Obama on No Child Left Behind

There have been a number of criticisms of NCLB over the years:

“I think the major flaw with NCLB is that they treat all schools as equal,” says Adam Thibault, Policy Director for Strong American Schools, a nonpartisan public awareness and advocacy organization. “Schools are not given credit for making incremental improvements, and I think there has to be more flexibility within the system.”

Obama addresses this concern by suggesting a system that evaluates continuous progress along the learning continuum. This would mean using assessments for schools, teachers, and students that take into account their starting point as well as their resources.

Another criticism has been the emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing as a means of measuring student learning. Many believe that since NCLB, teachers have become overly focused on the testing rather than student learning. “It’s unfortunate,” Reed says. “NCLB has emphasized a deficit approach to teaching and learning rather than building and celebrating successes.”

Obama’s plan clearly states his belief that schools should be supported to improve, as opposed to focusing on punishments.

Reed is also concerned with the superficial nature of what standardized tests ask students. “I think we should be using authentic assessment practices,” Reed says. “End-of-year assessments could be developed where you look for opportunities to see how young people used their knowledge in meaningful ways.”

Obama has said that teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to “fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” He says he will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college.

Chavez would like to see a reevaluation of teacher qualification—specifically, what it means for a teacher to be highly qualified. Chavez doesn’t believe teacher education programs are necessarily the best way to train a teacher; having people who have a demonstrated proficiency in the subject that they’re going to teach, she says, is vital. “I think we need to be open to thinking more creatively and getting experienced professionals who want to be in the classroom and who want to share their expertise,” says Chavez. “I’m 61 years old, and I might know a great deal about constitutional law and American History, but if I wanted to teach part-time in the public school system after I retired, I couldn’t begin to do that.”

Obama’s Teaching Service Scholarship program will prioritize recruiting math, science, and technology degree graduates, and his Teacher Residency Program can place trained subject matter experts in high-need districts. Obama points to New York’s Math for America as an example of a successful program that “helps to build a community of excellent teachers to serve in high-needs areas.” Though the details of Obama’s teacher scholarship and residency programs are yet-to-be-seen, it is clear Obama has plans to recruit teachers who are not on the standard teacher education program track.

In 2006, the American Federation of Teacher’s (AFT) recommendations to improve NCLB focused on the following four areas:

• Assessment and Accountability
• School Improvement Interventions
• Staffing Schools
• Funding and Systemwide Accountability

How many of these recommended improvements will be made is unknown. “NCLB is mostly going to play out in Congress,” Thibault says. “People had hoped it would be at the top of the agenda, but obviously with the economic meltdown, it slid down the agenda.”

Necessary reforms aside, NCLB has had some positive outcomes. “It certainly raised the level of public awareness and opened the doors for a lot of healthy dialogue about what needs to happen in public education,” Reed says. “The recognition at the national level that there are inequities in the educational opportunities was incredibly important.”

It’s critical, Reed says, to recognize that all children can learn and to have some kind of accountability measure to require that we separate data pertaining to student learning. “With some major tweaking and shuffling of the procedures to support the priorities, NCLB could be a good foundation,” Reed says. “Especially in light of its bipartisan support.”

Chavez agrees that though NCLB has not been entirely successful, it represents progress in the right direction. “All you have to do is look at the data to see that there have already been a lot of improvements,” Chavez says.

And parents and educators across the country will no doubt be waiting anxiously to find out the future of this legislation.

What are Obama's other plans for education? Check out Obama on College Funding, Obama on Early Childhood Education, Obama on School Choice, Obama on Math, Science, and Tech Education, and Obama on Teacher Recruitment and Retention.