Pretend you are the Education Secretary Arne Duncan. How would you go Essay

Pretend you are the Education Secretary Arne Duncan. How would you go about tweaking the NCLB What innovations would you implem - Essay Example The No Child Left Behind Act (also referred to as NCLB for short) mandated that by 2014, 90% of all schools will be meeting or exceeding state standards. One problem that NCLB does not take into account is that learning is cumulative. Therefore, if any benchmarks are missed in the beginning, it will be harder and harder for children to keep up to the standards when they are already lagging behind in test scores. The ISAT test measures elementary school childrens’ progress, while the PSAE (the Prairie State Achievement Exam) is given to 11th graders. The PSAE is helpful because it is the test that determines what a school’s Adequate Yearly Progress is. If a school fails to make AYP for a certain number of years, the school has to improve or face restructuring—which involves firing all of the staff and starting with a completely new faculty. Also, a culture open to learning is instilled in the new staff members. Schools may not make AYP for several reasons. One rea son might be that transfer students can bring down the general scores of a school. In fact, â€Å"The recent proposal of Senator Joe Lieberman on revamping NCLB school choice provisions suggested providing a safe harbor for one year from AYP calculations for the new out-of-district student transfers.†1 Schools that do not make AYP are generally schools that have a high number of at-risk students—who, for whatever reason—come from underserved and socioeconomically underprivileged populations. In sum, No Child Left Behind needs to be drastically overhauled so that schools that are not making AYP are not penalized, but rather are being given an extension past 2014 in order to improve further. Putting a timetable on when everyone should be at an ideal level of success is setting everyone up for failure—both students and teachers. Even the best teachers in the world cannot rush success. Improving schools go hand in hand with improving student performance at th ese schools that don’t make AYP on a yearly basis. â€Å"According to one survey, sixteen to nineteen year olds in the high-risk category were almost four times as likely to be high school dropouts as those not in the high-risk category.†2 Improving schools in the United States is going to be a time-consuming and rigorous task. In order to improve schools, one of the main foci will be to attempt to raise student test scores by having them take more practice tests, encouraging them to do more independent study outside the class, and encouraging them to complete their assignments in a neat and timely manner. In schools where there are a dense population of at-risk students, it’s important to stress values and social skills as part of the hidden curriculum. That notwithstanding, another integral part of any school is its teaching staff. That having been said, the next issue to be discussed is the quality of the faculty at schools across the country. There are sever al factors which influence a student. â€Å"At the classroom level there are three main variables which accounted for the learning of the pupil: time, opportunity, and the quality of instruction. Time and opportunity†¦influence†¦the pupil’s learning [directly] whereas the quality of instruction [has an impact on] time and opportunity.†3 Obviously, what would help tremendously is if a teacher knows how to properly budget his or her time, and spend a majority of class time implementing a lesson and then having the students work. This is the main idea of what education consists of at the high school and