A Summary of Week 3’s Collaborate Session

This session focuses on the government’s mandate to ensure equal opportunities for all through education as stipulated in the civil rights law. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that was enacted in 1965 had been governing public education to promote equality between the privileged and the less privileged children. This Act underwent regular reviews by the Congress after every period of about five years. In 2001, ESEA was found to be weak in closing the achievement gap that existed between the two classes of children. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was developed and passed in 2002, based on the assertion that every child has the ability to learn and therefore, with the use of standardized tests, schools were held accountable for children’s performance. The call for further educational reforms may have been those that led to the replacement of NCLB by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 by President Obama. The new changes mentioned are those that include transferring the power of sanctioning underperforming schools from the central government to states and a better way of testing students and making schools accountable. This better way is informed to be one, which breaks the yearly tests into smaller tests done in series. Under ESSA, states are supposed to submit how they plan to hold their local schools accountable. Test scores and graduation rates set at 5% and 67% respectively are used as variables that determine the efforts of schools to close the achievement gap. The educational funding processes in regards to ESSA are yet to be finalized by the Congress.

The other contents of the session contain learning tools that help us student to understand American education more and in particular, the NCLB Act. These tools include: interviewing teachers who have taught observing the NCLB Act to be informed of how it has affected their profession, developing an essay that discusses the historical and social contexts that led to the development of the Act, and determining how the findings affect our teaching profession among others