NCLB is not an "approach to education" like "whole language" or "see and say". It was an act of Congress, signed into law by President Bush. From a government web site:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) -- the main federal law affecting education from kindergarten through high school. Proposed by President Bush shortly after his inauguration, NCLB was signed into law on January 8th, 2002. NCLB is built on four principles: accountability for results, more choices for parents, greater local control and flexibility, and an emphasis on doing what works based on scientific research. (Pavlov?)

My understanding is that the NCLB program forces teachers to "teach to the test," the test that their students must pass to make it to the next level. That means the teacher has to memorize the test, plan all her lessons around its various parts, and drop any lesson or activity that is superfluous. At the same time, the students memorize specific information and are subjected to occasional reviews to make sure the material still rests in the recesses of their memory when test-time arrives. Art and music programs have been dropped because of time constraints (for NCLB and for other reasons).

Don't art and music speak to a student's soul? Are we turning our teachers into drones and our children into regurgitators?

I have yet to read anything positive about NCLB.

P.S. Interestingly enough, President Bush's home state has had a great awakening on how state history is taught. Changes will go into effect as soon as lawmakers are on the same page. It sounded like an anti-NCLB policy.

Last Edited on 5-Aug-2007 9:48 PM

The consensus is that this legislation has had all the negative consequences that CeeBee mentions – and more. Its original goal &$8211 and an admirable one – was to make schools and teachers more accountable. How this is to be accomplished has never been quite clear, but the theory was that schools would be scored on their performance; schools that were not performing would be warned, then penalized, then taken over if they didn't improve.

The first flaw is that the only criterion that the bureaucrats could think of for evaluating schools is standardized tests. This has led to "teaching to the test" and the emphasis on rote learning that CeeBee mentions. It also, teahers say, introduced a huge amount of bureaucratic paperwork, providing mountains of busywork for teachers and administrators and giving the bureaucrats job security while doing nothing to improve learning in the classroom. In fact, mounting red tape and paperwork have consumed some of the time previously used for preparing lessons, reviewing homework, and so on.

A second flaw is the evaluation of schools itself. I could be wrong, but I understand that all schools are measured by the same yardstick. Thus, inner-city schools, those in pockets of poverty, those with high proportions of non-native speakers, and so on are held to the same standards as schools in the affluent suburbs. Though perhaps standards must be, well, standard, some schools are doomed to fail the tests, no matter what they do.

This leads to the third difficulty. There is little or no funding behind NCLB to aid failing schools in overcoming their deficiencies. When NCLB was passed, it was touted as a bipartisan triumph. No sooner had it passed than funds to implement school improvements were cut, and Democratic supporters of NCLB protested that the program they intended to put into place had been Bush-whacked. While I believe strongly that throwing money at schools is not a solution to all or even most of their problems, we can't expect a nonperforming school to get any better if it hasn't the financial resources to do so.

NCLB is a classic case of an idea that was fine in theory but has turned out to be a failure in practice. Student performance continues to decline.

Here are a couple of analogies. I can drill students in the memorization of grammar rules and give them tests that are easy to score and that accurately measure rote learning. However, if that's all I do, they most likely will not learn to write any better. More significantly, I can give a student a series of F's with stern warnings that unless there's some improvement, the student will fail the course. However, if I don't give the student the knowledge and means to overcome the failure, he or she will continue to fail.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

The Reading and Writing tests were pretty good. They did NOT primarily require rote memorization, but asked students to (for example) choose the best-written sentence, decide the type of organization that would be most logical for a particular topic, find the main idea, pick out sentences that did not belong in a paragraph, etc.

Formative tests are provided to teachers to help prepare the students and to give teachers an idea of the topics that will be covered. Unfortunately, we did not receive the formative tests until just before the real testing began; so, when I discovered the test expected students to find parallel passages in a story, I did not have time to cover the material before the test. This problem has been fixed, I think.

I also had a problem with some of the terminology. For example, I used graphic organizers in the classroom, but never called them by name. When the test asked students if a Venn diagram would be appropriate in a certain situation, they didn't have a clue what a Venn diagram was.

There is another and more general problem with NCLB. All students are eventually supposed to show proficiency in each subject, but until a school has 100% proficiency, it is supposed to show a certain amount of improvement. The problem for the school and especially for the teacher is that last year's second grade is compared to this year's second grade. You just better have a brighter class this year than you did last year.

For the past two years, I've been teaching in a facility that does not have state testing (O Happy Day), so this problem may have been rectified as well. But then again, you know how the government works.

An even more general problem is the core philosophy behind NCLB--that every child can learn. Now, I know all chilren can learn. But I don't think every child can read at an 8th grade level by the time he is 14. If I could take a kid and work with him one-on-one every day, maybe...

I'm not sure we can expect kids to be that motivated. I've watched lots of students who struggle with learning. I often wonder if I could keep working at it like they do. It must get discouraging to want to read, to be willing to try your best, and--despite your hard work--to always be behind.

Here's a parallel situation. At the end of the English Composition class that I teach, students must write a departmental essay on a topic created by the department or even by someone outside the department who has been cajoled into dreaming up a topic. The essay is scored by readers other than the classroom instructor and is supposed to be counted as 30% of the student's course grade – regardless of the student's performance on all other work in the semester, which includes at least six other essays. (Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no way for the department to track whether professors abide by the 30% rule, and I suspect that most use their own judgment.)

Now, this departmental essay has its merits. It helps to make instructors (more than half of whom are part-timers, or adjuncts, like me) conform to departmental objectives. It ensures that all students in the required English 101 course have at least one major assignment in common. It at least provides one way to weed out those students who are unprepared for the second semester of the course (which most are also required to take). Without it, some well-intentioned, soft-hearted instructors might pass students who should fail, thinking they are doing them a favor when they are really dooming these students to failure later.

On the other hand, since I know that the departmental essay is always of a particular type (an analytical essay, usually comparative, based on short readings), I tend to give writing assignments of this type throughout the semester. I may sense that other types of exposition should be covered (for various reasons), but I necessarly want my students to get as much practice as possible in this one type, especially since it is what they'll need to do on the departmental. Although the general principles of writing that I teach should, theoretically, apply to any type of writing, the existence of the departmental essay influences the topics I give and what I emphasize. I am, for example, convinced that many of my students need something a bit more practical or basic than "literary analysis," but I am reluctant to devote much time to other types of exposition because I fear that they will be unprepared for the departmental.

Fortunately, I have learned through years of experience, how to compromise and to balance what the evidence shows that my students really need and what the department thinks they need. I've learned how to vary the writing assignments while directing them toward the final essay. As a result, my students' performance on the departmental essay is almost always consistent with their performance on other assignments. Those who fail the departmental have usually been failing anyway. Nonetheless, it has taken me many years to get to this point of compromise, and I still sometimes worry that I am, at least unconsciously, "teaching to the test" (the final departmental essay) instead of focusing on the needs of my students.

I am not under great pressure to toe the line. However, if the future of the school (its funding, its reputation, even its survival) depended on my preparing my students for some one-size-fits-all standardized assessment, I am sure that it would cramp my style. I would be less inclined to be innovative and experimental. In my focus on some more or less arbitrary requirement, I might become blind-sided to the real needs of my students. I also might not want to devote time and energy to teaching fundamentals to students who are so deficient that they couldn't pass the standardized test anyway, and (conversely) I might not be driven to challenge the more gifted students who will meet the minimal requirements of a standardized test no matter what I do.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

I heartily agree with your reluctance to teach to the test.
When I taught at a private school, I spent several weeks one summer examining students' papers. I found that many of them had trouble with parallel construction, roundabout construction, and over-use of and and be verbs. So I spent time on those elements the next year. Those items were not on the assessments, but I think many of my students corrected those problems in their writing.

Another example:
During the last quarter with the 8th graders, students paired up to write and illustrate a children's book. (Usually a writer paired up with an artist.) We examined children's books in the library, talked about the rhythm of the sentences, the importance of interesting words, conciseness, creativity, writing for your audience, etc.

I picked the top 10% or 15% of the books, which were then judged by the principal and several teachers. I made a copy of the top book, which was put in the library and available to be checked out. The students also read their books to the 1st and 2nd graders, and A Children's Choice Award was given for the favorite among the little kids.
The kids loved it, and I think some of them realized for the first time the importance of careful writing. They definitely did not want to diminish their books with a misspelled word or bad grammar.

I'm not a big fan of project-based learning, so this was a departure of sorts for me, but it was a great way to finish the 8th grade--and I hope that it was a good learning experience. But I would never have gone ahead with the project if we had had an assessment test waiting for us at the end of the year.

An aside:
The project was also a success because I could depend on the kids to do most of the real work at home. I never had a parent complain about having to get the kids together to work on the project.

I also used to send challenging puzzles home on the weekends. The kids had to work them with a parent, grandparent, or other family member. They got credit for showing a real attempt to solve the puzzles. Many parents told me what a good time the entire family had working on them. No one ever complained about having to spend 15 or 20 minutes doing something together.

Those days are gone, and not just because I teach in a juvenile detention facility.