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.

Related content

• Ten lessons from the Bridging Language Barriers symposium
• Educational success through bilingual education
• Children of the harvest: schooling, class and race
• Refugee children left behind as eagle lands on the moon
• Long-term English language learners
• Schooling challenges of multilingual children
• Is there such a thing as postmodern bilingual education?
• The language that cannot speak its name
• Building bridges through multilingual schooling: a mother-tongue pilot in East Timor is showing the way
• Can ESL teachers help in maintaining the home language?
• Providing bilingual education since 1689

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.

In the article, the principal shares a sad story about the cultural bias of the 5^th-grade reading test, which will from now on become a stock of my intercultural communication teaching. Oscar, a recent arrival to the Vermont school from a refugee camp in Africa, took the same test as all the other kids around the country who have grown up in the USA and spoken English all their lives:

Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes […] but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true.’”

Oscar had understood the text and he understood the difference between factual and fictional writing. However, his lack of exposure to (American) media, meant he got the first question and, subsequently, all the other five questions, which were based on the first one, wrong.

Oscar got penalized for the fact that his knowledge of the world was quite different from that of the middle-class native-born “standard” (?) child the test designers had in mind. In the policy context of No Child Left Behind the school and the principal were penalized, too.

Cultural bias has been a concern for assessment researchers and practitioners since the emergence of IQ tests in the first half of the 20^th century. The evidence is there that standardized assessment disadvantages even among native-born students those from non-middle class backgrounds (Mac Ruairc, 2009, is a recent study in the Irish context well-worth reading). Students from migrant backgrounds and from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds are further disadvantaged. Despite all the evidence and all the research, standardized assessment and the idea that it means quality spreads like a cancer from one educational system to the next.

Dear readers, share Oscar’s story widely! Many adults in the developed world believe the moon-landing is not fact but fiction, and it’s plain to see that the fact that Oscar thought it was a story tells us nothing about his reading ability nor about the quality of the instruction he received in his school. There are thousands of such testing stories out there. How can so many wrongs add up to a right – the imagined standardized high-quality education system?

Ruairc, G. (2009). ‘Dip, dip, sky blue, who’s it? NOT YOU’: children’s experiences of standardised testing: a socio-cultural analysis Irish Educational Studies, 28 (1), 47-66 DOI: 10.1080/03323310802597325