I plan to investigate the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its effect on the schools of the state of Connecticut. This piece of legislation has had a long and turbulent history from its enactment up to the present date, and it has produced both impressive effects and troubling problems. I hope to gather data in an unbiased manner so as to paint the picture in the most accurate view possible. It helps that I attended a private school far from New England, thus I started out oblivious to the NCLB Act’s repercussions. However, I have observed from some brief research into the subject that there has been a trending towards the stance that the Act accomplished more in the hindering of education than its improvement. This is the point of view around which I will likely wrap my thesis.
I will address core issues and concepts of the No Child Left Behind Act, including, but not limited to:
1. A simplified, clear-cut definition of the Act, its goals, and its accomplishments backed by statistical fact. Some of the data I collect will involved the pooled numbers from the entire results of U.S. schools, but I will try to focus on Connecticut.
2. An investigation of the NCLB Act’s primary elements, including standardization, necessitating the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) parameter, and emphasis on a narrow testing curriculum of mathematics, reading, and writing.
3. The effects of the aforementioned elements, including: increased accountability and responsibility of school staff to meet testing standards as well as the effects of standardization itself, the effects on exceptional students such as the gifted, minorities, and the disabled, and major reform calls to flawed aspects of the law.
I will be dealing with a statistics involving test scores, minority concentration, and other areas of data unforeseen at this time. These numbers will be organized using Excel and likely use graphs and charts to express these findings in a clear and straightforward manner. I will look for videos or clips of adversaries and advocates (with the advocates probably presented as counter-evidence or paired with a refutal) of the bill. As of now, my primary source of information will be the TOR database with a focus on the Education page, but with possibly with some material from sociology or history. Citation and copyright laws will be appropriately researched.
Some possible sources:
I tried to embed links (using the appropriate button in HTML format) but they aren’t showing up here. Alas.
Daniel, your proposal about NCLB raises important policy questions, and can work for this web project if you find a hook to directly link it to the first question in our assignment: “1) What particular story about cities, suburbs, and schools do you wish to tell. . .?” I encourage you to draw a more direct connection between NCLB and city and/or suburban schools. You saw one way that I did this in the Sheff 2009 chapter that you facilitated last week. Another way to do this might be to explore how rates of NCLB “failing” schools have changed in the city and suburban region of metro Hartford since the law has been implemented. For example, here is one website where the CT Dept of Education reports NCLB results (http://www.csde.state.ct.us/public/cedar/nclb/index.htm). There may be another newer location on the redesigned CT CEDAR website. For your web project, you could create a Google spreadsheet chart or Google fusion tables map to help us visualize the rate of NCLB “failures” or “warnings” across Hartford and selected suburban districts over the past few years. Many policy observers argue that public support for NCLB is weakening as more and more suburban districts are found to be in violation of the law, since its standards rise each year. Let me know if you have more questions about this in seminar.
About your sources: how did you attempt to enter them to your post? Let me know in seminar.