No Child Left Behind (NCLB) - 4/21/2009
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was intended to force all schools in the country to bring all students up to a high minimum standard. It has resulted in significant progress in many areas. It has also resulted, unfortunately, in fudging – to put it gently – on the part of some states and some districts. In some cases the fudging has been watered–down standards in order to help more students meet them. In other cases there has been fudging of data in order to make results look better than they really were. In part this was due to the fact that No Child Left Behind allowed each state to set its own standards and manage its own data.
Buried in the midst of the Federal stimulus package is a provision which requires all states to set new standards. Unlike NCLB which did not specify how high standards were to be and did not connect them to any specific level of proficiency, the new law indicates that the standards must be sufficiently high to ensure that all students who meet them would be able to succeed in college, the military or a job without remedial assistance.
This will require enormous changes in the ways in which students are assessed with much greater emphasis on critical thinking, analytical reasoning and effective communication. It will also require the creation of programs which get students to those levels. However, this is a huge step in the right direction.
It is worth noting that the Association of American Universities through the Standards for Success report (www.s4s.org) attempted to identify the skills and knowledge necessary for a student to succeed in college several years ago, proficiencies which we in Herricks have used as our aspirational goals for some time.
