no child left behind

RALEIGH – Public school students in North Carolina face a growing number of course options, regardless of federal No Child Left Behind standards. That’s a key finding in a new…

In the era of No Child Left Behind, students have not been discouraged from enrolling in courses other than language arts and mathematics. Both the number of class periods and the number of students enrolled in most courses has increased in concert with enrollment growth. Nevertheless, elementary foreign languages and middle school health and physical education courses have been on the decline.

RALEIGH – Smaller class sizes do not translate into better public-school performance. That’s the key finding in a new analysis from the John Locke Foundation. The idea behind the state’s…

In November, the State Board of Education released the final report of the High Priority Schools Initiative, a four-year, $23 million class-size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools. The report offered no statistical evidence that smaller class sizes raised student achievement. Between the first and final year of the program, fewer schools met their state ABC growth targets and even fewer made Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Reduced class sizes failed to significantly increase student performance on state reading assessments. In the future, legislators and policymakers should not fund class-size initiatives because of their expediency or popularity but because they produce measurable gains in student achievement.

RALEIGH — Groups representing some teachers and school boards in North Carolina are forming a coalition to urge changes to the federal No Child Left Behind bill, but the leader…