Inclusive Education and the No Child Left Behind Act - Literature review Example

No child left behind act The notion of the inclusive education has been greatly challenging in the adaptation of the approaches which fundamentally differs from the assumptions, structures as well as existent practices of the dominant structure of the educational institutes as well as different cultural ideologies associated with it (Hulgin & Drake, 2011, p.389). Inclusive education generally includes the educational approach and philosophy which targets at the provision of the all the students with community membership and wider opportunities for the achievement of the academic as well as social up gradation. Inclusion principle generates an environment in which all the students can feel themselves welcome and fulfill their unique needs and styles of learning to be valued as well as judged judiciously (The Promise of Inclusive Education, 2012). One such act which relates vehemently the inclusive educational system is the famous act of No child Left Behind Act of 2001 in passed by the then American President George W. Bush. The paper will seek to analyse the social, economic and political status that led to the development of the act. Social status associated with the NCLB Act The national Commission on Excellence in Education in the year 1981 was vested upon the responsibility to review as well as synthesize literature and scholarly data in order to assess the then quality of teaching as well as educational standards in both the public as well as the private sector with a special emphasis on the educational experiences of the teen age youth. The report investigations revealed significant information among which the most important which can be stated here is that around 17% of all the 17 years old children in the United States of America was considered as functionally illiterate with the percentage of the minority youths reaching as high as 40 percent. Areas of faults were conjectured in the poor performances in important subjects like English, Physics, mathematics as well as in verbal communications. There was also deterioration in the academic achievements owing to the racial and ethnic differences as well. The findings and the report concentrated on the weaknesses of the approaches of content, expectations, time and teaching. Thus identification of these parameters let the government to drive its focus on the movement towards a standard based educational system which came up in the forefront with the passage of Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (IASA). The IASA along with the following implementation of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the ESEA focused on the ensuring of the needs of all the students including the disadvantaged students along with the children who were vulnerable to the risk of school. In the mid 1980s, the testing industry saw a major shift towards standard based high stake assessments as one of the most necessary components of the standard based reforms. There was also a shift in the expectations of the marketplace as well. Within the span of 1994-2000, majority of the states in America enhanced standards of the contents, standards of performance and so on. The states also demanded the minimization of the time lag between the testing and the receipt of the score reports (Jorgenson & Hoffman, 2003, pp. 1-5). The test scores as an indicator of the actual achievement of the students started to become implemented in the reality and along with that the notion of social justice was also attached to the implementation motive. Thus a wave of establishing a new law made the lawmakers rethink and establish a new law with various threshold standards set for the purpose of introduction to inclusive education as well as focus on the delivery of social justice (Robicheau, 2006, pp. 2-3). Within such a social backdrop, on January 8, 2002, American President George W. Bush declared the law of No Child Left Behind Act which was directed towards the establishment of absolute clarity towards the value, use as well as the importance of the achievement of the testing the students staring from the kindergarten period through the high school. Political status and NCLB Political angle is highly attached with that of social status regarding any issue taking place within a societal structure and it exerts a greater positive correlation when the issue is related with that of education. The discussion of the social status in the above segment can be deemed as a path of synthesis with the then political status which helped in the implementation of the law. The law as it is known was implemented on January 8, 2002 by President Bush and he stated that, “all students will have a better chance to learn, to excel, and to live out their dreams” (In Need of Improvement: NCLB and High Schools, 2007, p. 1). The Act was passed with the bipartisan support in the Congress because there has been the consensus that the nation at that time required the termination of the achievement deviation which existed between the racial, ethnic as well as the economic background and that the schools should be absolutely responsible for the attainment of the success of the students (In Need of Improvement: NCLB and High Schools, 2007, p. 3). In the year 1994, there were existent two pieces of federal education legislation among which one of them was the Goals 2000 and the Improving America’s schools Act (EASA) became laws with concreting the role of the federal government in the implementation of the standard based reform movement. These Bills were required to the all the states for the development of the standards regarding the content as well as the performance standards in the reading subjects with the implementation aligned to those standards. Individual states were also required for the establishment of the annual benchmark for the improvement referred to as the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The district leaders would use these sources on the state assessment for the decisions made whether the schools made AYP and whether they comprised enough technical assistance that were required for the needed improvement (In Need of Improvement: NCLB and High Schools, 2007, p. 3). In this way the political factors influenced the passing of the NCLB Act. However it was later found that there were loopholes in the funding mechanism as well as the political agents were driven by the ending their needs and not every level of classes were given equal importance. But that is not discussed as it will be discussing the aftermath of the Act. Economic status associated with NCLB The Act was passed by the Congress in 2001 with the goals of increased accountability for the schools as well as the helping the poor as well as the minority children with economically disadvantaged students. The economic status of the contemporary period was not so pleasant and economic factors hold a lot of importance in the passage of the NCLB Act. Homelessness can be defined as one of the economic factors which can be said to be as one of the driving factors that pushed the implementation of the Act. At that time, the number of the affordable housing units drastically declined. Within the time span of 1993 and 2003, the percentage of the low cost rental units depleted below 13 per cent due to the loss of older, lower-quality apartments in the private market. In 2005, around 40 percent of the households with ages of children through 17were found to be infested with physically inadequate housing, crowded housing as well as cost burden associated were also great. Along with that of the rising domestic violence also led to the deprivation of the child’s education (Aratani , 2009, p. 4) . The employment of the persons of ages between 25 to 64 with Master’s degree increased by 3.2 million along with huge dropout rates. It was estimated that the improvements in the education over this 20 year period would have increased the GDP by additional 4% (Paige, 2004, pp. 4-5). Thus on this economic background, the Act was generally formulated as well as implemented Conclusion The thorough discussions leads us to the conclusion that the requirement of the inclusive education on a rigorous basis was required at the time frame prior to the implementation of the Act and the social factors led the ethnic differences as well as poor educational achievement rates encountered by empirical studies. The States faced pressure of maintaining the uplifted educational achievements and minimization of the achievement gaps and in the economic status among the many reasons homelessness, unemployment and domestic violence led to the chalking out of the Act. References 1. Aratani , Y, (2009), Homeless Children and Youth Causes and Consequences, Retrieved on 19 July from: http://www.columbia-chps.org/assets/firefly/files/files/pdfs_articles/Aratani_pub.pdf 2. Hulgin, K, M & Drake, B, M (2011), Inclusive education and the No Child Left Behind Act: resisting entrenchment, International Journal of Inclusive Education, Vol. 15, No. 4, May 2011, 389–404, Retrieved on 19 July from: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=d54eb168-2865-4777-8b8a-6d84fe09ca03%40sessionmgr15&vid=4&hid=11 3. In Need of Improvement: NCLB and High Schools, (2007), Retrieved on 19 July from: http://www.all4ed.org/files/archive/publications/NCLB_HighSchools.pdf 4. Jorgenson, M, A & Hoffman, J (2003), History of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB), Retrieved on 19 July from: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:2gQ1NPUUMD4J:www.pearsonassessments.com/NR/rdonlyres/D8E33AAE-BED1-4743-98A1-BDF4D49D7274/0/HistoryofNCLB_Rev2_Final.pdf+&hl=en&gl=in&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjfRTTajZ3u9H6Iv0IisBV6cV3INzLrOe6vt_lj5saKsScKdJu1_E2rpnFE9uXUK1aUQ4QWctmObZnhQJSCVr_atJWE4aEpWE_KixiBF9uWcXiHhbXFndNOr5y0hEJ_upl4LoXV&sig=AHIEtbRiZQTBCq_VRERzGjw2YkIHs6eR9w 5. Paige, R, (2004), US Department of Education, A Guide to Education and No Child Left Behind, Retrieved on 19 July from: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:zPiiANh3EQcJ:www2.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/guide/guide.pdf+&hl=en&gl=in&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESikmM9N6ROtt4K_iRS97YJhmHv-9H6NYR2T84E0S2bebKgJHiVa7Kz4I_viloV71xmlvSxG6YFblTSMqkZnhyktl4ZaO2FVBZycN_j6SE5--6d-YuXZDmDReotzk84GKrniVlZ5&sig=AHIEtbTtYoq84QCCkduuW28sU8agtMqxrg 6. Robicheau, J (2006), The Absence of Ethics in No Child Left Behind, Retrieved on 19 July from: http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/archivesum07/robicheau.pdf 7. The Promise of Inclusive Education, (2012), Retrieved on 19 July from: http://nvpie.org/inclusive.html Read More