Obama Calls for Major Change in NCLB

In a New York Times article published on March 13th entitled, “Obama Calls for Major Change in Education Law”, Sam Dillon reports that the Obama administration is calling for a “broad” overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law that encouraged teachers to teach to tests and hue to a narrowed curriculum for their students. While advocating to retain requirements for annual reading and math tests that were passed down by No Child Left Behind Law, the administration would like to replace the pass-fail grading system with one that would measure a school’s performance by a combination of test scores, pupil attendance, graduation rates, and school climate. While the Federal government would call for more vigorous interventions in failing schools, it would also choose to lessen federal interference in well-run schools.

In the end, instead of requiring every child to reach proficiency in both math and reading, the Obama Administration is setting a new national target: that all students will graduate from high school college and career ready by 2020. By taking away the current focus on using standardized test scores to judge school performance, Arne Duncan and President Obama hope that teachers will no longer be concerned with having to dumb down the curriculum and focus instruction on test preparation in order to make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP).

While I can see the logic behind how the Obama Administration wishes to take away the severe pressures on schools for having to meet AYP each year, I am still not certain how the federal and state governments will be able to specify, objectively, how schools have achieved “college-readiness” for each student. In order to measure whether schools are graduating students who are “college ready”, it seems to me that there necessarily must be some kind of testing or data collecting involved in objectively assessing school performance. At first glance, its seems what the Obama administration is doing is giving another name, “college readiness”, to the current goal of leaving “no child left behind”, and in the end simply pushing back the date of completion from 2013 to 2020.