The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) Essay

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) - Essay Example Student achievement in the most fundamental academic skills continued to decline, especially in low-income school districts. Therefore, the ESEA was designed to serve as a funding source for elementary and secondary education in the United States was designed to provide funding for better educational resources, allocate funding for public schools with a need for additional financial support and provide government-sponsored grants that would enhance the quality of state departments of education. Over the decades since the inception of ESEA, it was determined that revision of the ESEA was required to meet the needs of contemporary students in America. This need led to the implementation of the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 in the Clinton administration and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 which both enhanced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to make educational reform more relevant for modern academic needs. However, there is still a need for further educational reform that surpasses the relevancy of the NCLB as there are measurable deficiencies related to this Act. This essay explores the issues associated with NCLB which mandate further revisions to this Act in order to fully address the problems in today’s public school districts. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whilst a valuable piece of legislation to ensure higher quality of education, fails to address certain issues in today’s society. This revision to the ESEA does not properly address the goal of promoting bilingualism. In many of today’s public schools, there is a measurable shortage of educators with the proficiency and training to provide bilingual learning for children in elementary and secondary schools. It is estimated that there are nearly 5.1 million students in need of English-as-a-second-language instruction throughout the United States (Cuellar, De la Colina and Battle, 2007). With growth in migrant children now enrolled in public schools