Chapters 3 and 4 highlight some serious issues with the No Child Left behind Act. The idea that schools are evaluated and judged based on whether students make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) isn’t fair in my opinion. I don’t think it’s reasonable or even possible to expect every single student to score at or above the proficient level by 2014. This is setting the standards way to high and many schools will be declared failing as a result. Of course schools will be under immense pressure to reach those standards in order to receive federal funds, so curriculums will continue to be based on teaching to the standardized tests which is the fundamental problem with NCLB. As Kapp mentions in chapter 3, there are serious inequalities that exist as a result of NCLB and standardized testing. Culturally diverse schools are more likely to be labeled as inadequate, as schools with large numbers of low income, minority, immigrant, or special education students face many more hurdles and obstacles in order to reach proficient scoring levels on these exams and make yearly progress. I think this is a very important issue and one that is clearly overlooked by proponents of NCLB. Some groups of students need more help than others and applying this one size fits all solution to helping these students and schools makes no sense at all.
The fact that there is a serious lack of involvement between the general public and public schools is definitely one of the main issues with Public Education in America as Deborah Meier points out in Chapter 4. School boards have grown so large that fewer and fewer citizens are able to have any say or make an important decisions regarding school governance. With NCLB, this issue is made even more prevalent. School administrators and law makers are basing their decisions for what to do or how to handle public schools and public education on the outcomes of these exams instead of leaving such critical and important decisions up to the public and those that are a part of the school boards. I think it’s important to have smaller school districts for the sake of being able to base important decisions on the needs of smaller groups of students and ensuring that communities and the public has more say in matters of public education. Having bigger schools and districts is not a good thing and as Meier alludes to, it is detrimental to our democracy. Of course in order to address this issue, lawmakers need to re-evaluate their ideas and beliefs of standardized tests and of the NCLB act as a whole.
Are large school districts detrimental to the quality and performance of public schools? Would having smaller school districts make it more difficult for schools to receive or compete for funding from the federal government?
