Abstract Despite the vast majority of Americans that are educated though public school systems very successfully, many student of minority or low-income backgrounds have been “left behind.” The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), was the Bush administration’s attempt to help ensure that every public school student had a right to a solid education. A main goal was to have every school achieve higher scores on standardized testing each year and eventually by 2014 every student should score proficiently on their tests. Funding for NCLB was supposed to cover all the added costs that the schools would occur, but the funding ran out and schools are running out of resources to help their students.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was created to ensure that all student were given a fair opportunity to receive a good education from the public school systems. Before 2001, there was a large performance gap between students with a higher economic advantage and those students with less wealth. There was also a pattern of minority groups achieving less than white students in specific areas of school. “‘[W]e understand now that there are some basic tools that have to be put in place so that we give those children who are among the most disadvantaged in our country, who go to school in some of the poorer schools that they, in fact, get a very real opportunity in education,’ Rep. George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, told the NewsHour in 2001” (Nwazota, 2005). NLCB was the largest increase in the Federal government’s role in education since the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965.
What is No Child Left Behind?
George W. Bush and his administration proposed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (“No Child Left Behind,” 2004). NCLB is based on
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