Education System Pros And Cons

While it is true that NCLB “created the nation’s first reform-minded federal regulatory regime in education, this regulatory system still left a great deal of power and flexibility to the states; it was up to the states to develop proficiency standards and accountability programs to ensure that all students had access to a quality education. As established in the previous section, it was not until President Obama’s waiver system was put into place that strong opposition to federal intrusion under this law began. The component of the plan which created the most difficulties for the states, and for which they sought relief under the waiver program, was the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement; under this requirement, states needed to set proficiency benchmarks which would guarantee that students were on track to reach 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by the year 2014. As with many new policies whose goal is to make sweeping reforms, the regulatory scheme of NCLB had unintended consequences for the students it sought to help, namely students in high-poverty high-minority school districts. In order to hold schools accountable under NCLB, states chose to use the status achievement model. This model of accountability, coupled with the state 's’ creation of uneven proficiency standards essentially halted student gains in reading, particularly for students in low-income and minority districts. While the regulatory system set out in NCLB had many flaws, it attempted to do the unprecedented; it attempted to create a system of accountability for schools and states. In performing this unprecedented task, NCLB highlighted even more starkly the achievement gaps which did exist, and how the failure of the public education system contributed to these continually intractable gaps. While NCLB had the wrong approach to correcting these failures - harsh punishments for those who failed to make the arbitrary AYP goals set by the states, it did help to identify schools which had a long-running track record of failing to educate students adequately. In their zeal to get rid of President Obama’s educational initiatives, the proponents of ESSA got rid of a system which, with the right reform, might have made significant improvements to the American education system. This section will thus highlight some of the reforms that might have been made to improve NCLB and demonstrate how ESSA failed to make these necessary reforms. In a 2010 report, Stecher et al. analyzed two longitudinal studies which had been performed by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation on the implementation of NCLB; from a meta-analysis of these reports, they released several recommendations for the reauthorization of NCLB. Based on the evidence, Stetcher et. al found that while NCLB had succeeded in establishing an infrastructure for accountability, they determined that “the flexibility provided to states by the law has resulted in the establishment of 52 different accountability systems…each with different academic standards, levels of student proficiency, and requirements for teachers.” Given this outcome, Stetcher et al. recommended, among other things, that Congress “promote more uniform standards…promote more uniform teacher requirements…[and] set …show more content…
ESSA does add that schools should also be measured according to English Language Learner (ELL) proficiency, one other academic standard, and one non-academic standard. These new measures are a slight improvement over NCLB, but they are far too vague and ill-defined to qualify as the ‘world-class’ standards recommended by researchers such as Darling-Hammond. Schools need to be subject to much more robust and comprehensive standards than standardized tests, graduation rates (which are generally used as the other “academic standard”), and an unspecific ‘non-academic’ …show more content…
While ESSA does also stipulate that states must have “college and career” standards, it does very little to outline what those are — in the name, of course, of state and local control of education. It is well established in the literature on NCLB that when the states were given the freedom to create their own definition of what constituted ‘proficiency,’ the result was very uneven definitions that led to wide discrepancies between states. When evaluating the potential efficacy of ESSA, the state 's’ overwhelming failure under NCLB to come up with robust definitions of proficiency seems likely to repeat itself; only, in this instance, it will be under the guise of ‘college and career-based