No Child Left Behind

Today in my CEP 451 class (law of special education) we watched a video on No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I've always known the basics of it, how it uses standard testing to determine if schools are achieving to required expectations. Also if a school doesn't it gets taken over and radically overhauled. I've never talked to much about how it really affects schools. There is the concern that teachers will only "teach towards the test," and they could miss out on a lot of creative meaningful learning that a teacher would have provided them if they didn't have to worry about their scores on these standardized tests. In the video we watched there was a high performing school but they were so high they really couldn't improve each year, so they went from like a 90% to a  91 or 89% and were "outperformed" by a school that went from a 30% to a 40% (these numbers aren't accurate I didn't take notes). There isn't something quite right there if schools are up to be taken over by the national government if they don't meet expectations for 4 years or something like that. We haven't talked about it in the class yet so I still need more background information about it. Don't quote me on any of this because the video was very one-sided and I still need to delve deeper into this topic. NCLB is doing what it was meant to do, it is improving test scores and literacy proficiency all around the country but there are a lot of educators that are not big fans of it. I just felt like writing my reaction to the video, I will post more about it on another day.