NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND AND ITS EFFECTS ON LANGUAGE POLICY

The law titled No Child Left Behind (NCLB), passed by U.S. Congress in 2001, offers a striking instance of high-stakes educational testing functioning as de facto language policy. Although NCLB is an education policy meant for all students attending government-supported schools in the United States, one of its many consequences is that it has generated numerous language policy by-products in schools, particularly due to its high-stakes testing requirements.1 This article describes how NCLB is shaping language policies in educational contexts, and the overall effects it is having on English language learners (or ELLs, the term currently used in the United States to describe language minority students receiving language support services in school as they acquire English).