The Negative Consequences of the “No Child Left Behind” Act

The Negative Consequences of the NCLB Act 1

The Negative Consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act


The Negative Consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act

On January 8th

2002, following his election, President George W. Bush signed the No

Child Left Behind act which aimed to ensure that all American children are educated equally

and perform well in standardized tests regardless of the school they attend, where they live or

their social class. The No Child Left Behinds main goal is to ensure that all students across the

US who attend either public or private schools are receiving the same quality of education which

will enable them to perform well at school. The act states that schools in all states and all areas

around the country either poor or rich must deliver the same standard based education and

schools that constantly perform poorly in their standardized exams must be held accountable for

the academic failure of their students and must seek to improve their teaching processes in order

to increase their students grades in these exams. As a consequence, teachers started emphasizing

more than ever on preparing their students for standardized tests to assure their school will

receive government funding. Following the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, there has

been much debate about the significance of standardized tests and what they should mean for

administrators, teachers, and the students across the country who take them (Furumoto, 2005).

The debate, primarily, attempts to determine whether the enforcement of this new educational

policy will be truly beneficial for the educational system and its students or not. For us, although

the No child Left behind act was meant to improve the American educational system, it suffers

from some major drawbacks which have caused more harm to students than improving the

quality of education they receive.

First, the standardized testing enforced by this act does not take into account that not all

children across the US have the same reasoning abilities. The problem with standardized tests is

that all students are required to take the same exam while every one of them has different


learning and processing capacities. According to a study done by Anne Schuler and her

colleagues, some children can easily deal with non-spatial information such as essay questions

and long academic texts while others can be classified as visual or spatial learners (Schuler,

2012). As it has been proven that students differ in their innate abilities, does it seem reasonable

to use a single test to compare them to each other? It is clear that the answer is no. However, the

educational system does not want to admit this fact; policy makers who enforce these standard

achievement tests as a primary assessment tool assume that students have the same latter and

innate abilities and can think and reason information in the same way but, in fact, this is not true.

This leads us to conclude that standardized tests are not a fair measure for learning.

In fact, what these tests fail to capture is the students full intelligence. No two individuals

around the globe share a similar understanding of the same thing and every one of us feels,

thinks, and sees things differently. One of the great researchers in the field of human learning and

intelligence claimed in his book that at least seven types of intelligence exist among humans

(Gardner, 1999). And because of this scientific fact that proves there are various forms of

intelligence, we can conclude that standardized tests are illogical because they measure only one

type of the students intelligence.

Another problem with these tests is the fact that they prevent the student from developing

deeper knowledge. A research study published on the American Educational Research Journal by

Walter C. Parker and his team, concluded that, many standardized test tend to get repetitive as

many practice booklets for these tests that contain samples from previous exams clearly show the

similarities in the tests format and sometimes they tend to ask the same questions in different

words (Walter, 2013) Thus, it became easier for students to predict the tests questions from these

practice booklets and know exactly what they need to memorize in order to pass the test without


bothering themselves with the rest. Hence, it is clear that standardized tests prevent the students

from gaining deeper knowledge of the subject as achieving a high test score requires from them

to only memorize past exam questions without necessarily understanding the materials.

Moreover, high school graduates are struggling to apply the few concepts they have

managed to learn at school to real life situations. In her latest book, Diane Ravitch, former

assistant secretary of education, heavily criticized todays educational policies in the US claiming

that if you ask any student to describe his/her understanding of materials learned in class or apply

it to different real life situations, the majority of them if not all would not be able to because they

do not know more then what they need to pass the test (Ravitch, 2011, p.99-117). Thus, if

students fail to apply what they have learned at school to real life situations, how did this new act

improve the American educational system?

This leads us to the second most important issue with these frequent standardized tests,

which is the fact that memorizing all of that knowledge at school is useless. One of the

supporting arguments to this new policy claims that frequent tests are beneficial to students

because testing them many times helps them retain information longer and better. (Dunlosky,

2013) But what is the purpose of accumulating all of this knowledge in our heads? The US

educational system needs to admit the fact that remembering something is not the same as

understanding it. In todays world, it is impressive when someone knows too many facts, but not

often useful. Once, Albert Einstein said Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world (Needle, 2007). What Einstein tried to

convey us is that all the knowledge that we can receive at school is useless unless we are able to

understand it, use it in creative ways and develop it. We agree with Einsteins position because

knowledge will always be available out there and memorizing it in our heads through frequent


testing will not help us or add anything to it unless we discover on our own new ways of how to

apply this knowledge in different situation and add value to it.

Indeed, it is important to note that many students do not perform well on them due to

various reasons, other than what they actually know about a subject. However, these reasons are

often related to the students socioeconomic status. In his book Standardized Testing and its

Victims Alfie Kohn presented a brief summary of one of his research studies done in 1992. The

results of this study suggest that different factors such as (poverty, community, parents

educational background, and number of parents) were responsible for roughly 89% of differences

in the standardized national math tests (Kohn, 2004, p.54). From this we see that the situation of

the students while taking the exam can also prevent them from performing well on a certain test.

All in all, it is ineffective to compare schools according to their students scores due to the fact

that students in each school can be affected by different factors that will prevent them from

performing well on tests and that have nothing to do with their knowledge or mental abilities.

However, the educational system overlooks that because it was meant to act as a sorting

mechanism for the society; it wants to be able to decide which students are smart and which ones

are stupid based on a single test that will decide for them the rest of their destiny. Hence, it would

make more sense to treat and assess each student differently and based on the different factors

that may affect each one of them independently from the others.

The third significant issue that has resulted from this new act is the corruption of educators.

Many teachers have started teaching their students inappropriate ways to take exams in order to

boost their test grades. Students now have started attending school only to learn a superficial

approach of test taking that will prepare them to achieve high grades instead of developing deeper

knowledge and high level of critical thinking skills that will benefit them in their everyday life


once they leave school. According to a study published by Journal of Educational Technology &

Society, it was proved that children, who used the superficial approach of test taking, which

consists of skipping difficult parts, guessing a lot, copying answers down, achieved high scores

on standardized exams (Kiong L. 2011). Therefore, to guarantee that their students achieve high

scores on standardized test, teachers usually advice their students to skip the hard questions and

guess the rest which is completely an inappropriate approach to use while taking an exam. So,

why the US policy makers still consider standardized tests as an effective assessment tool for

learning?

Besides teaching inappropriate ways to take exams, other unethical and corrupted actions

were practiced by these educators. After facing a high pressure to ensure that their student score

high grades on their schools standardized tests, many teachers were found guilty of changing

their students answer sheets, inflating their grades and even guiding them during the exam.

(Kohn, 2000, p.80-110) So, is this really what schools are teaching our students? Standardized

exams were meant to demonstrate a students potential, but, in fact, all what these tests are doing

is creating future generations of liars and cheaters who had no idea what they were being taught.

Another drawback of this new act is the issue of curriculum narrowing. After this new

policy, many schools have limited instruction to tested material only. They felt pressure to

enforce a new unbalanced curriculum which is focused only on reading, writing, and math while

other important subjects that are not covered by standardized tests such as arts, music, physical

education, public speaking, laboratory experiments were either reduced or eliminated. These

schools were forced to do so due to the huge pressure imposed on them by this act to demonstrate

appropriate yearly improvements in reading and math. In 2006, a study done by the Center on

Education Policy to investigate this issue demonstrated that 71% of the US schools has reduced


the weekly hours spent by students on certain subjects of the schools curriculum such as arts,

music, history and physical education while, on the other hand, increased the weekly hours for

reading and mathematics. (Cawelti, 2006) So, what effects this school curriculum narrowing has

on students?

Curriculum narrowing had a significant impact on the students motivation to learn. One of

the professors at Columbia teachers College stated that "A student who is being thought only few

basic subjects at school can be imagined as a violin student who is only permitted to play scales,

nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. Hed lose his zest for music." (Kolodziej 2011)

Indeed, we can clearly conclude that narrowing the schools curriculum negatively affects

students by lowering their interest in what is being taught at school. But, is that it?

Besides losing their interest in what is being taught, school dropout rate has also increased.

According to a study done by Tyler and Lofstrom, it was found that Narrowing school

curriculum may have negative effects on the morale and motivation of the students as evidenced

by an ever-rising dropout rate in recent years (Tyler & Lofstrom, 2009). Hence, it is obvious that

the dropout rate highly correlates with the schools curriculum narrowing. This leads us again to

question ourselves what is the purpose of the NCLB act if schools dropout rates have

dramatically increased in recent years after this policy has been enforced?

In conclusion, although the No Child Left Behind act was meant to improve the

education of all students across America, it suffers from major flaws which make it worth serious

reconsideration by the US policy makers. Many major aspects reinforced or caused by this act

has gathered strong negative criticism including, the issue of standardized testing, corruption

inside schools, curriculum narrowing and students inability to apply what they learn in school to

real life. Indeed, standardized tests were proved to be a poor measurement for the students


learning and abilities; they encouraged corruption among students and their teachers, and affected

the students ability to apply concepts thought at school to real life situations. On the other hand,

pressure imposed on schools by this new act to demonstrate adequate improvements on reading

and maths standardized tests caused the issue of curriculum narrowing which was proved to hurt

students and even causes them to drop out of school. Given all these facts, we are now certain

that the future of the US education system is at stake. Hence, the US policy makers must consider

all the flaws of their NCLB policy and take serious actions to do something about it.


References

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The Negative Consequences of the NCLB Act

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The Negative Consequences of the “No Child Left Behind” Act