Pros And Cons Of No Child Left Behind

The way we view education nowadays is much different than how we viewed it 50 years ago. In today’s age, we live in a world where our children’s education is very important. Hence the passing of a helpful, yet controversial act known as the No Child Left behind Act or NCLB for short. Since the passing of the No Child Left behind Act many schools have been held responsible for students’ academic testing results, resulting in both helpful and negative results towards the school. No Child Left behind Act was first introduced in January 8, 2002 by President George W. Bush to help our students attend schools that were treated equally and fairly as every other school (Lee, 2015). Students were falling behind in education thanks to poor results

Realizing that too many students were doing so poorly, they started to focus their attention on the schools and hold them responsible for the academic progress of all students (Klein, 2017). The pros that came from this law were that many schools had the pressure put on them to become great. For example, when I was in middle school we had to take these standardized tests and since I attended a low income school we didn’t do very well. This caused certain teachers to be switched around and the material we would learn would change as well. Nothing ever seemed like the students fault which is very good because it doesn’t add stress to the students. With new teachers and more professional staff, the students who did badly on standardized testing slowly started to do better. Things could become stressful for the students, but every student knows that testing normal in school. Also tests are the only way of determining what students have learned in their year of classes (Johnson, 2006). Another pro is that it helps lower the achievement gap between the majority and

The cons of the NCLB act are that the people who look at the “failing” school seem to become very biased (Connect, 2015). This means some representatives will judge a school based on their income level and what kind of race the students are. Another con is that the NCLB mostly focuses on test scores (Connect, 2015). Just because the test scores increase and look positive, doesn’t mean the students are learning (Connect, 2015). They totally forget to look at the fact that a student may have a learning disability and just end up blaming the school for it, without the school ever knowing if the student had a disability (Lee, 2015). For example, the school I attended told their students that grades were the most important thing for a student to advance in further education. This was a mockery since half of the class cheated, got high grades but didn’t learn anything. This truly affects us as students because we are stressed about getting high grades and a high GPA, which we forget to actually learn. This hurts education within schools along with the schools image by putting blame on educators for not preparing their students for the next level of education. Schools have to follow AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) and if they don’t pass, then they get penalized. If they fail a yearly exam twice, then they become in need of improvement (Connect, 2015). This gives the students the ability to switch