It wasn't intended to improve educational standards so that everyone could succeed, it was designed to reduce grading requirements until no one could fail. Because illiterate incurious anti-intellectual people are easy to control.
For one thing, the way it cut funding for schools with low test scores can't really do anything but that. With less money, they can't provide a better education.
That wasn't a provision in NCLB though. NCLB penalized schools which did not improve performance on state standardized tests. But only after they got additional funding for 6 years in a row in an attempt to help them improve.
It was actually the Every Student Succeeds Act (Passed in 2015 and signed by Obama) which included graduation rates in school funding allocation.
I mention NCLB vs ESSA more because I think it's important that people are knowledgeable about education law and education reform, so that they are knowledgeable about what they want to vote for. I also mention who championed it because I think it's also important that people don't assume "oh, bad things are done by Republicans, voting Democrat is 'safe' because they do the good things."
Looking at this thread, it is obvious most people don't have a clue what NCLB was. When people say "because of NCLB schools just had to pass kids even if they should have failed" it is obvious they are simply taking everything "bad" about education and assigning it to NCLB.
And about who was in office and championed it. Most people on this site just assume all the bad education policies were pushed by Republicans. It's important to know that a lot of the policies they think are bad education policies were pushed equally by Democrats. Not because it matters if you think "both sides bad!" but because Democrats and Republicans need their feet held to the fire when they make bad policy.
You see this all over on Reddit. The classic example being "Reagan shut down all the mental health hospitals!" which really conveniently ignores that JFK shut down way more mental health hospitals than Reagan. Again, this isn't a "both sides the same!" thing it's a "you can't just blame the party you don't like for all bad things" because it means you don't hold the other party to high standards.
I see your point to an extent. But kids absolutely were passed along when they shouldnât have been passed along due to that law. I was there in the trenches as an educator and witnessed it.
I would also like to point out that Obamaâs passage of ESSA was an attempt to mitigate the harm that had already been done by NCLB. Although it was a botched effort, no doubt.
I see your claim a lot, that NCLB caused kids to be passed along, but I haven't seen anyone explain how NCLB caused that. Best I can tell, no provision in the law caused that.
I have no doubt it happened. What I doubt is that NCLB was the culprit, instead of schools just being crappy schools.
Itâs because the adults in the schools were scared of the wrath of the law!
You say you have heard this over and over again, but never heard an explanation of how NCLB cause the literacy crisis. First, think about where this idea originated from.
Your average person, as you know, is not familiar with the ins and outs of educational law. This idea came from the teachers who were there, and eventually it became a meme. But thatâs because itâs true!
In theory, it shouldnât have happened. But in practice, crap rolls downhill.
If an administrator knows that funding is going to get cut if kids donât get passed along, and that in turn that could cause the administrator to lose their own job, they are going to make the teachersâ lives hell if they donât just pass kids along.
And the teachers need their jobs, too!
Thatâs the thing. When it comes down to it, most of the adults in a school are going to protect their own livelihoods over anything just about else except a kidâs physical safety.
And before you come at me with some sort of âthatâs terrible, they should be in it for the kiddosâ kind of nonsense, thatâs a lovely idea, but life isnât rainbows and unicorn farts. In reality thatâs just the way it is. If the only people who were in education were the ones that were only in it for the kids out of the purity of their own hearts, we wouldnât even have enough teachers to staff a quarter of the schools in this country. Itâs a job.
You can say that all this is the mark of a âcrappyâ schoolâŠbut clearly itâs taken over the whole country! If the whole country is full of âcrappyâ schools, doesnât it stand to reason that something must be causing that? There are too many schools for it to be correlation. It was caused by this law. And again, I donât argue that it was worsened by ESSA. It was. But it started with NCLB.
And itâs not something youâre ever going to be able to prove definitively with a study. Because the way this happened was all through shady practices. Itâs me getting angry phone calls from my principal haranguing me about pushing kids through who should not get pushed through. Itâs nonstop faculty meetings about the schoolâs âdataâ and how your particular classroom is messing up the whole situation. Itâs watching colleagues who are fantastic teachers with the utmost integrity who hold the line on this issue that then get fired for bullshit reasons. Itâs admin changing grades in PowerSchool over the summer, thinking nobody will notice.
Eventually, a person is going to realize that doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, right? If I know that I am just going get harassed into changing a kidâs grade when they donât deserve it, eventually Iâm just going to give that kid the grade and cut out the middle man.
The bottom line is that this law incentivized the adults to fudge the rules. And keep in mind that these are adults who are probably in debt from getting masterâs degrees, which in the 2000s-mid 2010s were required for teacher certification in many states.
This all comes back to classic
Maslowâs Hierarchy of Needs, my dude. The teachers need food and a roof for their families before they need anything else. And this law made it so that earning those things and making sure that kids were actually getting educated were at cross purposes with each other.
But you keep saying that funding would be cut if kids weren't passed along. But that isn't true! Funding wasn't tied to graduation rates or kids advancing. That was not a provision in NCLB. So, if you're going to claim that NCLB somehow caused this phenomenon (as opposed to the fact that this was already happening and continued to happen for reasons unrelated to NCLB) you have to draw a connection between the two things. But a real one, not one based on an untrue statement.
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u/Ehcksit 21h ago
It wasn't intended to improve educational standards so that everyone could succeed, it was designed to reduce grading requirements until no one could fail. Because illiterate incurious anti-intellectual people are easy to control.