Should the controversial No Child Left Behind Act be reformed or should it be rejected?
    That is a question that seems to be growing on the national consciousness as the issue starts to become a campaign issue in the presidential race.
    Both Barack Obama and John McCain are in favor of reforming this act, while Hillary Clinton wants to reject the entire program. We, however, are falling on the side of the former in this instance.
    For some background — NCLB was signed into law on Jan. 8, 2002 and essentially reauthorized a number of federal programs aimed at improving the performance of U.S. primary and secondary schools by increasing the standards of accountability for states, school districts, and schools as well as providing parents more flexibility in choosing which schools their children will attend.
    NCLB enacted the theory of standards-based education reform, formerly known as outcome-based education, which is based on the belief that high expectations and setting of goals will result in success for all students.
    The act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools. NCLB does not assert a national achievement standard; standards are set by each individual state in order to comply with the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
    The act is up for possible reauthorization in 2007 as congress is considering major revisions to the initiative. Currently a group of 50 Republican senators and representatives introduced legislation in March 2007 to provide states much greater freedom from the act’s controls and punishments.
    We believe that the act has been both a success and failure. A success because it is resulting in improved student achievement in reading and math and is increasing the quality of education by requiring schools to improve their performance.
    The act has been a failure, however, because of the significant lack of funding that has been provided to schools in order to improve their performance and the fact that there are problems with standardized testing, which is when all students in a state take the same test under the same conditions — i.e. the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests that students are required to take as part of the NCLB requirements.
    The main complaint about the large focus on standardized testing is that the means of assessment — the state tests — encourage teachers to teach a narrow subset of skills that will increase test performance rather than focus on deeper understanding that can readily be transferred to similar problems.
    But this is something that can be fixed. First off, the federal government needs to make education a priority, through increasing the amount of federal aid that school districts receive for this program.
    Two, the government needs to drastically rewrite the criteria of NCLB and loosen some of the focus on standardized testing, and perhaps change it to more of a performance-based education reform where the focus is on the student’s performance in the classroom — not their performance on a standardized test.
    We understand what the federal government was attempting to do with NCLB. Education needs to be a priority in this country. However, we need to come up with better methods not only to fund it, but to track its success as well.
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    Information regarding the specifics of NCLB was obtained from Wikipedia.org.