No Child Left Behind

Running head : No Child Left Behind Act

No Child Left Behind Act

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[The name of institution appears here] Abstract

With the No Child Left Behind Act , signed into law in early 2002 , the Bush Administration put its stamp on the central federal law governing K-12 schooling , the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA ratified in 1965 . Throughout his campaign for the presidency , Bush summoned the ideas that are now law as a way to improve public education across the board , particularly for poor

children . Vowing to end the soft prejudice of low expectations that he said has allowed too many poor children to fall enduringly behind in school , President Bush declared It 's time to come together to get it (educational reform ) done so that we can truthfully say in America 'No child will be left behind , not one single child

Described in this way , the problem of low expectations proposes the solution most probably built into the provisions of No Child Left Behind : higher expectations . Though , the law needs not higher expectations which , after all , cannot be legislated but to a certain extent documented success , across the board and against a set of external standards . Expecting every child to succeed is one thing needing that success is another . Supporters look upon the No Child Left Behind Act as a much-needed push in the right direction : a set of measures that will drive broad gains in student achievement as well as hold states and schools properly accountable for student progress . A number of critics see it fundamentally as a insincere set of demands framed in an appealing language of expectations , that will force schools to fail on a scale large enough to rationalize shifting public dollars to private schools that is , as a political effort to reform public education out of existence through a policy of test and burn (Levin , B Riffel , J , 1998

Sadly , No Child Left Behind appears , at best , to fix the wrong problem The sanctions written into the law appear designed to compel teachers to teach and students to learn . Thus far , few children do not want to learn and few teachers do not want to teach . This is barely the biggest problem in struggling schools . What is missing is chance and support not desire . Consider the gap between the reforms institutionalized through No Child Left Behind and the needs of John Essex , a high-poverty school in rural Demopolis , Alabama . The New York Times (Schemo , 2003b reported

The truck full of stones showed up at John Essex School without explanation , as if some unnamed saint had heard Loretta McCoy 's despair As principal of this school in Alabama 's rural Black Belt , Ms . McCoy struggles to find money for essentials : library books , musical instruments , supplies and teachers . So when the stones appeared , Ms McCoy knew it might be the closest John Essex would get to landscaping and got pushing

A pile went by the back door , filing a huge...