Question

1)Briefly explain what school accountability policies are and provide the economic arguments that support these policies.

2) Describe the No Child Left Behind Act. What was its original intent, how does it mandate that states assess adequate progress, and what are the sanctions that schools face if they do not meet these goals?

Answer 1

Q1):Accountability is a noun that describes accepting responsibility, and it can be personal or very public. A government has accountability for decisions and laws affecting its citizens; an individual has accountability for acts and behaviors. Sometimes, though, taking accountability means admitting you made a mistake.Accountability policies are intended to promote effective instruction and student learning by rewarding effective educators and schools while punishing low performing ones. Frequently these policies rely on standardized testing to measure student success and determine school and teacher effectiveness. CEPA researchers address questions such as what impacts accountability programs have on teachers, students, and schools as well how effective they are at actually improving student outcomes.

As we know for every plan or policy to be successful needs allocation of funds or money. A rich and sound contry can create a sound education system in country .simply we can say economic supoot is important for any policy to make it successful. So what can be done? For many advanced economies, including the United States, bringing down inequality in the future means increasing the supply of highly educated workers. Too many young people drop out of high school; too many high-school graduates are not college-ready. Then there is the cost of higher education, which in the US is prohibitively expensive for many families. These are problems that could be solved by better government policies.

In many developing countries, levels of educational attainment still remain uncomfortably low, with access to even basic education constrained by market failures and inefficient policies.While the precise focus of policies necessarily varies across countries, a number of broad areas can sketched out. Education policies that help students achieve strong academic outcomes, continue on to higher levels of education and acquire the skills to succeed in a globally competitive economy can foster greater inter-generational earnings mobility and help reduce income inequality over time.

Q2):

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was in effect from 2002–2015. It was a version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.When NCLB was the law, it affected every public school in the United States. Its goal was to level the playing field for students who are disadvantaged, including:

Students in poverty
Minorities
Students receiving special education services
Those who speak and understand limited or no English
NCLB was controversial. Here’s an overview of how the law affected students with learning and thinking differences.

The goal of NCLB was to provide equal educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.NCLB was different from previous versions of ESEA. It held schools accountable for how kids learn and achieve in several ways:

Annual testing: Schools had to give students statewide math and reading tests every year in grades 3–8 and once in grades 10–12. Parents had the right to get individual test results for their children. Schools had to publicly report school and “subgroup” results. For example, schools had to report how students in special education were performing on reading and math tests. States had to bring all students, including those in special education, up to the “proficient” level on tests. They had to set targets for improvement, called adequate yearly progress (AYP). Schools essentially got a report card from the state on how they were performing. The school had to share that information with parents of their students. If a school didn’t meet AYP, it could be labeled as “needing improvement.” Schools with many low-income students were called “Title I schools.” If a Title I school didn’t meet AYP, NCLB allowed the state to change the school’s leadership team or even close the school. If a school repeatedly failed to meet AYP, parents had the option to move their children to another school.AYP goals and sanctions were supposed to push schools to improve services and instruction for struggling students, including children in special education. These penalties didn’t apply to non–title schools.

It’s been almost 15 years since the US Congress passed the much-derided No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reform bill in an effort to improve American students’ international competitiveness in reading and math, which had been falling for quite some time.Suddenly a bipartisan group of legislators from the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) declared in a new report that the reform efforts of states in the wake of NCLB had been unsuccessful.

After all of the national, state and district reform efforts during the decade following No Child Left Behind, the US was outperformed not only by a majority of the advanced industrial nations, but by a growing number of less-developed nations as well,” they wrote theNCLB is most infamous for its stringent standardized testing requirements through which schools whose students failed to show progress over two years could face significant sanctions – including state takeovers or being made into private charter schools. It also included provisions requiring that all teachers have a bachelor’s degree in the field they were teaching and a state certification.

But though the law established a federal framework, the implementation of the federal education reform law was largely left to the states, many of whom experimented in different ways. And, though NCLB focused on using student assessments to determine and, hopefully, improve student achievement, the often unpopular testing regimens and continuing dissatisfaction with the public education system led to other reforms in some states, many driven by political or ideological concerns.None of them, the group found, have worked on a national scale.In retrospect, the NCSL study group concludes that states have tried to find individual ‘silver bullets’ without setting decisive goals and creating a thoughtful, systemic approach to building a coherent system with an appropriate timeline for implementation, as did the other high-performing countries.Comparisons of schools that barely meet or miss criteria for adequate yearly progress (AYP) reveal that some sanctions built into the No Child Left Behind accountability regime exert positive impacts on students. Estimates indicate that the strongest positive effects associate with the ultimate sanction: leadership and management changes associated with school restructuring. We find suggestive incentive effects in schools first entering the NCLB sanction regime, but no significant effects of intermediate sanctions. Further analysis shows that gains in sanctioned schools are concentrated among low-performing students, with the exception of gains from restructuring which are pervasive. We find no evidence that schools achieve gains among low-performing students by depriving high-performing students of resources.