No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Testing Requirements

In 2001, Congress passed education legislation promoting school accountability and the implementation of standards and assessment for all students. These standards articulate what students should know and be able to do as they advance through school and are meant to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment. In accordance with these mandates, the purpose of [Page 605]assessment, which generally translates into student testing, is to measure the extent to which students have met the standards that have been set. Ostensibly, standards and assessment offer a way to hold students, educators, schools, districts, and states accountable for student achievement. These mandates, as indicated by the legislation, include students who speak a language other than English at home and who are in need of language support services to succeed in English-medium classrooms. This population of students is commonly referred to as English language learners (ELLs).

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act, required states to adopt academic content and performance standards and assessments to evaluate student progress toward those standards. The recently reauthorized ESEA, titled the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), builds upon earlier legislation and focuses even more heavily on accountability. In this way, NCLB has greatly intensified the involvement of the federal government in the education that each state provides. Within the law's accountability framework, student performance on assessments is used to determine whether schools will continue to receive federal funds without sanctions. Although NCLB does not specifically require states to use standardized tests for their statewide assessment systems, this is what is happening across the country because it is how the law has been interpreted by most states. As a result, standardized tests have become increasingly high stakes since the passage of this federal legislation, as a way for states to demonstrate measurable student progress and meet the law's accountability requirements. This entry describes the assessment requirements of NCLB as they pertain to ELLs.