President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law in 2002. The bipartisan act aimed to address decreasing performance and literacy in students. However, the reality of the act was “teaching to the test”, which diminished the curriculum, and led to declining school performance in children. The bill was the start of the government’s misplaced priorities in the classroom at the Federal level.
Earlier this year, the Senate Committee of Education reported the statistics; Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading. In other words, if a student is proficient in reading, the classmates sitting to their left and right likely are not. The US Center for Education Statistics found that, in Ohio, 80% of low-income and 48% of higher-income students are not proficient in elementary-level reading and writing. The United States also ranks 125th globally in terms of literacy rates. Despite this, the United States is consistently ranked as having the best education system in the world. So how can our education system be so renowned yet produce indifferent results in recent years? The answer lies in the classroom, where the government has fails to address important issues.
“Teaching to the test” is a common issue in the American education system where the state curriculum places most, if not all, emphasis on proficiency for standardized tests. This means it will not be taught if a topic is not included in the state’s curriculum. This issue also affects teachers, who feel immense pressure to get students to proficiency, causing all other material to be lost. This does not prepare students for high school, college, or life; It prepares them for their test in May. While these problems are very prominent with NCLB, claiming that it had no positive impact would be unfair. The main positive outcome of NCLB would be the federal standards for education it sets. Having standards at the federal level helped decrease the gap between test performance in individual states, and ensured each school would be educated equally. However, this alone has flaws, such as some states being disadvantaged prior to NCLB, which caused the children in those states to be pushed harder to meet the standards of more educated states.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), enacted by President Barack Obama in 2015, superseded NCLB and drastically helped reduce the issues caused by NCLB. ESSA placed most education standards in the hands of the states, while also increasing the emphasis on equity rather than equality, classroom engagement, and decreasing the number of standardized tests. While ESSA undoubtedly addressed NCLB, there has been no significant increase in student performance at the elementary level. The cause of this still lies in the federal government, despite ESSA giving education standards to the states.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of students in every grade have struggling after the two-year hiatus from standard schooling and testing. Despite this, the federal government has yet to make efforts to focus on students’ success post-pandemic while students struggle more than ever. On the other hand, efforts to ban material in schools including race, gender, and sexuality have increased along with politicians pushing for religious values to be taught in public schools. This demonstrates the misplaced priorities of federal officials, and that we must focus on the general education of students in core subjects to succeed in their lives and careers rather than standardized tests and basic comprehension.
