Blogs:

In order to prepare our minority and poor children to survive in the highly competitive world, improved schools were promised to them by the NCLB or No Child Left Behind law. This program was extremely hyped and was considered to be a significant accomplishment of President George W. Bush.

After a decade, today, the program is a symbol of the inability of Congress to correct something that is flawed. This law emphasized on labeling schools as failures based on standardized tests. Schools were made to confront the reality that many children were actually not learning.

Into its tenth year, NCLB has constantly been under attack by critics who feel that this rigid law places unrealistic expectations on students through its emphasis on math and reading rather than focusing on a well rounded approach.  

A temporary fix was offered by the Obama administration who said that waivers would be offered to states from certain undesirable proficiency requirements if they would opt for actions favored by his government. Many states reached out for this option waiting patiently for action by lawmakers.

NCLB is also under criticism by other Republican presidential candidates including Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania senator. He went on record saying that he regretted voting for it. Ten years ago, an uncommon stance was taken by President Bush in a bid to push districts and states to tackle huge gaps in achievements.

When the legislation was signed, President Bush said that poor performance cannot be hidden any more. He also said that the practice of keeping results from parents will no longer be accepted.

He said that a lot of time, energy, resources and incentives will be allocated to poorly performing schools to help them correct their problems. Through annual testing, data is required to be published by districts that will help gauge the performance of student subgroups.

Annual testing was indeed an eye opener as it pulled up schools that hitherto claimed to be performing well while they most certainly were not. This situation led to a lot of embarrassment, disappointment and anger.

All of a sudden, a lot of attention was being paid and schools could no longer afford to forego assigning homework. Principals and teachers in many schools started viewing this program with a lot of skepticism and criticized NCLB saying that factors used to judge them were unfair and out of their control.

Academic success of this law is debatable. Fourth and eighth graders have benefited from significant gain in math as shown by national assessment scores. Even as these gains were recognized and accepted by experts, they have plateaued over years.

When it comes to reading, experts feel that no significant gain was seen as progress was higher before the law was passed. 2014 is NCLB deadline and there are many schools yet to meet the federal standards.

Educators today are increasingly looking at other factors such as evaluating teachers through student performance, online learning, common core standards and Race to the Top competition. There is no doubt that it is time to fix No Child Left Behind based on realistic goals.