Leaving Behind “No Child Left Behind” Act
The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate passed a rewrite for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on Dec. 2 and Dec. 9 respectively, and it was signed into law by President Obama on Dec 10. The original bill, signed by President George W. Bush in early 2002, put education reform primarily in the hands of the federal government. The rewrite, titled “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA), will give state governments authority to fix their own struggling schools and significantly reduce federal involvement. The changes proposed by ESSA will be beneficial for Peninsula students and faculty, aligning the new standard of education closer to the goals of Peninsula teachers and staff members, as well as getting rid of a bill that did not further the best interests of well-performing schools.
Under ESSA, schools will be held accountable based on proficiency guidelines imposed by each individual state, as opposed to being measured by their yearly progress, which centered around students being able to pass federally-mandated tests. Furthermore, the Secretary of Education will be restricted from influencing state decision on issues such as teacher evaluations or Common Core standards. This, in turn, will shift the focus of education away from simply passing tests to actual learning and understanding of material taught. These new developments represent a step in the right direction in true equality of education.
“With the progress from the NCLB to ESSA, I genuinely believe we are heading in the right direction,” senior Rebecca Mu said. “We need to create [standards] that will actually be fair and reasonable.”
Through ESSA’s goal of moving standardized tests away from centralized education and emphasizing the learning process itself, teachers and students can focus more on the material at hand and less on test performance. In addition, ESSA terminates the rigid system that NCLB implemented to rate schools, allowing states to devise the guidelines themselves. This allows the state government to formulate proficiency criteria, potentially cutting back on the paperwork and testing that schools must currently complete to prove academic performance. Depending on the direction that California takes with the new bill, high schools like Peninsula may be able to exhibit its strengths outside of test scores.
“I have hopes the ESSA will truly reflect each school’s uniqueness, rather than the NCLB system that was very rigid in measuring success by performance on a test,” principal Mitzi Cress said.
NCLB was extremely outdated, did not do much to help failing schools and proved to be unfavorable for schools that were above the nation’s bottom five percent. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the gap between Caucasian students and minority students was significantly reduced following NCLB’s enactment, especially among elementary school students.
However, performance among students as a whole did not improve significantly. In fact, the average nine year old only increased his or her reading score by four points. In addition, schools that did receive significant financial help did not always progress. This comes at the expense of schools like Peninsula that often do not receive as much funding for school development. It is important for low income schools to receive the necessary funds to better their facilities and programs. At the same time however, NCLB may have distributed resources to schools unevenly in hopes of supporting struggling schools.
“While the idea of accountability and helping failing schools is certainly a good one, there was just too much money wasted, and not everyone got the funding that they needed,” Government teacher Don Frazier said.
