No Child Left Behind’s Implementation in Urban School Settings: Implications for Serving Students with Emotional and Behavior Disorders

Although the prospect of schools being held to higher achievement standards, and thus producing better student outcomes, is universally appealing, to date very little is known about NCLB‟s actual impact on student outcomes. Further, despite the enormous number of books, book chapters, and articles describing its legal and conceptual underpinnings, little is known about the NCLB‟s practical implications for how we educate groups of students targeted in the Act (Rose & Gallup, 2003), and particularly one of its target groups: students with disabilities. For example, there appears to be little if anything in the extant literature, some five years after its enactment, regarding the implications the Act has for students identified as having emotional and or behavioral disorders (EBD), particularly those students served in urban school settings. Thus, our intent in this paper is to briefly review the major principles of NCLB and then to provide a context and discuss implications for NCLB‟s role in improving educational and social outcomes for students identified as emotionally and behaviorally disturbed (EBD) who are being served in urban school environments.