Feb
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Changes to "No Child Left Behind" will emphasize learning, not test scores
February 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The Obama administration has taken a full year to formulate its education strategy and teachers believe it was worth the wait. The cornerstone of the changes will be to remove the focus on test scores that was central to the “No Child Left Behind” policy.
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, says the new policy will “focus on the student and not some arbitrary, high-stakes test score. As if you could reduce a student to a test score. You can’t.”
Under the current “No Child Left Behind” law, federal education policy will deny funding to schools that do not meet benchmarks for the number of students passing state-mandated tests, known as the AYP. Educators complained that the policy required a “teaching to the test” mentality. It also penalized school districts that had a disproprionate number of low-scoring students. In some states, the number of schools failing to meet the AYP standard was over 20 percent.
The new policies are not yet established. The Education Department is circulating its ideas and will need to get Congressional approval before the changes become law.