No Child Left Behind: a study in unintended consequences

Emily McKinney — Thu, 23 May 2019 05:00:52 +0000

President George W. Bush signs the “No Child Left Behind” act in 2002 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In 2001, the United States government responded to the apparent lack of quality education in the country by passing Public Law 107 – 110, also known as “No Child Left Behind”. Its purpose was “to improve educational achievement by assessing student progress through standardized testing, mandating curricular reforms, and improving teacher quality” (Mangual Figueroa, 2013, p. 333). Section 3202 of the law states that Limited English Proficient (LEP) students should be able to “meet the same rigorous standards for academic achievement as all children are expected to meet, including meeting challenging State academic content and student academic achievement standards” (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2002, p. 283). While the intentions seemed honorable, unfortunately the policy neglected to recognize relevant second language acquisition research into how the needs of emergent bilinguals may differ considerably from the needs of mainstream students.

The “No Child Left Behind” educational policy arose during the George W. Bush administration in the United States as a piece of legislation aimed at improving low achieving schools across the country. After continued reports of poor test scores from students across the country compared to other countries around the world, the United States developed an educational policy that was supposed to encourage and incentivize schools to revise their instructional methods so as to promote higher tests scores. Initially, this might sound beneficial for all students, but the policy failed to acknowledge students’ diverse language backgrounds.

How did the policy affect English language learners?

Researchers in the field of TESOL were frustrated with the lack of attention the NCLB policy paid to evidence for the amount of time it takes students to learn a language and the specific needs of students learning such language that will be used for instruction and assessment. NCLB completely neglected the research on how it can take four to seven years for students to acquire an English proficiency sufficient for academic performance that will truly reflect their knowledge (Crawford, 2004).

NCLB’s focus on accountability disrupted ESL classrooms because teachers and school administrators were financially pressured into valuing test preparation over communicative skills building. As schools were expected to show growth and improvement in scores each year, ESL students were not given enough time to cultivate an understanding of the English language sufficient to demonstrate their content knowledge.

How did the policy affect ESL teachers?

A second unintended outcome of the NCLB policy affected teachers of English language learners. Within the NCLB Act, there was a section that discussed the necessary qualifications required for teachers. However, it only focused on the teachers of “core academic subjects” defined as “English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography” (NCLB, 2002, p. 534).

In other words, the policy overlooked the same requirements for ESL teachers, even though the policy is supposed to serve English language learners in particular.

The idea was that improved teacher qualifications would increase the overall quality of education that all students receive, including those with limited English language proficiency. Unfortunately, “this failure to acknowledge ESL as a subject in which teachers must be highly qualified effectively denies its value and status as curriculum ‘content’ and reinforces the common assumption that teaching English language learners requires little more than a set of pedagogical modifications applied to other content areas” (Harper, De Jong, & Platt, 2008, p. 271).

How did the policy affect bilingual programs?

Yet another unintended consequence of the NCLB policy was that support that had previously been in place for bilingual language programs diminished after the passage of the act. Whereas previous improvements to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) included explicit support for bilingual education, the 2002 document hardly mentioned it. That means that with the introduction of NCLB, English language learners were cut off from explicit support for developing their native language as well as English.

This flies in the face of the agreement among linguists and educators that “development and maintenance of a child’s first language is critically important to his or her psychological, linguistic, and cognitive well-being” (Cummins and Swain, 1986, p. 97).

The root of the problem here was that NCLB placed such a high level of pressure to succeed on the tests given in English that schools and teachers were discouraged from helping students develop their native language. Again, even though the language within the act suggests flexibility and inclusion, the emphasis on accountability throughout the document severely limited the attention that could be given to individual students and their specific needs.

Deficit views and unintended consequences

NCLB obviously places little or no importance on multiculturalism and multilingualism as resources for the classroom and for the nation more broadly. Regrettably, the NCLB policy approached language education through the perspective that speakers of other languages come to the classroom with deficits rather than valuable experiences and knowledge that can add to the overall learning experience in the classroom. In practice, this kind of policy marginalizes students labeled as ‘LEP’ – not only because the label itself can be considered demeaning. By ignoring relevant research in language learning, linguistics and education, the NCLB policy – despite its stated aims to raise standards – effectively further disadvantaged already marginalized students and the educators who serve them.

References

Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research and practice. London: Longman.

Harper, Candace A., De Jong, Ester J., & Platt, Elizabeth J. (2008). Marginalizing English as a Second Language Teacher Expertise: The Exclusionary Consequence of “No Child Left Behind“. Language Policy, 7(3), 267-284.

Emily McKinney – Language on the Move