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After years of dancing around Congress to help states evade the No Child Left Behind Act, the Obama administration thinks it’s time to go back to the legislative drawing board.
No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era school accountability law, must be rewritten, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a speech Monday. And despite an ever-growing chorus against required standardized testing, such tests must remain mandatory, Duncan said, because “parents and teachers and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year.”
But, as Duncan stated last summer, the law must “ensure that the tests — and time spent in preparation for them — don’t take excessive time away from actual classroom instruction.” So the administration is calling for limits on the time that school systems spend on standardized testing and test preparation.
The speech comes as Congress renews its bid to rewrite the sweeping federal education law. It also comes at a moment when sentiments against standardized testing have reached afever pitch. In recent months, teachers, parents and advocates from both sides of the political aisle have voiced concerns in light of new tests associated with the Common Core State Standards and the implementation of teacher evaluations based on those scores.
NCLB, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, mandated the annual standardized testing of public school students in reading and math in some grades, and it doled out consequences based on those test results.
Since then, while schools have made progress by showing increased minority test scores and posting the highest-ever high school graduation rates, Duncan said, “we cannot allow ourselves to believe that we are yet doing justice by all of our young people.”
