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I knew that No Child Left Behind was very unpopular before I experienced it firsthand, but when I encountered it myself in the first week of student teaching, I understood, and I began to loathe it.

The classes that I did my student teaching in had some inclusion students as well. One girl could function with assistance, but she was borderline mentally retarded. When I had to start grading their essays which were practice to prepare them for the state tests, my co-op teacher pointed out to me that, while her general assignments were graded differently in the classroom (taking into account that her condition obviously required that she wasn't able to turn in the same calibre of work that some of her classmates in the gifted and talented program did), her essays had to be graded the same as her classmates'.

This bothered me for the rest of the day. I felt like I was doing this poor girl an injustice by grading her in a way I knew she wasn't capable of performing. This is when I realized how unfair No Child Left Behind was, and that it WAS, in fact, leaving all kinds of children behind.

Now as a teacher with my own class and my own students being graded and judged by standards that some will simply never be able to meet, I realize that while the idea might be good on paper, when it's not funded properly, it's not going to work. There are areas of the act that aren't being utilized the way they need to be.

The biggest concern that I have with this act is that it's created by politicians. What in the world do politicians know about what's going on in a classroom? They have a very idealistic sense of what's going on in our schools, but they're not there every day to experience it firsthand. Until they are, they have no business reauthorizing the bill.

Learn more about this author, Renee DeCoskey.
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