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Article:
Claims Made in Opposition to the NCLB Act
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Claims Made in Opposition to the NCLB Act
from...Wikipedia.org
* Supports early learning, an approach criticized in Better Late Than Early by Raymond and Dorothy Moore.
* Requires public secondary schools to provide military recruiters the same access to facilities as a school provides to higher education institution recruiters. Schools are also required to provide contact information for every student to the military if requested but students or parents can opt out of having their information shared.
* Organizations such as ACORN have criticized the unwillingness of the federal government to fully fund the act. While promoted by President Bush and applauded by both parties, neither the Senate nor the White House has requested funding up to the authorized levels for several programs such as Title I. Republicans in Congress have viewed these authorized levels as spending caps, not spending promises and have pointed out that President Clinton never requested the full amount of funding authorized under the previous ESEA law.
* Indicators of school performance are not accurate or viable.
* Testing is not coupled with plans and funding to remedy problems that might be detected by the testing. Instead, a system of increasing punishments is provided to take away resources from schools (i.e. from the students and employees of schools) which exhibit failing threshold scores.
* Although "local freedom" is advertised as a benefit of NCLB, school districts are free to choose one curriculum package from a federally developed list of about 6 products, and cannot use the funding for any other purpose. Thus, the main immediate effect of NCLB is to reinforce an oligopoly of large curriculum publishers. There is some public accusation of political cronyism in this result.
* Because schools, districts, and states are punished if they fail to make adequate progress according to the goals they themselves establish, the incentives are to set expectations lower rather than higher and to increase segregation by class and race and push low-performing students out of school altogether. The schools, districts, and states are also potentially set to game the system by manipulating which students are included or excluded from test-taking (to enhance apparent school performance) and by creative reclassification of drop-outs (to reduce unfavorable statistics).
* States and school districts should be granted greater freedom to target assistance to schools with the most extensive academic difficulties.
* After-school programs are neglected.
* NCLB is designed to set the stage for the eventual privatization of the U.S. public school system: reports about struggling schools sour public opinion and may cause more and more voters to question the viability of public education.
* NCLB violates conservative principles by federalizing education and setting a precedent for further erosion of state and local control. Libertarians and some conservatives believe that the federal government has no constitutional authority in education.
* NCLB is a covert flushing mechanism developed by Rod Paige to eliminate the Department of Education by requiring unreachable high standards to fail a disproportionate amount of schools and reduce the amount of federal funding handed out so that eventually the individual states would pay entirely for their school system and defederalize all education (which some might see as a good thing).
* Students with learning disabilities do not receive extra help when taking the standardized tests, and can jeopardize the assigned rating the entire school is given.
* Students who are learning English as a second language are expected to take the standardized tests and show proficiency equal to their English-speaking peers, when it is proven that English-Language-Learners take between 5 and 10 years to "catch up" to grade-level proficiency.
* Focus on improving the average student's education may ignore individual differences between students, and potentially harm both special and gifted education programs.
* NCLB focuses on basic educational classes and removes funding from music programs, art programs, etc. This results in schools being forced to remove elective and after school programs.
* NCLB places a focus on the standardized testing mandatory for each student, therefore forcing the educators to focus on points covered in testing rather than what they think is important for children to learn. Standardized tests can be irrelevant to students' developmental learning.
* "NCLB will cost school districts $1.491 billion annually representing an 11 percent increase over current total operating budgets. It was further determined that 97 percent of the costs associated with NCLB are unfunded with additional federal funding covering only $44 million of the nearly $1.5 billion in costs."
* While addressing the issue of "achievement gaps" (such as that between affluent and disadvantaged students) NCLB fails to address how possible "effort gaps" between the same groups affect the achievement gap. An effort gap can be attributed to such factors as hours of quality study time per week, diligence in completing homework assignments, attitude, discipline, and parental support.
* NCLB gives future teachers little creativity in the teaching process.
* Students with disabilities do not have the proper learning techniques because the standardized testing is over-stressed.
* Standardized testing, the measure by which the Act evaluates competency, has been historically accused of cultural bias.
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