A Legislative Overview of No Child Left Behind, Research Paper Example

State the administrative agency which controls the regulation. Explain why this agency and your proposed regulation interests you (briefly). Will this proposed regulation affect you or the business in which you are working? If so, how? Submit a copy of the proposed regulation along with your responses to these five questions. 

The administrative agency that controls the regulation that I am most interested in is the Department of Education. The reason this agency interests me is because it is the organization that deals directly with the education of society. Growing up, no matter how informed or educated one becomes, there is always a feeling of regret wishing they had taken their education more seriously. Sometimes young people do understand the value of education but don’t have the access to desired resources. Providing these young people with those resources is essentially the responsibility of the Department of Education ESEA. In 2001 George W. Bush Proposed the No Child Left Behind Act NCLB, which to this day has not yet been amended. This act dramatically changed the way students were educated, but most importantly they way they were tested for proficiency within their grade levels, throughout their education, and even going on to college. I personally feel the legislation does not account for the true potential or aptitude of young people and results in creating a mis-directed and misguided workforce. This has a significant impact on society and business as it stunts creativity minimizing innovation, but it also limits the individuals potential of some of the most promising minds of every generation. Attached is a copy of the legislation and the following will go into greater detail about the comments I propose to can improve this law.

Describe the proposal/change

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is the most recent reauthorization of ESEA. United States President George W. Bush worked with the Department of Education to improve the regulations of federal funding spending in an effort to insure that every student in the public school system achieves grade level learning goals in a classroom taught by a highly qualified teacher. Under NCLB, there is a dramatic increase of federal mandates and requirements at the school, district, and state level. Although previous federal education legislation has involved federal government in the state- run education systems, NCLB executes significant accountability requirements by the state to provide data based evidence to the federal government of student achievement.

NCLB determines the standardized consequences for those schools unable to meet AYP requirements. If a school is unable to demonstrate AYP for two consecutive years, they are considered to be under Program Improvement status. During the first year of Program Improvement, parents are offered transportation to another school within the school district who demonstrated AYP, the school is offered technical assistance to address the factors leading to failure of AYP, and a two-year school-improvement plan is developed or revised to improve student achievement. This technical assistance continues into the second year of Program Improvement along with the offer of supplemental educational services. The third year of Program Improvement requires constrictive action; possibility consisting of staff replacement, new scientifically based curriculum implementations, or some form of reorganization. During year four, a plan of major reconstruction is developed, such as staff replacement and/or reopening as a charter school, that is implemented if program improvement status continues into year five (Mills, 2008).

The problem with this system is that it takes up too much time and it’s too costly. It takes an entire three years for NCLB to recognize that a school system is below par. By this time the original class that incited the red flags is well on their way to another school in many cases. In high school they could be juniors or seniors and in middle school they would be in their last year going on to high school. Likewise, many schools have their newer less experienced teacher teaching younger students. This means one grade level underperforming on standardized test could be the result of one or two particular inexperienced teacher within what on the most part would be an effective school system. The final problem is the test. There are many complaints that the standardized test questions do not account for cultural or geographical differences. The words used or the scenarios used are bias in favor of more privileged communities creating a learning of comprehensions curve in regards to understanding the test. In this respects if a school is found to score below par and then staff are removed, it would be unjust, as the real blame would on the test. Finally the test does not test practical skills and forces teachers to devote too much of the school year focused primarily on test questions.

Write the public comment that you would submit to this proposal. If the proposed regulation deadline has already passed, write the comment you would have submitted. Explain briefly what you wish to accomplish with your comment. 

It is very difficult to apply a nationwide standard to education with such a high level of stake placed in its results. No Child Left Behind has established protocols in public education that has established its own set of achievement gaps from state to state that state content standard policies or reform don’t seem to completely resolve. There many who argue charter schools might be the answer for this conflict. Rashid Carter from Olive-Harvey College was the host of a video presentation on this topic. The subject matter of the video was public schools, testing and the concept of no child left behind. Many issues were addressed, specifically how do public schools effectively assess the value of the education they are providing for students. Charter schools were identified as a solution for all of the failing schools that being closed down. The panel talked about charter schools and their effect on achievement. A panelist noted that charter schools are, “not the answer but an answer.” The problem he noted was that No Child Left Behind forced teachers to teach towards tests. He noted this was a negative effect of the policy. I propose a more comprehensive method of evaluating students that incorporates creative thinking and the arts through project based learning and many of the other hands on tactics incorporated by charter schools. I believe the end result achieved will be higher standardized test scores, but I also think emphasis needs to be placed on alternative education methods and avenues of achievement such as essays, projects, and extracurricular accolades.

Provide the “deadline” by which the public comment must be made. (If the date has already passed, please provide when the deadline was).

The deadline to when a public comment can be made is 30 days after the Notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), so in the case of NCLB it would have been 20 days prior to January 2002 or 30 days prior to any current amendment that might be applied to the legislation. As authors note, “congress may specifically require a rule or the initiation of the rulemaking process to flesh out a statutory provision. An agency may itself identify a problem such as an industry behavior that adversely affects consumers. We may have difficulties enforcing existing rules and this may provide evidence of a need to modify the rules” (“Rule Making,” 2013).” The Notice and Comment legislative process involved in amending acts or establishing new policies of agencies follow the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). This process is a standard procedure utilized by agencies to issue statues, agency rules, executive orders or additional requirements of certain policies or regulations. The agency must first start this process by issuing a NPRM, or notice of proposed rulemaking, along with this proposed rule making notice comes a specific amount of time allocated to the public for them to comment on the proposal before their can be a final ruling. In some exceptional cases, notice and comments can be averted or waived for purposes such as emergencies or other “good causes” (“Rule Making,” 2013).

Once you have submitted your comment, what will you be legally entitled to do later in the promulgation process (if you should choose to do so)? 

Once I have submitted a comment on the rule, if I should choose to be present in court, I am legally entitled to challenge the validity of the rule in a court proceeding on the grounds that the rule is capricious, arbitrary or a violation of some other rule.

If the proposal passes, identify and explain the five legal theories you could use in an attempt to have (any) administrative regulation declared invalid and overturned in court.

• One legal theory which can be utilized to challenge an administrative regulation and potentially overturn it is that the rule is arbitrary, a violates another law or exercises an abuse of discretion.

• The second theory that can be utilized to overturn the rule is that the grounds on which the rule is based is not supported by substantial evidence. This basically means that there should be more data supporting the implementation of the rule than the amount of evidence available against its use and value as a societal necessity.
• The third theory recognizes that the rule implementation process can be halted or set aside if it can be proved that the agency did not follow APA requirements of the standard notice of rulemaking, publishing the notice, and allowing time for public comment.
• A fourth argument to overturn the regulation could be that it’s unconstitutional. New rules that allow agencies to violate the constitutional rights of citizens would be unconstitutional if enforced and therefore unenforceable and not valid for implementation.
• A similar reason to number 4 is that instead of the rule being unenforceable because it’s unconstitutional, the rule is just unenforceable because it actually extends beyond the limitations of power held by the agency.

Which of these challenges would be the best way to challenge the regulation you selected for this assignment if you wanted to have the regulation overturned and why?

For No Child Left Behind, I believe the best grounds to overturn the rule would be that there is no substantial evidence to support it. In many case the standardized test companies affiliated with the legislations had lobbyist supporting its implementation and execution. Data shows that the legislation has created an even large learning gap in low income communities, specifically those where African Americans and other minorities reside. Standardized test scores have even been given further accreditation of a measurement for access to higher education making costly standardized prep program vital to access to higher education. No Child Left Behind was implemented with the intention of narrowing the education gaps existing in America from state to state, but the truth is the program has done the opposite, and there is plenty of data to prove this and show that the legislation is arbitrary.

References

Mills, J. I. (2008). A legislative overview of No Child Left Behind. New Directions for Evaluation, (117), 9-20. doi: 10.1002/ev.248

Nichols, D. J. (2005). Brown V. Board Of Education And The No Child

Left Behind Act: Competing Ideologies. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, (1), 151-181. Retrieved from http://www.law2.byu.edu/jel/

“Rule Makinge” (2014). Federal Communication Commission.

The Education Trust. (2004). The ABC’s of AYP: Raising achievement for all students. Retrieved from http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/ABCAYP.PDF