In The News Issue Review: No Child Left Behind Act
Written by: Deborah Binkley-Jackson, Gifflene C. Charles and Danny Johnson

Issue Summary
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act is a nationally created law that requires educational achievement through various accountability measures for K-12 educational institutions in the US.  The act contains the President's four basic education reform principles: stronger accountability for results, increased flexibility and local control, expanded options for parents, and an emphasis on teaching methods that have been proven to work (AACTE Education Policy Clearinghouse, 2005; U.S. Department of Education, 2004). One of the major reasons for the NCLB act was to close the achievement gap. The NCLB act of 2001 was signed by President Bush on January 8, 2002 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Since then, the educational achievement gap between minority students and their peers in K-12 education has improved.  The improvement is due in large part to the new federally mandated requirements placed on state school systems. 
One measure of improvement is through federally required yearly testing in math and reading for grades 3-8 (U.S. Department of Education, 2005). This is an example of the stronger accountability for results that was created by the NCLB act.  Another example of improvement measures is the ability of the parents to move their children out of schools that are failing to perform in academics.  Many other requirements have been incorporated into the NCLB act and are far beyond the scope of our paper.   In this paper, we will give a brief overview of the stakeholders, available resources, the IT connection, local and national impact and areas of concern.

Stakeholders
Since, the NCLB act is a federal act, requiring all school systems to comply with testing requirements, the entire nation of students, teachers, administrators, parents and educational professionals could be considered its stakeholders. The NCLB was created to lessen and eventually remove the achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and their advantaged peers.  By looking at the issue of needed improvement by minority students one can easily make the assumption that the NCLB act works towards improving minority students’ educational abilities and not the common misconception of devaluing their peers’ educational abilities.

Resources
Both proponents and opponents of the No Child Left Behind Act have provided to the general public, information in support of their views. Articles, papers and websites (American Federation of Teachers, 2005; MiddleWeb) abound.  Many of these entities include school districts, the Government and advocacy groups. Separate searches of Google news (Google, 2006a) and Google scholar (Google, 2006b) returned thousands of pages of news items, journal articles and books relating to the subject. This availability of different sources of information provides the reader with different perspectives on the issue. Some groups in the forefront of this issue include the Aspen Institute, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Government entities, rally for the act and tout its benefits, while those groups that are affiliated with educators and schools bring attention to its limitations.

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