Nclb Act Pros And Cons

In 2001, the United States Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 by creating the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The NLCB act instituted what are called Common Core Standards in an attempt to ensure that students across the nation received fair and equal access to a high quality education. Its aim was to close the gaps of achievement between high-and low-performing students; minority and non-minority students; and disadvantaged and more advantaged students. Unfortunately, because the NCLB act places significant emphasis on student assessment through testing, there are a number of areas where the arts in education programs have been negatively affected. In fact, according to the article entitled

Many teachers in the arts programs attribute these negative affects to the shifting of educational priorities resulting from the institution of the NCLB act. This is because, while the NCLB Act does include the arts in its classification of core subjects, the law’s emphasis is on testing reading and math skills. This, in effect, narrows the curriculum, diminishing the value placed on the arts and instead puts the focus on the more heavily emphasized subjects such as reading and math. As an unfortunate consequence, surveyed teachers have reported that “NCLB has had negative effects on scheduling, workloads, and funding for their art education programs” (Sabol, 2010). But should the arts be considered educationally less important when compared to developing reading and math skills? To answer that, consider what the arts provide for the developing student that is important in regards to their intellectual and

The article entitled “A View into a Decade of Arts Integration” writes that “the arts have the ability to improve general cognition through the development of executive attention” (Durma, 2014). In other words, by combining multiple learning methods, integration of the arts increases the amount of processes by which learners absorb and retain information. As a result, the chances that learning will take place are improved. As an example of how this process can be implemented, consider the findings highlighted in the article “Found in Translation: Interdisciplinary Arts Integration in Project AIM” which reports a “statistically significant increase in student learning across four variables measuring higher order thinking skills” as a result of arts integration (Pruitt, 2014). Upon implementing the arts in his mathematics teaching strategy, one math teacher wrote that “he was pleased that his students who had been low performing on written work were able to demonstrate conceptual understanding of math with a visual medium” (Pruitt, 2014). One student disclosed that the math was easier to understand when art was included in the learning process. “Now [when we are working on a math problem] I read the distributive property poster to remember and I think back to when I made the cards…because of that, I didn’t fail the math test” (Pruitt,