No child left behind act: Implications for the use of information and communication technologies by the school principal

The recent enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) legislation and related laws and regulations at the state and local levels has introduced a new dimension into the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) by school principals. The purpose of NCLBA is to improve school education, and it relies heavily on the collection and analysis of data, primarily data collected from mandated achievement tests to accomplish this. The principal must oversee collection of these data and must also manage them, analyze them, interpret them, formulate school plans based on the data, and make decisions informed by the data. In addition, various reports based on these data must be made to parents, the public, school district officials, and state and federal agencies. Data for the study were gathered by conducting interviews of principals in two large school districts in southwest Florida. These interviews provided insights into how principals are using ICT in meeting these new requirements, identified the software programs and features that they relied upon most often, and how principals applied data-driven decision making in the areas of curriculum and instruction, scheduling, program and teacher evaluation, student discipline and retention, communication with parents, and staffing.