Republicans and Democrats agree that the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB needs thoughtful revision. How to best achieve the desired results from the act is where the controversy is mounting, especially in the face of President George W. Bush’s plans to reauthorize the act this year.

Proposals for renewal have included provisions to increase the use of incentives by mandating that merit pay for teachers be based on their students’ performance on standardized tests.

The blueprint for improving the No Child Left Behind Act states, “We must reward teachers and principals who make the greatest progress in improving student performance and closing the achievement gap . To speed up our progress we must work to match the very best teachers with our most challenging schools.”

This proposal has been criticized as an attempt to displace accountability from the state to individual teachers.

“I think (providing incentives based on test scores) makes a really negative impact on teachers,” said Assistant Professor of education studies Julie Burke. “In my experience as a teacher in public school and as a teacher-educator it’s very detrimental. It causes a whole chain reaction of unsustainable pressure that gets put on the kids because the teachers have pressure on them because the principals have pressure on them, because the superintendents have pressure on them.”

The Bush administration introduced NCLB in 2001 in an effort to increase the accountability of teachers for their students’ progress, and provide parents more freedom in selecting their child’s school. It emphasized reading and math skills and mandated that all children read at grade level by 2014.

“Seems like a reasonable thing to ask, to have every child reading at grade level by 2014, or being able to do math at grade level by 2014,” said Bush in a recent statement addressing his plans for reauthorization. “So now is the time not to roll back the accountability or water down standards.”

Individual states are required to develop standardized assessments in math, reading, and as of this school year, science, to be given to all students in a particular grade.

An adequate yearly progress (AYP) for each school is assessed and funding is based on which schools have shown improvement.

“Measuring results helps teachers catch problems early, so children who need help – extra help can get that help,” Bush said. “In other words, you can’t determine whether a child needs extra help unless you measure.”

Critics of the AYP system claim that schools with large populations of students with social or cultural backgrounds that set them at a disadvantage are the ones that need extra funding to attract better teachers and tutoring programs, and their test scores may not qualify them to benefit from extra federal funding.

“If you want to improve student performances instead of penalizing teachers

and penalizing the schools by taking away money because they’re not meet the average yearly improvement they need to throw money at those schools to provide tutors and resource officials,” said Assistant Professor of Political Science Robert Duncan.

The National Education Association (NEA) has been especially critical of the AYP requirement and has asked Congress to re-evaluate its effectiveness.

The NEA Web site states, “The adequate yearly progress (AYP) formula is a highly inaccurate and arbitrary yardstick for measuring progress. The law sets predetermined benchmarks for students’ proficiency without taking into account schools’ starting points. Furthermore, its testing of students with disabilities and English language learners is neither valid nor reliable.”

Many scholars believe that the requirement to fulfill testing quotas encourages teachers to “teach to the test,” focusing on a narrow area of skills specific to scoring high on the state’s standardized tests. States develop their own standardized tests, which means they can make the content less challenging to boost their scores. A study done by the Department of Education in 2007 indicated that the rigor of the states’ tests account for most of the observed differences in scores between states.

In order to provide proof of improvement, NCLB has strongly emphasized statistics and test scores.

“It turns knowledge that’s worth knowing into a measurable commodity,” Burke said.

In shaving the curriculums down to the bone, “core” knowledge, not coincidentally knowledge that is measurable by a number such as math and reading skills is now taking up time that used to be reserved for history, art, music, and social and cultural exploration.

“We’ve lost a lot of opportunities for kids to develop on a social level,” said Associate Professor of Education Studies David Hildreth. “Right now (kids are) being expected to do things that take away from their opportunities to play, to be creative, and to mess about. It’s good to have high expectations, without a doubt, but not at the expense of a kid’s being a kid.”

Under NCLB, schools are given incentives to meet yearly achievement requirements and receive bonuses for scoring exceptionally high. Some scholars claim that this rewards system provides an incentive for schools to push out disadvantaged and non-English speaking students.

Many parents have argued that under the pressure of NCLB, teachers are not differentiating among different student ability levels. They focus their efforts on those students who are performing below the standard, because that is where the incentive lies.

“Because it’s all about bringing people up to that minimum level of performance, we’ve ignored those high-ability learners,” said Nancy Green, executive director of the District-based National Association for Gifted Children, to the Washington Post. “We don’t even have a test that measures their abilities.”