blog 6

Recently, I have learned from a book that during Pres. Bush's term he passed a bill known as No Child Left Behind(NCLB)and its negative effects on the educational system . NLCB proposes the importance of standarized testing. So this meant that teachers were to teach only towards a good score on the nation's standarized testing exams. California's exam, the STAR test, I believe can dictate a way schools teach their students and whenever teachers teach for tests, it usually has a negative effect. This is so because the passion out of learning is over-shadowed by the incentives that are present if a school was to get a good score on the STAR test.

No Child Left Behind can also dictate the overall strategy that a teacher might want to approach. For instance, a teacher might want to teach the importance of a certain event in history because it changed the lives of many people. Well, say the star test added a broader test for history that included more things to learn and more events to test. This can be bad because a broader test means less time for teachers to emphasize on important topics that should be looked upon simply for the fact they were life changing. Students and teachers should be the ones picking the curriculum, not the test.

I believe that NCLB was a very stupid action on the President's part. It was just made so that the United States' test scores can compete with other European and Asian countries who tend to have great scores. I believe that scores on a test say nothing about a nation it is simply a number. It absolutely does not say anything about the overall happiness of a nation's people.