Impact of `No Child Left Behind`

No Child Left Behind in Texas

One third of high school students fail to graduate . Jobs prospects for these students are limited . And when skills , talent and knowledge are limited in a very fast paced highly competitive environment , the American work force is doomed to meet global standards . To address this problem the government signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB program . The program measures its success on how students become educated using the graduation rates . The nation 's public school systems are responsible for educating 48 million students , the

majority of our future workforce . Providing them with the skills needed to succeed is vital to the nation 's economic strength and ability to compete in a global economy . NCLB Act was passed to ensure that all students have access to a high-quality education and to increase the likelihood that these students will graduate . In particular , the act seeks to make significant changes in public education by asking federal state , and local education officials to reconsider how they assess the academic achievement of the nation 's students (GAO , 2005

But assessment is just the first step in the process of solving the problem . Intervention is also part and parcel of the program . Knowing the results of the assessment , effective intervention to help the students is needed . Table 1 shows the number of types of interventions observed per school level and type . High schools pose highest in the number of interventions using alternative learning environments

Table 1 . Number of Interventions Visited by School Level and Type

Source : GAO , 2005

In an interview with President Bush , a staunch believer of the NCLB program , he elucidates important points being criticized against the NCLB program . For one , the government believes that measuring the abilities of the school children is important to know where the program can effectively start . Reading is very important in nation building and therefore the sooner one realizes the weakness , the sooner a pupil can get help

Their third-graders through eighth-graders , at least 95 per cent of them , must take federally mandated tests each year . And if all the sub-groups in the school - boys , girls , brown , white and green - don 't show annual improvement , a chain of requirements launches , beginning with forced permission for kids to go to other schools in the district and ending with mandated dumping of school management (Meyer , 2003

Secondly , NCLB gives control of the curriculum to the local schools . The main control that federal government suggests is the resizing of the classroom and asking the local boards to post and publish their scores to make everyone accountable and learning is shared . Unfortunately , NCLB data shows insignificant progress as can be seen in the Texas Report Card for Reading in 2005

In 2005 , the average scale score for eighth-grade students in Texas was 258 . This was not significantly different from their average score in 2003 (259 , and was not significantly different from their average score in 1998 (261 . Texas ' average score (258 ) in 2005 was...