No Child Left Behind. Not only is it a mouthful to say, but it is also something few people fully understand. A lot of students also don’t understand how the law impacts them as an individual and as a student body.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a federal law that compels states to have requirements for reading and math. Its main goal is to improve student achievement. With NCLB, each state is allowed to pick its own test for their students to take (see Federal law allows states to choose student test). By 2014, the federal government expects every student to be declared proficient in reading and math.
Here’s how it works: students in every school across the country are tested during the fall and the spring. The tests are then sent to each state’s Department of Education. The Department of Education is responsible for sending the tests to the federal government.
Each school district then finds out whether or not their schools have passed and whether or not they have made adequate yearly progress (AYP). In Albert Lea, if a school in the district doesn’t make AYP for the year, a letter has to be sent home to the parents of students in that school informing them of that fact. Each year the AYP standards are raised.
“If a school doesn’t make its goals for two years in a row, parents are given the option to choose where they would like their student to attend school,” said Albert Lea superintendent Dr. Michael Funk.
Making AYP is dependent on something called subgroups. Every student in a school is placed into a subgroup; examples of subgroups include white, black, Asian, Hispanic, English language learners, special education students and those who qualify for free and/or reduced school lunches. If the scores in a subgroup are not where they should be, that subgroup is said to have not made AYP. If one subgroup in a school fails to reach AYP, the entire school fails to make AYP.
“NCLB gives a distorted picture because of student subgroups,” Funk said.
For example, in Albert Lea, there are a total of 385 subgroups tested. Of those, 374 subgroups reached AYP last year, which makes Albert Lea 97 percent proficient. However, because Albert Lea did not meet AYP in 11 subgroups, three schools in the district were not able to say they reached AYP.
So what happens if a school continues to not reach their AYP? The consequences are categorized by each consecutive year AYP is missed and get progressively more involved with each year that passes.
Currently, 50 percent of schools in Minnesota don’t make AYP each year.
“If a school remains on the list, the district offers supplemental services,” Funk said. “The district will give money to external organizations to get students extra help.”
This year the Albert Lea district had $27,000 to spend on supplemental services. One thing this money was spent on is a program called Viewpoint. Viewpoint tracks individual students and their test scores and shows teachers their strengths and weaknesses in reading and math; Viewpoint also shows teachers which areas students need to improve.
“The district is also placing considerable emphasis on reading and math,” Funk said. “In the elementary schools, students spend 90 minutes each day on reading and 90 minutes each day on math.”
This money also allows the district to have a testing coordinator whose job is to interact with the Minnesota Department of Education and to interact with the school principals about testing.
Another hidden cost the district must cover is if a student chooses to move from one school to another, the district is then responsible for bussing them to that school. For example, at the beginning of this school year, an increased number of students began attending Lakeview because Halverson and Hawthorne did not make AYP last year. So the district now pays additional money to bus them there.
While the intent behind No Child Left Behind might be to increase student achievement and to guarantee the United States remains competitive in the world, the program might not be headed in the direction the government hoped it might.
“If the government doesn’t change No Child Left Behind, they will have 100 percent of schools failing by 2014,” Funk said. “It has to change.”