NCLB Continues to Spark Debate Over Standards and Homework

On October 5, President Bush said that renewing the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law will be a priority for him in 2007, "but acknowledged the law isn't working as well for parents as it should," as CNN.com noted.

An Associated Press article reported that "the law is scheduled to be reauthorized by Congress next year, but some education observers have speculated it could be bumped until as late as 2009, after the next presidential election."

For its part, the White House states that NCLB is having a positive impact on students in general and minority or underserved students in particular. According to the White House Documents and Publications service:

• In reading, 9-year-olds made larger gains in the past five years than at any point in the previous 28 years.
• In math, 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds earned the highest scores in the history of the test; and
• In both reading and math, African American and Hispanic students are scoring higher, and are beginning to close the achievement gap with their white peers.

Teacher Debra Craig told the Riverside, Calif., Press-Enterprise, holds another view: "It is not easy to simplify the NCLB mandates. There are many facets to how schools are judged and how penalties are imposed."

First, the impetus for NCLB – based on the notion that teachers were negligent in failing to teach minority students – is a fraud. Four years later, the 'achievement gap' still exists despite the whip cracking of NCLB. Academic achievement has never been about race but socioeconomic factors.

"Another major problem with NCLB is its impossible goals," Craig continued. "By demanding that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading, it's setting schools up for failure. NCLB expects all students – even those in special education who have learning disabilities and children of illegal aliens, some of whom barely speak English – to achieve some artificial level of success."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told reporters that NCLB was "like Ivory soap: It's 99.9 percent pure," referring to the mandate's core principles. Spellings added that she was willing to consider improvements to the law.

Homework hassles

Signed into law in 2002, NCLB has come under fire from K-12 educators who cite unreasonable expectations, and from parents (and students) who feel that the burden of homework imposed by the rigors of standardized testing is draining children of their free time. A study of 500 parents and 200 middle school students cited by CNN.com showed that half the students said they have been unable to finish homework because an assignment was too difficult or they could not find anyone to help. Four in 10 parents, the report added, said their children had too much homework to finish in one night, and a quarter said they could not help because the work was too hard.

Indeed, the pressure to make grades have driven some students to cheating, buying term papers, plagiarism and the newest wave of response: outsourcing their assignments to tutors.

Tutoring goes global

In the United States, a qualified private tutor can cost anywhere from $25 to $100 per hour. But some parents are finding a different solution. Reuters news report described a California mother who hired an online tutor for $2.50 an hour – in India.

Denise Robison of Modesto, Calif., hired the Bangalore-based TutorVista to work with her 13-year-old daughter in math and English. Teachers' unions do not support this development. "Tutoring providers must keep in frequent touch with not only parents but classroom teachers, and we believe there is greater difficulty in an offshore tutor doing that, said Nancy Van Meter, a director at the American Federation of Teachers, told Reuters.

A Reuters report points out that NCLB "encourages competition among tutoring agencies and leaves the door open for offshore tutors." "The big test is whether the kids are actually learning," Diane Stark Rentner of the Center on Education Policy said. "Until you answer that, I don't know if you can pass judgment on whether this is a good or bad way to go.