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Getting Ahead
Benefit from "No Child Left Behind"
By Sue Marquette Poremba
I figured that my son's middle school experience would be the same as his older sister's. They attended the same school, had the same team of teachers and were on the same academic track. However, everything about my son's coursework was different from my daughter's. Her math class focused on nothing but math. His math class included writing assignments. Her core classes complemented each other, and her teachers coordinated their projects. His core classes stood independent from each other, and there were fewer projects. We had no idea why there was a change until we asked the math teacher. "No Child Left Behind and the new requirements," she answered with a sigh.
Karen Kender of Plymouth, Minn., had a similar experience. "Up until No Child Left Behind was implemented here, sixth grade social studies spent most of the year on Minnesota history, government, etc.," she says. "My son did this in sixth grade. That was the last year that was done. My daughter is not doing it this year." Instead, Kender says, her daughter's social studies class is a review of fifth grade social studies – American history.
While most parents have at least heard of the No Child Left Behind Act, they have been given little information on the new law's expectations. According to Stacy DeBroff, author of No Parent Left Behind (Simon and Schuster, 2005), No Child Left Behind is a sweeping educational plan with the goal that no child regardless of ethnicity, gender or family income be disadvantaged in life due to the lack of a proper education. On its Web site, the Department of Education says that No Child Left Behind is designed to change the culture of America's schools by closing the achievement gap, offering more flexibility, giving parents more options and teaching students based on what works. However, some within the education field believe that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may be causing more harm than good for education.
"Increasingly, teachers are turning to cookie-cutter curriculums in an effort to teach to the standardized tests that form the benchmark of NCLB reforms," says DeBroff. "All too often, this pressure means dropping fun, creative and interactive activities because they prove too time consuming to fit into an already packed day. Instead of raising children who love to learn and solve problems creatively, we are raising a generation of terrific test-takers."
Is that a bad thing? Maybe. Gary Galluzzo, professor of education and human development at George Mason University, says, "Many teachers see the tests as constraining, fact-based, leaving little room for thinking skills." He says that one of the problems is that teachers don't see the tests before they are given, so they teach to what they believe is on the test.
Kender has seen "teaching to the test" in her children's middle school classes. "The first year of NCLB they did a lot of that, lots of 'practice tests,'" she says. "Practice tests were used as assignments in math."
Galluzzo wonders about the definition of student achievement. "Kids get an 'A,' but did they learn anything?" he asks. "Are we graduating good test takers or smart kids?"