It is apparent that the No Child Left Behind act certainly has it’s countless amounts of flaws, whether it be the issue of teaching to the test, the impracticality of it, etc., It has to be looked at as an appropriate start to trying to rectifying the conflict. I myself was a very strong critic of the No Child Left Behind act, but in retrospect, it needs to be looked at as an attempt to rectify the problem. When a program of such a large scale is implemented in such a large school system, there are certainly going to be problems.
The two largest issues that I found with the program myself, are the impracticality to have every single student at the “level of compliance”, which causes problem #2, the issue with the teachers specifically teaching to the test and dumbing down the curriculum. While a third major issue, in my opinion, deals with the inability to implement changes to the program as needed, that tends to be more of a federal government legislature issue rather than a school system issue.
The idea that every student would be at the same place at the same time doesn’t account for students who just happen to learn slower than other students. This puts more pressure upon the teacher to help that student and may hinder the teacher’s ability to focus on students who may not need such preliminary help, but will hurt their ability to further expand their knowledge.
The way I would have implemented it, was to set a percentage of how many students need to pass, which would differ upon the ability of the students, like having a goal of 30% graduation in a school which has 20% graduation rates, and having 85% for that which has an 80% graduation rate, then raising that bar slightly every year. Furthermore, to prevent teachers from “dumbing down the test”, oversight must be implemented to see if for example, most students from one school did poorly in a specific section of a physics, and action must be taken upon the teacher, which includes the observation of the teacher during that certain lesson, as well as having testing the teacher to ensure they know how to do the work themselves.
Concerning the issue of “teaching to the test”, my question does ask to possibly challenge this notion to some extent. If the teachers didn’t “teach to the test”, would this make the curriculum that much better? Are all teachers (or a majority of them) capable of making their own curriculums that will surpass that of the test-set curriculum?
