The law mandates universal "proficiency" in math and reading by 2014 — a deadline that weighs heavily on educators around the nation, since schools that don't meet it face stiff penalties.
Last year, every senior passed a proficiency test, mandated by the state, that permits them to graduate.
Focusing on Douglass High, documentarians Alan and Susan Raymond detailed [in their 2008 HBO documentary Hard Time at Frederick Douglass High] the realities of both day-to-day schooling in a high-poverty, majority-minority public schools and the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), enacted in 2001 with 100% proficiency requirements mandated for 2014.
Now, imagine you're a teacher at one of these urban area schools and your job depends on the ability of a class, full of students like the one above, to take and pass a proficiency test mandated by the federal government.
The initiative includes a marketing campaign, an audit of the hiring process, and mandated professional learning about cultural proficiency for all employees.
But, he said, "what I object to and continue to object to is the federal department virtually coercing states into it" by requiring "college- and career-ready" standards to qualify for grants and waivers releasing states from the most onerous conditions of No Child Left Behind, which mandated that all students reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014.
Point-of-care A1C assays, for which proficiency testing is not mandated, are not sufficiently accurate at this time to use for diagnostic purposes.
Some 208 students were not tested for language ability, the Chancellor went on, and 124 students with limited English proficiency were not receiving a mandated bilingual program or a course in English as a second language.
Chowan did not require the English-proficiency exam that was then widely mandated for international students, so foreign enrollees often spent a semester or two there to improve their English, then transferred to four-year universities.
The pressure intensified in 2002 with the enactment of the federal testing law No Child Left Behind, which mandated high-stakes standardized exams that were supposed to bring every child to "proficiency" by the year 2014.
