Leaving Children Behind: How No Child Left behind Will Fail Our Children

achievement for all children. If the law were designed to make significant progress toward this goal, every supporter of equity and excellence in education would applaud it. However, for multiple reasons, the actual provisions of NCLB, particularly Title I of the Act, contradict its professed aims. This leaves advocates for high-quality education for all children with the complex problem of opposing the law without giving support to those who will seize upon its inevitable failure as a way of promoting privatization and continuing the push for highstakes testing. All our children deserve a high-quality education, not classrooms transformed into test-prep centers. In most states, the law will make scores on standardized reading and math tests the sole measure of student progress. Test proponents claim that these exams measure what is most important, but any realistic assessment of state tests reveals that much of what is important is not tested and much of what is tested is not of major importance. Even the test-promoting organization Achieve, Inc., recognizes that most state exams are weak and acknowledges that much higher-order thinking (which ESEA is required to measure) cannot be adequately assessed through standardized paper-and-pencil tests. For example, one group of college admissions officers and another of published authors reviewed the highly touted New York State Regents Examinations. They found the exams were “insulting” to the literature and to the student and concluded, “If you want to know whether this test helps prepare students for college, the answer is no.” Under NCLB, education will be seriously damaged, especially in schools with large shares of low-income and minority children, as students are coached to pass tests rather than to learn a rich curriculum that prepares them for life in the 21st century. In schools where children don’t perform well, there will be intense pressure to eliminate or reduce emphasis on such untested subjects as history, science, languages, and the arts; to cut such “frills” as recess; and to reduce tested subjects to the form and content of the exams. Two recent research reports from the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy are the latest in a long series of studies that demonstrate that the higher the stakes, the more teaching to the test — often with harmful effects. Researchers agree that a majority of schools will fail to meet the unrealistic demands imposed by NCLB’s “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) provision. Virtually no schools MONTY NEILL is executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), Cambridge, Mass. (www.fairtest. org). P O I N T O F V I E W