No Child Left Behind Act Pros And Cons

In January of 2002, President George W. Bush signed on to the No Child Left Behind Act, which caused major reformation to the education world. Along with the changes to policy, it caused an upheaval among the people in the United States resulting in a riff between opposing perspectives. Two sides were taken: one in favor of the act and one against it. Although the goals are to "ensure academic progress and academic equality for all students" (Schmidt), not everybody sees it that way. Ultimately, the No Child Left Behind Act provides both good and bad qualities to education in America, so it comes down to a matter of priorities. The first side in the argument is the side that is in favor of the act, and more specifically, the side that

The main reason for this opposition is because of a controversy when it comes to the academic yearly progress (AYP) and annual measurable objective (AMO). The AYP is how much progress a school has made during the year based on standardized tests and the AMO is the target score that every school is expected to reach for the year (Schmidt p. 22). The controversy comes into play with the subgroup provision of the NCLB, which is "the requirement for each state's assessment system to separate the scores of their subgroups" (Schmidt p. 22) and subgroups are "students who are classified as disadvantaged by race, socioeconomic status and learning disability"(Schmidt p. 21). The schools who have a significant amount of subgroups have a disadvantage, though, because they are at a higher risk for federal sanctions (Schmidt p.

The controversy here is that studies have been done to show that there is a theory of multiple intelligence. The study shows that there are nine different types of learning and intelligences, but the standardized tests only test on the logical-mathematical and linguistics portions (Gardner). In other words, kids could appear unintelligent because they don't do well on the standardized tests, but they might excel in a different type of intelligence, such as musical or existential. These kids will only ever appear unintelligent to the state, though, because you can't tell from a standardized test that a child is intelligent in any other category besides logical-mathematical and linguistics, causing a bias