The Disastrous Impacts of NCLB

In a recent Op-Ed piece published in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, teacher Dan Brown reveals how the standardized testing associated with NCLB can actually have disastrous consequences for kids. Brown is the author of “The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle” and is deemed a young man certain to help make policy changes in the educational arena.

His brief tales of Manolo, Sara and Eddie represent the great challenges that inner city schools face. They are three children from distinctly different worlds, two who cannot seem to meet the standards set forth under NCLB and one for which the school has no program to challenge the fourth grader’s superb intellect.

Manolo has already repeated one grade, second, the year his mother died. Brown describes him as an imaginative writer with terrible spelling and mechanics. Angry at the world that had taken his mom, Manolo now faces a system that labels him a school failure.

Brown describes Sara as way ahead of her peers. According to Brown, “She wrote hilarious, irreverent poetry and had already mastered grade-level math. She fired off endless questions about current events.” Then the crusher, “The administrators at my school discouraged creative lesson planning in order to cram in endless “drill-and-kill” packets of basic skills test-taking strategies.”

Then there is Eddie who is in his fourth year in fourth grade. His attendance is a major issue and he cannot pass the standardized tests. Try as he may, Brown cannot seem to engage him in class. The teacher notes that Eddie has a particular talent when it comes to drawing, even if the child sees no art programming because the class needs to allot more time for standardized test preparation.

Brown paints a sorry picture of what NCLB is foisting upon this school. He also notes that “nearly six years into the No Child Left Behind era, American public schools have more money than ever, but students are still widely denied the most crucial tools for their success: individual attention and specialized support.”

Instead, Brown insists that “the resources that my students badly needed were being spent elsewhere; the money was going into high-stakes testing.”

Brown then backs up his concerns with a recent report by the Center on Education Policy that states 44 percent of schools have reduced instructional time in untested subjects (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch, and/or recess) since the implementation of NCLB.

His conclusion, “we have taken our eye off the ball on what is most important in schools - students’ needs.”

For more on Brown visit his blog site (note: photos are from Brown’s online site).