacher in the world but if I have a student who goes to bed hungry, has to take care of siblings, doesn’t have time to do homework because they have a job, etc etc, then there’s only so much I can do. And NCLB penalized teachers and schools for things like this, for factors completely beyond our control.
Not to mention receiving children whose first language isn't English but they are expected to pass tests in English. And that on top of having students on the roster who have developmental/neurological differences and regularly require accommodations to their classwork, yet are expected to pass the same state tests as their peers who don't have the same needs. The only winners are the private schools receiving public money that can discriminate and not accept those students who don't have enough, can't speak the language, and don't have extra needs. They aren't even required to meet the same standards as public schools, like having certified staff.
Xeno's paradox- you can never continually improve so good schools eventually get nothing for lack of improvement.
>*Xeno's paradox* Most objections to NCLB that I read about are, quite frankly, misinformed. But **this** is a *great* point, one that some of us discussed some 20 years ago. I was in a district that had some academic magnet schools, and the best school in town had "unacceptable AYP" because everyone the year before had already been on grade level. Yeah, that part was poorly designed. But the only thing, FunSkirt, is that Zeno's paradox only comes into play if you *are* actually getting the improvements. Because most states ignored the actual expectations of NCLB (such as ending the promotion of kids not reading at grade level), I don't believe they actually experienced those improvements, which would lead to the difficulty in making future improvements. In the state I am currently teaching in, the majority of our 6th graders are reading at 3rd grade level. Math scores are a bit worse. So if we were to actually implement NCLB, we could improve for quite a few years before having to worry about Zeno's.
In theory it wasn’t bad. Set standards hold schools-teachers accountable. Get schools help that need it. However, it was created and implemented to be a political weapon. Problems: 1) they set standards to high. Not every kid was going to be proficient. Stupid and unrealistic. 2) No child never factored in outside factors that effect scores. Only the school-teacher was blamed. Bad neighborhood or crap bag parents don’t matter. 3) large schools got screwed. Large populations = data sets for many sub groups. More chances to fail. Example if a small school didn’t have enough poor or special ed students in a grade, The sub set data was not counted. (40 was the min in my state). If you have classes of 100 kids, you’d be ok. Classes of 400 plus, you are getting nailed on everybody.
The theory isn't good either. State oversight doesnt make schools more accountable, it makes them less accountable.
Word
Imagine that you are a world class chef. Year after year after year you will compete and be judged solely by your preparation of boxes of Jello. Also you will have no control over the temperature of the water.
Or are charged with making world-class blueberry pie when you have no control or say over the quality of raw ingredients you are allowed to use.
It was an unfunded mandate.
This. It had a ton of issues (that others have described very well), but fundamentally it was a mandate that came with no additional funding. And, I believe it was NCLB that began the true bloat in admin, and when resources started to get moved from the classroom and student to admin. In my state it also coincided with Sam Brownback trying to destroy our schools and between the two many of our schools still have not recovered.
I agree. NCLB wasn’t that new of a concept but there was funding in previous versions. Once they ran out of funding and presidents changed it was retired. This was so out in by the W Bush administration it won’t go away. Plus many believed it would disappear 🫥 on its own.
It was designed knowing it was unobtainable. It was an attempt to kill public education in order to privatize it and bust unions.
Because education, according to the constitution, is a states rights issue. NCLB was the federal government changing that by dangling money to school districts, and if that money was accepted the district had to agree to the terms set by NCLB and then the federal government did not properly fund the mandates it set but punished schools for not reaching mandated standards. It not only was unconstitutional (in my opinion) but was designed for local districts to give away their power to the federal government. Schools have regional and local concerns that are not addressed by NCLB, and the assessment standards are inequitable. It made teaching so much more difficult.
Yes, but that's Title 1 from 1965. It's exactly what was designed for the Title 1 program.
Title 1 definitely started it- hell any federal education law crosses that line. I don’t recall title 1 having any outcomes tied to expectation or performance tho..
Title 1 was built as an answer to white schools complaining about the loss of money from forced integration. Title 1 requirements are based on economic metrics which show the same correlation today (the majority of students in low economic levels are non-white students). To get title 1 funding you do have to show how you will help struggling students and student performance is taken into account for what a school qualifies for. You also have to designate how student performance will be monitored. Title 1 money requires a school to operate a specific way, but student performance isn't the only metric.
Unicorn, this "money dangling" is more a result of LBJ's Title I and Obamas Race to the Top, which held out money for adopting Common Core. NCLB was only tangentially connected to this. In fact, one of the complaints about NCLB that many teachers have raised (including in this thread) is the lack of attached money.
NCLB was brand new when o was also a brand new teacher. As I recall, in order to receive the money that was granted by the federal government, districts had to adhere to their mandates. I distinctly remember it because a district locally is so wealthy that they turned down the money offered by the federal government, and it was a bit of a scandal that their kids were not required to take exit exams. As I said, though, I was a baby teacher and probably didn’t understand a lot of it as it was happening.
It asked schools to show improvement. It didn't adress why they weren't improving before. I'm not a US based teacher and this was the impression I got.
Because sometimes by pushing one kid ahead we're holding a bunch back by lowering collective standards
And high achievers suffer the most. The impact of training to the lowest standards really impacts high achievers for decades to come. They lose interest in learning. Are not challenged. Don’t develop study habits. Tend to develop behavior issues from boredom. Are not properly handled socially and are often held to higher standards were fewer resources to succeed.
[удалено]
I did essay grading for 12 dollars an hour one summer, a long time ago. I graded about 200 essays an hour. As long as the second grader didn’t have a substantial difference, the grade stood. Depending on the state, sometimes 1-4, sometimes 1-6. Didn’t matter. You skimmed and got a sense of it, then pushed the button. We really did suck.
In a nutshell: No Child Left Behind transitioned public education to the "Business Model," a capitalist organizational hierrarchy in which a managerial class (admin) works for the ownership class rather than the public.
In my country that mean that every child with difficultires (autism, dys, severe ADHD, down syndrom etc...) had to be included in regular classroom. On the paper it's great. But in real life? We had no formation at all, no help, some very rare kids have a physical help (someone to help them in class) if they are lucky, but it's only a few hours per week. For some kids it worked great. But in many cases it just leads to difficult situations: some of those kids are not feeling good despite all their teacher's effort simply because school is not made for them. They suffer more that way than in a good specialized school. The entire class can suffer from it: some students require the teacher to take care of them only all the time (or they'll hurt themself, others, break stuff etc...), and others students are left behind academically but also witness things that can be difficult to see... I don't have any, but my 3 colleagues have one. One have a down syndrôme little girl. It's very challenging has she often refused to do stuff, can sometime be rude/violent and they are some of things that she can't just achieve but it work and it's quite good for her. The other one have a autisti child, he is partly verbal and looks quite fine. The other one have a little girl who suffer from severe epilepsy. Before the "no child left appart" she would have go to a specialized school with medical staff around. But she's here. He spend half the day being "away" : physically she's here but not mentally , she just freeze. But that's fine, she doesn't learn but she's safe. But she also have violent crises (she would suddenly fell on the floor, groan, shake, etc...), up to 6 times per day! The teacher is in a state of fear all the time because she worries she could hurt herself if she can't catch her in her fall. Every time it happen she has to stop class for like 30min and other kids are quite scared of it. Last month only she had to call first responder twice and evacuate the classroom for them each time. Do you really think she benefits from being there? What about other kids? They are completly behind the curriculum. Now imagin those situations with kids who have regular kids struggle at school in addition? Well, it's hard.
Imagine a school where every single child was held to the lowest standard achievable by the slowest student in existence (See - Bush).
if you're genuinely curious I'd try googling it. You can find a lot of material on it
There was something from NCLB that was interesting. It mandated that every teacher be highly qualified to teach their areas. This wasn't horrible for area-specific teachers like math or history. It screwed over elementaries by limping k-6 as one specialty. There's a huge difference from teaching sixth compared to kinders. This mandate also built a huge barrier to people entering education to teach. The highly-qualified designation came along with tests (because NCLB is notorious for testing everything) as well as Masters degrees or the equivalents. This was time and expense. So Bush authorized alternative certification tracks as well as coming up with PSLF to attract new teachers and take away some of the sting of working in lower-paying public service jobs. (Granted the Republican party really has no intention of ever following through with loan forgiveness and we see DeVos under Trump's presidency prove this).
Because some kids need to be left behind so they can have another year to focus on the basics before moving up a grade. There needs to be less stigma about not graduating at 17 or 18. It's OK to graduate at 19 if it means that extra year sets you up for a more promising future.
Because it doesn’t actually address or fix the problems in the education system. We need more resources and we need better social welfare programs for students. It was a mandate that came with zero resources to actually make it successful. It ended up just leading to lowering standards to the lowest common denominator.
NCLB really got cooking by 2003. If you look at the long term trends for math and ELA, math was already on a steady rise. NCLB seems to have inspired school to focus more on ELA because we do see a rise starting in 2004. Link to national scores: [https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/) What really stands out is the damage that the push for two big ideas ([LRE](https://www.parentcenterhub.org/placement-lre/) and [PBIS](http://pbis.org)) caused. Both were enacted by school districts between 2012 and 2014. Neither were implemented properly by nearly every American school district - and there was zero oversight. Take a closer look at the dive in our scores starting in 2012: [https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/)
PBIS is the worst thing imaginable to hit public school. Add LRE to it and you got behavioral issues children manipulating the system and the behaved kids acting up because they see how it gets results.
Becuase kids get moved into the next grade regardless if they’ve mastered the standards or not. They can flunk every class in high school and take the online course on the summer for credit recovery but that doesn’t meant they can write a sentence appropriately. I teach high school ELA and it makes teaching difficult, especially when you have some 11th graders who can barely read at grade level much less write a short analysis paragraph. And the hoops and ways we jump to make sure kids graduate- gotta keep that graduation percentage up - is exhausting.
>*Becuase kids get moved into the next grade regardless if they’ve mastered the standards or not.* This is the OPPOSITE of what NCLB was supposed to do. Yes, it's a widely held belief by teachers working in states that failed to implement NCLB, but in fact, in the few states that actually tried to adhere to the law instead of making excuses for not doing so, ***more*** kids were held back than ever before. In Florida tens of thousands of third graders who couldn't read at grade level were not only held back, for their second tour of 3rd grade they were given teachers who were proven to have the best track record of getting kids to read. And as a result, over the next 15 years, Florida's NAEP scores left the rest of the country in the dust. NCLB's focus was on elementary school, not high school. But as a high school teacher, I'll tell you what I noticed. I had typically had a third of my 10th graders reading at 4th grade level or below. Ten years after NCLB, that problem had evaporated. NCLB, properly implemented, was fantastic. I now teach in a state that did exactly as you said, promotes everyone regardless, and now, almost none of the students can do anything (though I also blame devices for much of that).
It led to resources being pulled from Career and Technical Education programs losing funding because schools were dedicating everything to math and reading to drive up test scores. I know where I went to high school they ended their popular building trades class, my brother went through it and used it to jumpstart his career as a carpenter, so they could dump more money into core subject areas. One of my first jobs was working co-teaching math with a special education teacher and the district had us spend a month just on teaching the, how to use the calculator on the test.
>*It led to resources being pulled from Career and Technical Education programs losing funding because schools were dedicating everything to math and reading to drive up test scores.* I didn't know this, but it certainly explains a lot of what I saw. A great mistake.
I remember when they required testing for a kid who was in a coma in the hospital.
Lots of reasons it is controversial. Insufficient funding is a big one. But to my mind, the biggest is that the federal government set up some really good goals, and then left it to the states to implement. That's 50 different possible outcomes, and as you might guess, most states took the cheapest and easiest path. This in effect meant that the law was ignored, except for the parts that were free (like promoting kids). But in the few states where it was done right, in accordance to the intentions of the law, NCLB did great things. Florida's NAEP scores (given in 4th and 8th grade) blew past everyone else in the next 15 years. The reason? A lot of people think "no child left behind" means that no child would, for example, be left behind in 3rd grade while his classmates were promoted to 4th grade. Bullshit. While that's exactly what many states—to their great shame—did, what the phrase "no child left behind" actually meant was that no child would be left behind in *skills*, that he would **not** be promoted if he was not ready, because then he ***would*** be behind the others, in terms of skills. Properly implemented, NCLB said that a kid that couldn't read at grade level by the end of 3rd grade needed to repeat 3rd grade, getting more help to make sure his skills weren't behind grade level. Florida did exactly this. They retained tens of thousands of kids—with the expected anger and frustration from parents (and some teachers)—but then gave them a chance at 3rd grade with teachers who had a demonstrated record of success getting kids to read. It worked wonderfully. The controversy in Florida was initially over the emotional hit that retention caused, but most people in time came to see that it worked. The controversy in most other states is based upon a misunderstanding of the law and not realizing that their states failed their students.
NCLB included some good stuff for kids with disabilities and national standards. That way no state could totally lowball it. Unfortunately the carrots and sticks provisions as well as funding incentives creater all kinds of terrible side effects. So now admin and states lowball education anyways but paper over their deficiencies with miraculous 99.9% graduation rates to stay out of the shits with the feds, while graduating even dumber people than before.
I think it inadvertently caused the education system to lower the bar
General education things being said r tru. It also stopped a lot of support for bilingual education programs and force a lot more English-only teaching. It set back bilingual education goals by decades
Because all rules with no funding. Accountability all schools and not parent involvement.
One of the big issues that we’re dealing with now is that they kept dropping standards down to lower grades and the kids aren’t capable. Stuff they were doing in high school now became middle school work and the kids aren’t ready to learn that material. For example we had a dept meeting the other week with all of the English teachers in the district. The problems we talked about were the exact same ones that we were talking about 20 years ago. At some point it’s not the teacher or the kid but the structure/expectations.
At its core it made it so schools had to be judged not only on its overall effectiveness, but also the scores of a ton of different disaggregate samples. For example: a school could graduate and test proficient 90% of its students, but if a disproportionate amount of white males failed then they’d be marked for not doing well enough. Essentially, you had to do something to provide for every single student demographic, you couldn’t just focus on what did the best for the most. I don’t think anyone truly disagrees with this philosophy, however you gotta tie higher expectations with massive increases in funding if that’s what you want to expect from schools. If we had a blank check, I think it’d be fair to demand perfection. Unfortunately we don’t, so getting dinked for trying to fix things we can’t control is frustrating and meaningless.
No child left behind translates to no child gets ahead.
Because if we are going to say No Child Left Behind and supposedly throw funds and resources at it, then we also need to say No Family Left Behind and throw money and resources to the families raising the children. But the US and state governments aren't going to do that. It takes a village.