In our last article in this series, we discussed how suburban and urban schools differ when it comes to how students receive and utilize knowledge.
School are drastically different everywhere, which raises the question “How do we know that our students are all learning the same thing?” It’s difficult enough for students across the same school to get the same education, let alone the state or nation.
This week, we’ll tackle setting the education standard in the U.S., and Obama’s newest effort, the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Fail of No Child Left Behind
In 2001, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which replaced the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, enacted by Lyndon Johnson. NCLB offered up a slew of standardized testing, requiring schools to put their students’ knowledge to the test across the nation. The response to the law was overwhelmingly negative, with many teachers claiming that the act took away teaching for the sake of actual knowledge and instead focused on teaching directly for a test.
So where did NCLB go wrong? Well, everywhere, actually. The testing created high stakes for schools, offering no help if the schools could not make their students proficient by 2014. The worse the students did, the less funding the school would get. NCLB actually tripled the number of tests students were federally mandated to take, causing stress not only on the side of the students, but of the teachers. If teachers didn’t have enough class time to actually teach everything that was on the tests, how were their students supposed to do well?
This testing riff also caused many of the liberal school subjects (like art, social studies and music) to be taken out of schools so students could focus more on their academics (what NCLB deemed important) instead of wasting time on creativity.
NCLB also required every student in America to be proficient in all subjects by the year 2014; 12 years after the law was introduced. Did this happen? Of course not. NCLB failed again and again, but was never really looked at until after 2014, when the results came back extraordinarily negative on the side of proficiency.
Introducing the Every Student Succeeds Act
The Obama administration worked hard to find a way to replace NCLB for years, and finally, in late 2015, the Senate finally voted to replace the law with the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Every Student Succeeds Act wants to do away with NCLB’s “one size fits all” approach, understanding that every student is different and every student needs differentiated success criteria in order to achieve the highest level of success in school. The law, much like its predecessors, wants to close the achievement act and have every child succeed. Fitting title, huh?
With ESS, the weeks where every student in the state and country has to take a standardized test will cease to exist. Tests can be broken down into smaller, more manageable assessments that are still based on standards. The law also allows states to utilize the Common Core State Standards without requiring them.
What is a Common Core?
The Common Core State Standards Initiative planned to create a goal-line for all students across the nation in both English Language Arts and Mathematics. CCSS is geared toward having students enter college in either a two-year Associate’s or four-year Bachelor’s degree program.
States are able to take these standards and adopt them along with their own to create their own sort of success criteria for their students. Colorado does this, for instance, utilizing the CCSS for all school curricula. Each teacher bases their plans on these standards in hopes that each student will reach them by the time that they graduate.
Our View
As we understand from last week’s article on suburban and urban education, there is still an achievement gap that exists across the nation. Since 1965, the Department of Education has been trying to close that gap, and with every law passed and standard met, we get that much closer. Will ESS and CCSSI finally close the gap once and for all? Probably not, but it is one important step closer to successful education system in the U.S.
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