No Child Left Behind: New Issues in Education

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In January of 2002, President Bush signed a landmark piece of legislation into law, referred to as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. This legislation was intended to ensure that every child complete the first several years of school with the required reading skills to successfully negotiate the increasingly complex curriculum from grades 4 through 12 (Simpson, LaCava, & Graner, 2004; Yell, Katsiyannas, & Shiner, 2006). The legislation requires states to implement a statewide plan for reading instruction, based on research-proven reading instructional principles, to ensure that no child is left behind in reading prior to grade 3.

With the passage of No Child Left Behind, a variety of issues have arisen that impact educators, generally, and special educators, in particular. These include, at a minimum, the issue of high-stakes assessment, meeting adequate yearly progress (often called AYP; Yell et al., 2006) toward achieving statewide educational goals, and the issue of the qualifications of teachers themselves—namely, the "highly qualified" teacher. These issues have been hotly debated among educators and likely will continue to be critical issues for teachers in the years to come.

High-Stakes Testing

While various state assessments have always been part of the education scene, only as recently as 1997 did federal legislation mandate that students with disabilities were to be included in statewide assessment programs (Kohl, McLaughlin, & Nagel, 2006). Such a mandate resulted from the worthy goal of ensuring that students with disabilities can participate in the benefits derived from studying the general education curriculum; thus, this mandate was a part of the broader national move toward inclusion.

More recently, the No Child Left Behind legislation has mandated that states develop a series of high educational standards and institute appropriate required assessments to document that students are meeting these standards (Elliott & Marquart, 2004; Fletcher et al., 2006; Ysseldyke et al., 2004). In essence, the federal legislation requires states to administer assessments periodically and to ensure that all students—and, in particular, various subgroups of students within the schools, such as racial minorities or students with -disabilities—are achieving success toward learning the standards in the school curriculum. This was the origin of the title for this legislation—no child should be left behind in reading during the early grades.

Whereas NCLB only dealt with assessment in the elementary grades (Yell et al., 2006), this emphasis on assessment has revitalized the entire "assessment for accountability" issue. In many states, passage from grade to grade, or even graduation from high school, may be associated with successful completion of the required assessments in various grade levels. Thus, some of these assessments have high stakes (i.e., serious effects and implications) for various learners, including students with disabilities. Of course, accommodations for various disabilities are allowed under the guidelines; for example, many practitioners allow extra time as one accommodation for students with learning disabilities (Elliott & Marquart, 2004; Kohl et al., 2006).