It’s a No Win Situation
A few weeks ago, Fox News and others published articles about a middle school principal in Massachusetts who cancelled the school’s Honors Night because he believed it would be “devastating” to students who did not receive any achievement awards. He wanted to make sure that no students were discouraged from learning just because they did not succeed this time. All students were in the same school, so the playing field was level from that perspective, however, the principal pointed out that some students do not receive as much emotional and academic support at home, which can influence academic success. By these standards, the playing field will never be level, therefore, this principal decided to remove the goal line. If everybody can’t win, then nobody wins. What this principal ended up doing was taking away the goal for the children who had succeeded and the ones who did not succeed. He took away the incentive while trying to be fair. Although he meant well, and believed that an all-inclusive end-of-the-year ceremony would be better, he ended up disappointing many students and their parents, taking away some of the pride that comes from being honors students.
No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are the academic initiatives of the past two administrations and are important civic issues today. While the rhetoric of the first suggests teamwork with everybody reaching a goal together, compared to the second which implies winners and losers, both are competitions. No Child Left Behind is a Congressional Act intended to promote equality in education for students from all economic and social backgrounds by numerous requirements including requiring the states to implement standard tests to receive federal funding. The benefits of this Act are often challenged because of the recently explored ideas that intelligence cannot always be determined by testing. These tests also limit teachers. Teachers ‘teach to these tests’, making certain that they focus on material that will be tested and limit children to these topics so that they can do well on these standard tests. No Child Left Behind was supposed to expire in 2007, but remains in effect in states which have not been granted waivers obtained by adopting elements of Obama’s education agenda.
Race to the Top, Obama’s education initiative, is a $4.35 billion contest (2010 figure). This contest awards funding to schools on a points system, with points being awarded based on testing, caliber of teachers, and promises to better the schools among other things. The number of winners is limited and some view it as unfair. In 2010, Delaware and Tennessee received funding not due to the current excellence of their school programs, but because they promised to fix their failing programs. Millions of dollars are going to promises. No money was awarded to those on top. Oklahoma was near the bottom, lost four years in a row, supposedly because their plans to improve were not considered good enough. If you think a few middle- schoolers would be devastated by missing out on an Honors Night, consider how it feels to be from New Jersey, the state I’m from, which missed out on $400 million of funding by a few points, because of a mistake in filling out the application.
No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are meant to promote improvements in education but at what cost? Billions of dollars are being poured into programs on what appear to be unfair bases. These are very prominent issues today as education funds are limited and equality of educational opportunities is a major concern to many. Both Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind should be rethought and revised. Competition in all aspects of life is reality and it is a worthy goal to encourage all our students to achieve to their highest potential.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_left_behind_act/index.html
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20121127_11_A11_OKLAHO587516
http://educationnext.org/is-race-to-the-top-a-fair-competition/