A new comprehensive research study, first available from the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, argues that No Child Left Behind has not damaged teachers’ opinion of their profession, as many might have expected. In fact, according to Vanderbilt professor Jason A. Grissom, “Over the time spanning the implementation of No Child Left Behind, the teachers’ job satisfaction was actually going up; teachers’ intent to remain in the profession was going up.” The research study is called “Estimating the Effects of No Child Left Behind on Teachers and Their Work Environment.”
While it is certainly true that other surveys have portrayed teachers’ generally negative portrayal of NCLB, the researchers in this study contend that those surveys are flawed by the fact that most tended to ask teachers to recall past elements of teaching based on value-judgment statements rather than asking specific questions about current teaching issues.
To combat this problem with many surveys, this survey used data from a nationally representative sample of 140,000 public-school teachers collected by the National Center for Education Statistics every four years from 1993 to 2008. This way, they had data from years before NCLB as well as years after, so they could accurately gauge possible changes in opinion.
The survey does not say that teachers find everything to be more positive since NCLB, but the picture is certainly not as bleak as is often made out. In particular, some measures of job satisfaction, including classroom control and teachers’ perceptions of administrator support, have increased on average since the implementation of the legislation.
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