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The subject of No Child Left Behind will frequently be one that affects our everyday teaching as well as the lives of our students. Since the act was formally passed five years ago, several have studied student performance and the affects from the changes that have been made as well as the development of any further improvement from district to district across the country. Many seem opposed to having to change their teaching styles to accommodate a standardized test. In addition, several people feel that NCLB takes away from other aspects of a student’s education, such as fine arts while causing them to not have time for their own lives. This article which was located on CNN.com closely examines one student’s individual grasp on preparing for the test and how it affects her day-to-day life in school and in general.

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — Natashia Ector starts the last class of the day with her head on her desk.

After two bus rides, a train ride, five classes and a lunch period spent doing homework, the 17-year-old high school sophomore quickly takes her math teacher up on the offer of two minutes of quiet.

But the calm doesn’t last, the classroom perks back up and the work begins anew.

There is no time to waste at the Boston Community Leadership Academy, where the teachers and 10th-graders have mere months left to prepare for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. The exam will determine which sophomores can graduate and whether the school is meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which mandates that all children be proficient in math and English by 2014.

Last year, more than 90 percent of the schools’ students — nearly all black or Hispanic — passed both the math and English portions of the exam on their first try.

Minority sophomores statewide have shown steady improvement over the past five years, making Massachusetts a leader in addressing one of education’s most stubborn and urgent problems: the achievement gap between white and minority students on standardized tests.

In a typical day for Natashia, it seems everything is colored by the all-important exam.

“Nobody knows what we’re going through,” she says, “unless they’ve come to school.”

After No Child Left Behind became law, states scrambled to comply by creating new tests and standards, said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive officer of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group that advocates for public education. Others reduced existing standards to make it easier for students to meet them, which is allowed by NCLB.

But Massachusetts — already several years into its own reform plan — did neither.

When the state Legislature passed the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, it created the MCAS test, established the 10th-grade exam as a graduation requirement beginning with the class of 2003 and demanded the creation of high standards for teachers and students.

In exchange, the Legislature promised more funding; it has pumped more than $19 billion in additional money over the past decade-plus into education.

In most schools districts, several teachers are having to only change their individual curriculum in order to ensure that their students will be able to perform on annual standardized testing, but in this particular area of Boston it has become a graduation requirement and as earlier stated, has provided this school system with an enormous amount of funding. Though I feel that NCLB may do quite a bit to improve the effiency of students not only in the white demographic but the minorities as well, I’m still not entirely sure of whether this act provides students with the skills they should acquire before they go on to higher learning experiences. Reading about this student in the tenth grade named Natashia has made me consider my own doubts about how it affects student performance and understanding.

For those that have questioned whether or not NCLB removes students from other areas of learning, this article shows how a student of minority which this act concentrates on, is able to take on many different activites including dance and drama. In relative to what we have been discussing in class recently, Natashia’s teachers concentrate mostly reading comprehension which is largely tested on but still have the opportunity of giving lessons in other subjects such as drama. For “The Crucible” students were to analyze a character by comparing to a celebrity similar qualities and how they each would fulfill the role. Which consequently encourages reading comprehension through a better understanding of the characters. In relation to our own discussions, I think that mixing both the curriculum involving NCLB with a more meta-cognitive learning curriculum is possible but more difficult, and therefore calls for some improvements because as Natashia says,”Nobody knows what we’re going through, unless they’ve come to school.”

Her English teachers, Beth Noell and Frank Pantano, barely mention the exam directly, but their emphasis this class is on reading comprehension, a major skill needed to pass.

For the period, the students talk about the characters in “The Crucible,” putting them in different categories, speculating on their motives and discussing their fatal flaws.

The four-act play should take the class about four weeks to finish. Maybe that’s a little long, Pantano says, but “I want them to go in depth and understand.”

So it seems that regardless of this test that students are being required to pass in order to graduate, teachers at this school are still taking the time within the limits of their curriculum to not only teach a deeper understanding of reading and writing, but skills that will enable them in any further assessments, such as a standardized test.

One teen’s struggles preparing for standardized test

Complete Article

January 29, 2007

CNN.com