The role of sacrifice in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002: A critical enquiry through a Roberto Calasso and Michel Foucault framework

The purpose of this Critical Enquiry was to determine, through the application of a deconstruction framework consisting of Roberto Calasso's notions of correspondence, convention, and sacrifice, the purpose and implementation discourses that constitute the character of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The Calasso Model for Critical Enquiry evaluated the discourses associated with NCLB to determine if the discourses of NCLB are consistent with furthering the fundamental democratic ideals of access and equity that both explicitly and implicitly form the character of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA).;The Calasso Model for Critical Enquiry defined correspondence as a controlling thought or belief from a sovereign authority. A second level correspondence specified what actions were needed by whom to complete the first level correspondence. A convention contained the technical instructions necessary to fulfill the mandates of the correspondence. The model defined sacrifice as the people who willingly accepted the correspondence but failed to achieve any benefit from the actions.;This dissertation determined that NCLB is a new second level correspondence because it fundamentally changed the language of ESEA. Students taking mandated standardized tests are sacrificed to NCLB because they do not benefit from the testing, which has the purported purpose of improving the educational system and not the education of the child. The democratic ideals of access and equity are not promoted by NCLB because of the implied restrictions and pre-determining of worth implied from standardized testing.