No Culture Left Behind?

Campus Report ^ | September 27, 2007 | Nirmala Punnasami

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No Culture Left Behind?

by: Nirmala Punnasami, September 27, 2007

At this stage in the history of education in this country, most education analysts who focus on the federal No Child Left Behind Act prefer to “assess time allocation” and the strengths and weaknesses of this controversial piece of federal legislation, but Terry Stoops , the Education Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina- based “think tank,” compares “course enrollment to student enrollment growth,”referring specifically to what is happening with education in North Carolina.

For the academic year 2000 to 2001, North Carolina Public Schools offered students over 450 courses. This number increased to 500 courses in the school year 2005-2006 and includes “Afro-American Studies, American Indian Studies, Contemporary Issues in North Carolina, Geography in Action, Latino Studies,” and a wide range of other subject areas.

Ironically, there has also been “a notable decline in elementary school foreign language courses between 2005 and 2006,” Stoops reports. “In the elementary schools, since 2000, there has been a drop by 23% in the enrollment in these classes.” According to Stoops, “problems with staffing foreign language courses are probably one reason why this has occurred.” In middle schools, while the student enrollment for this period from 2000 to 2006 has increased by 12 %, the enrollment in foreign languages went up by 7 %.