No Child Left Behind

Transparency

The great curriculum projects of the past such as the Eight Year Study were public events in which [Page 611]teachers worked together to build the frameworks that were to drive great teaching and learning. Even the day-to-day school curriculum is a public thing in that curriculum programs are purchased or developed publicly. Teams of teachers convene to examine curriculum and instructional materials to ensure that such materials are appropriately aligned with state standards. Teachers work together over summers to prepare units and lessons that will be enacted during the school year. However, once the teacher takes responsibility for the curriculum, its public persona is transformed into a private enterprise. Individual teachers even at the same grade level pursue their own vision of instruction, curriculum, and assessment. The NCLB has the potential to alter this pattern in which public curriculum mutates into a private, almost secret activity.

The NCLB requires that publicly developed standards are to govern the day-to-day work of the teacher. Whatever curriculum is used must be consistent with those publicly displayed standards. All children are to be tested on a regular pattern. Although testing is hallowed by tradition, under NCLB, such testing must be aligned with the instructional goals derived from the standards, and more importantly, the results of such testing are both public and open. In the past, schools were able to bury their failures in the “average” of all the test scores from a cohort of students. Under NCLB, test results must be reported by subgroup, for example, English language learners (ELL). The test results must be publicly reported so that the results for all subgroups are presented. Finally, there is a standard metric for identifying the progress for students over time. To comply with NCLB, a school must demonstrate that each subgroup represented in the school has made “adequate yearly progress.” The measure adequate yearly progress (AYP) asserts that children should have the opportunity to learn what has been defined by the standards each year so that when the student is ready to go on to the next grade level or school, he or she knows what is required to be successful at the next level.

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