President Bush signed an act entitled the “No Child Left Behind” act (NCLB) into effect early in 2002, and
it affects hundreds of high school students, and the scary thing is that most do not even realize it. The piece
of legislation itself is quite extensive (if you’d like to read it for yourself, go here:http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html; good luck getting through all of the text), so I’ll give you the gist of it: students are expected to meet a set score for the standardized tests that are taken every year around Spring (and no federal funds are provided either!), and if that does not happen, dire consequences will ensue.
First of all, if the student does not score high enough on the math and/or verbal portion, the student will have to take remedial classes in the subject, and the student does not even receive credits towards graduation for these classes. Let’s say that a student’s test score shows that he is two years behind the reading level that he should be at. That would mean that he has to take two remedial verbal classes on top of a regular English class that he would need to graduate. If the student had failed to meet the criteria for math, he would have to take remedial classes for that too. All of these remedial classes plus regular classes can equal a very burnt out student.
Secondly, NCLB threatens schools to produce good test scores or else the state government will take over the school. I know this because the closest high school next to mine has been taken over. They used to be on the block schedule (three to four 90 minute class sessions), but now they are back to the regular period schedule (five to seven 50 minute class sessions), which means more classes and more work. Most of the electives have been cut as well, with the exception of one art class, one home economics class, and one keyboarding class. This will inevitably result in college-bound students who will not be able to meet the requirements for college (taking foreign language and art classes), and a drastic cut in teachers as those that teach elective classes will be out of a job.
You might think, well, just tell students to take the test seriously. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. NCLB states that 95% of the school’s population must be tested in order to produce an eligible score. This can be a hurdle, being that there are obviously students who choose to skip school on the days of testing, or those who choose to bubble in pictures onto their answer sheets. To make matters worse, 95% of each demographic needs to have been tested as well, meaning that 95% of the school’s African-American girls have to be tested, as well as 95% of Asian boys, 95% of Hispanic girls, and so on. With criteria like this, it’s no wonder that there are schools that fall into the cracks.
A school is given three years to produce an adequate score, and if they achieve that, the government will be off of the school’s case for a given amount of years. My school, for example, has one more year to generate good scores or else it will succumb to the same fate as our neighbor school. In the first year, we could not come up with enough students to test (we were about 8 students short), so we received a “Void” in lieu of a score. In the second year, our scores were too low. I’m a senior this year, and so I do not have to take any more tests, so the fate of the school rests with the lower classmen. Whatever happens will not affect me, but I’m still concerned nonetheless. I’m worried about my friends that are sophomore and juniors; I’m worried about my friends’ younger siblings; will a state-run school under NCLB provide a proper education for them?
I understand that the results of my school and others around here aren’t that typical for most of the nation being that I live in California, which is an incredibly diverse state, but trust that NCLB affects schools in other states as well. Just take a look at the sophomores in Texas; the average test scores for sophomores in the state are pretty high. Not to say that students in the state aren’t smart, but there are probably some students that do not attain these test scores. Do you know why their scores are not represented when the scores for schools are announced? It is because students that show low scores are encouraged to drop out of school so that they would not drag down school scores.
To wrap up this lengthy article: if you are still in high school, please, please take the standardized tests seriously, and tell your friends and classmates to do so too. Don’t let your school go down the drain due to some absurd piece of legislation.
by: Anne Hoang
