Has No Child Left Behind Improved Public Education?

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Instead of focusing on critical thinking skills, and the development of creative and well-rounded individuals, schools under the threat of NCLB sanctions are ‘drill and kill’ test prep factories. Students are placed in boring and endlessly repetitive remedial classes and are denied the opportunity to express themselves and become critical thinkers. The single-minded focus on testing drains all the joy out of education and turns learning into a tedious, thankless chore. NCLB’s requirement for “scientific” teaching methods has spawned counterproductive fads such as “scripted teaching’ which literally requires the teacher to follow a minute-by-minute script in the classroom that allows for no spontaneous dialogue between the students and their teacher. Engaging students in the learning process requires giving them a say in what they learn and how they learn it. It requires giving students an opportunity to develop their strengths and explore their interests. In strictly disciplined, rule-bound schools with test-driven curricula, this cannot occur.

NCLB imposes harsh sanctions on schools based on s tandardized test results. Schools that do not achieve the required scores that show “Annual Yearly Progress” (AYP) are punished with consequences ranging from the deprivation of federal funding, to the imposition of private management companies to run schools, to forced school closures. School administrators are under so much pressure to raise their scores to prevent such draconian measures that widespread incidences of cheating have been discovered. These sanctions are attacks on public education, not ways of strengthening our public schools.