The “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001″ is yet another example of the failure that usually results from the federal government attempting to force their influence over areas that are traditionally best left to state and local governments. The “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001″ (NCLB) was the brainchild of President George W. Bush who wished to go down in history as an “Education” President. The Act called for the creation of Statewide Standardized tests that would be administered once a year to every student in order to gauge educational improvement of the school systems. The NCLB Act also implemented punishments for any school that did not post “Improvement” every year.

These Standardized tests were designed to only test a few specific core disciplines, which was the first problem it created. With punitive measures in place for any school that did not show increases in these areas, teachers were forced to focus their classroom instruction on these few areas. With stress put on just English and Math skills, teachers dropped many other areas of study, including History, Science, Arts, and the Humanities in order to “teach to the test”.

With the threat of lost funding and even total disbanding of the school at risk if even one specific group of students did not show “improvement”, school systems were forced to redefine and lower their educational standards in order to avoid punishment. While this practice of “cooking the books” allowed State Educational Departments to “prove” a statistical raise in test scores, it did not in any way improve the education students were receiving.

Another very damning aspect of this federally mandated test was in its administration. There is both a cultural and physical bias that destroys the NCLB principle. The same test, given to every student the same way. Culturally, there are variances in just what may be considered the most important skills a person can learn. An inner city student from a poor section of town will not necessarily respond as well to the same educational stresses as a rural farmland student or on who has grown up with well-off middle class values. Nor does NCLB testing differentiate between Special Education students and the most mentally gifted students.

The NCLB tests also blatantly violates the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” (IDEA) which requires schools to accommodate students with disabilities. Under the IDEA for example, blind students are allowed to take a test by having the questions read aloud to them. A group of blind students were invalidated by the NCLB test because they could not read the test and were given a “zero” score. This fact is hardly a good example of no child being left behind.

The entire NCLB program, set up for scholastic improvement, actually fostered a lowering of educational expectations as school systems attempted to avoid punishments. They usually had to do this by actually giving up higher educational programs in order to assure their students could at least pass the tests on a few remedial areas of knowledge.

These are but a few major examples of the massive shortcomings of this program. The NCLB Act has been declared a failure by both educators and many law makers who have seen the results of a poorly thought out program whose only real purpose was to aggrandize a politician’s ego and self image.