The Effects Of The No Child Left Behind Act

Year after year students put themselves through large amounts of stress, attempts to prepare themselves mentally, and spend majority of their waking hours studying for standardized testing required through the No child left behind act (NCLB). An act put in place by the Bush Administration in hopes and efforts for student around the country to excel in education. However, the No Child Left behind Act is hindering a student’s ability to perform in the classroom rather than the student to excel as planned. Amongst other countries around the world, the United States performs significantly lower in education. Overall, the act had good intentions, but does it really raise achievement and close the achievement gap? Improving education has always been a top priority in the white house. Many laws have been passed but how many have succeed? NCLB is one of the biggest social engineering projects of our time, but shows very little progress in our children’s education. The No Child Left behind Act causes more of a negative outcome by being ineffective at achieving academic improvement, closing the education gap, limiting the teaching material for instructors, and causes a harmful repercussion on children and adolescents mentally and emotionally.

The No Child Left Behind act is the most recent restatement of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 put in place by President Johnson to assist with the War on Poverty campaign. Originally, the law was meant to improve educational equity to lower income families, which still remains today. However, since the bill was passed in 1965, it has been reauthorized several times. The most recent being January of 2002 with the “No Child Left behind Act.” Despite the numerous amount of changes the...

... middle of paper ...

...reating them as a handicap or a burden.

Conclusively, “No Child Left Behind” has done very little at closing the achievement gap, and did a better job at broadcasting it. It gave very little criteria for teachers to work with when attempting to educate students. And many teachers can agree that the practice test, and testing style of curriculum does not provide a meaningful education to children. Also, the rigorous strategy of teaching has been proven to be unproductive at closing the education gap. NCLB causes students to suffer mentally and emotionally, which could lead to long term affects such as dropping out of school. The law also isolates students by their race regardless of academic performance or upbringing. “No Child Left Behind” was a good attempt by the Bush Administration to improve education in American but did not turnout the way it was planned to.