The Globe America and the World | Page 61

works cited HERE

The Problem with the NCLB

In The Atlantic, Marc Tucker, the president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, suggested that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) “significantly affected how U.S. public-school teachers perceived their level of autonomy.”

According to Tucker, NCLB embodied the first concentrated effort by officials in the United States to hold teachers accountable for student performance on a wide-scale.

Given the significant investment in education programs that served America’s underprivileged children, Tucker explained that U.S. policymakers had grown exasperated by evidence of mediocre student achievement on nationwide assessments. Under the NCLB, America’s public schools needed to make adequate yearly progress, decided in large part by student performance on state standardized tests.

For U.S. officials like George W. Bush, this kind of test-based accountability could be framed as a simple effort to give all of the nation’s children access to decent schools with quality teachers.

But it has fallen short and increases teacher burnout.

“I have been very tired—more tired and confused than I have ever been in my life. I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”

-Kristiina Chartouni

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