No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind may possibly be one of the largest controversies in Education today. In this video our President, Barrack Obama, addresses an issue with No Child Left Behind and advises us on a change he would like to see happen with the Bill. First he focuses on Assessment tools being used and how they are inadequate. I appreciate that the President has acknowledged the fact that students can meet high standards. Students should not be belittled; they can always surprise us and exceed the standards we set for them as I discovered in Writing Essentials by Routman last semester. I also am glad the President realizes that schools progress at different rates and in their own ways. Yet something I feel he should take into account when it comes to assessment is the way we assess students. We are mainly assessing students each year by having them take big exams. These exams are creating high-test anxiety more than ever before. Also something important came to my attention while reading, “Building the Primary Classroom” by Toni S. Bickart. In this textbook it talks about Howard Gardner’s study where he recognizes that there are eight different intelligences. Only two intelligences of out of these eight are students that are actually good test takers. With this in mind I feel that there should be assessments for multiple types of intelligences in order to get accurate results of the larger intelligence community that might resident at a school.