Good Article on No Child Left Behind

The Pew Research Center for the People and the People and the Press (2007, June 13) No
Left Behind Gets Mixed Grades. Retrieved November 3, 2008, from
http://people-press.org/report/337/no-child-left-behind-gets-mixed-grades
Annotation: This article outlines the different opinions of parents of different racial and ethnic groups on NCLB and its overall outcomes. These groups of parents were also broken down by level of education, political party affiliation, and even weather or not their kids attended public or private school, as well. Although they found some good aspects to the NCLB legislation, such as students getting more individual attention, as well as greater accountability for the allocation of funds, the overall coconscious was that, although schools have improved what, it has not been as significant as expected, or as widespread as expected. And that precisely was what many of the parents thought was wrong with NCLB; the fact that there is no “one size fits all”. About 30% of the parents agreed that there was too much testing being conducted on their
children, while about 5% felt that brighter, more gifted, students were being ignored. Among college graduates, the main thought was that the fundamental flaw of the legislation is that it overemphasizes the importance of testing.
I think that this study does a great job of finding out what people think of this controversial law. It gives a broad range of ideas and findings sampled from different people in different social situations. Overall, the percentages are used well in mapping out the data being analyzed.

Citizenship Education and the Role of Teachers

I read a publication in my Curriculum class a couple weeks ago called “Educating the ‘Good’ Citizen: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals”1, written by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne, which illustrated what they called the three kinds of citizenship that exist in our society. These three categories are then used as a model within which to educate our kids. The first category of the kinds of citizens that we can educate our students to become is the Personally Responsible Citizen. This is the kind of citizen that conducts his/her self in a personally responsible way: honest, caring, and just. The second type is the Participatory Citizen. This is the person who knows how government agencies work, and who decides to become an active member of his/her community. Lastly, there is the Just-Oriented Citizen, who sees beyond the established structures to identify social problems and find ways of fixing those problems.

What we see when looking at the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind principles, as well as the Character Education Program, under the Safe Schools and Citizenship Education principles (the information on this can be found in the Education website). Under both of these principles, the main focus is to teach students to be caring, respectful, fair, trustworthy, responsible, and giving. They are also taught civic virtue and citizenship2. These qualities are mostly outlined under the Personally Responsible Citizen.

There is nothing wrong with teaching our students to be just and responsible citizens, but are we short-changing them by not teaching them to go beyond that? Shouldn’t we also foster the kind of thinking that can elevate them to become more Participatory and, or Just-Oriented citizens as well? I believe our job as teachers has to go beyond teaching the basics, which are obviously very important, but maybe we can go a step further and encourage our students to think, and to question, and to get the most out of their education so that they can influence society in a positive way.



1. Westheimer & Kahne. "Educating the Good Citizen: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals"
April 2004, PS Online www.apsanet.org.
2. www.ed.gov