On Education: No Child Left Behind and the Debate in Educational ...

Via EducationalPsychology.net, an interesting article by Hanna Lindstrom:?No Child Left Behind and the Debate in Educational Psychology. Click through for the full article and some good links. Excerpt

The No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001 with much bipartisan fanfare. This widespread, federally mandated education reform was designed to hold schools accountable for improvement, assure that students meet basic learning requirements, and improve teacher qualifications. In 2011, after it became evident that a large percentage of schools in some states were failing to meet the mandate, changes were made that gave certain school districts more flexibility in implementing the policy.?

One of the most important and highly controversial provisions of the original No Child Left Behind Act was the use of annual standardized tests to measure school performance. The debate over the effectiveness of these tests as a fair gauge of school achievement is fierce, with proponents arguing that standardized tests are the fairest way to compare schools across the board, and opponents claiming that the tests don?t tell the whole story of how a school is performing and improving.?

Teachers, in particular, are often critical of standardized tests for a variety of reasons: they only measure one aspect of a student?s performance; they force the teaching of specific test-related skills, leaving little classroom time for other tasks; and they might be biased against minorities and the poor, putting already low-achieving schools at a disadvantage.?

Because of their interest in determining how children learn best and how educators can best serve students, educational psychologists have also been a part of the discussion around No Child Left Behind and specifically the standardized test issue. From an educational psychology perspective, standardized tests ? which are based on more traditional forms of IQ assessment ? paint an incomplete picture of human intelligence and have little correlation with future performance in school and in life.

Source: http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/education/2012/03/no-child-left-behind-and-the-debate-in-educational-psychology.html

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