by Tom Calhoun

Created on: May 05, 2009   Last Updated: May 14, 2009

This is not a protest against NCLB or No Child Left Behind. This is an assessment of what NCLB really is doing to education. There are those that believe that schools should be accountable for what they do with students, and they should be. The problem stems as to how they prove the accountability for their students. First of all let's look at what NCLB is, and then maybe you will see why there is so much resistance to this law. As a teacher for the past 15 years the opportunity to teach without NCLB and still be accountable to my supervisors to the methods used and the results of those methods made me accountable for what my students were learning and how they were able to apply such to real world experiences. NCLB has taken the real world applications out of the teaching arena, and has replaced it with dummy down curriculum so that administrators can keep their jobs and show on paper how well their schools are doing. This measure of success is from a test that means nothing in the real world, but a test that compares every student in their particular group, such as all 5th graders are compared to all other 5th graders no matter if they are special ed or regular ed. The other factor here is that by making such a comparison they are creating a scenario that puts those that are very high into a mix of those that are very low and this skews the numbers. In order to fix this administrators must do one of two things. Dummy down the curriculum so all fit the mold, or be put into school improvement and take the chance of losing their students to another school that may not be in school improvement. Dummy down curriculum means teaching to the test, and this is what is happening.

For NCLB to be effective and useful the government must understand that not everyone is capable of acquiring 100% compliance on any test, and that the test may not measure what they really know or can do any way, but gives some adminstrator a way of keeping their overpaid job, and costs someone else that is doing their job to lose not only the job of teaching but their credibility as well. Why is it the teacher loses in this NCLB game, they are only doing what they are told to do knowing it's not good for the student, but they are just like everyone else in the schools; they too are just trying to keep their job. Where does that leave the students, they are truly being left behind. The students are being used as pawns in a losing game called NCLB

Now how does this help students to be better prepared for the real world? How can anyone that has ever worked with kids in a learning environment ever admit that a standardized test measures anything, but that a particular child can take a test or cannot take a test. To prepare a student for the real world and keep up with what is going on as part of the solution to our world economic woes and to bring real brilliance back into this country it takes a little more than accountability. It takes real world experiences that have meaning to the students. If to just teach to a test is called accountability then this country has a real big problem. NCLB is just that: teach the test so the school will not be put on school improvement and forget about what really matters, educating kids. That means to be able to survive in the real world and to question what our government does, not to be followers but to be leaders in a very demanding world. NCLB should be about educating our children not teaching them how to pass a meaningless test.

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