How can a teacher say that it is acceptable to leave a child behind? The answer to this question is what some politicians count on: teachers cannot and would not say that they would want to leave a child behind. Nevertheless, we suffer punitive damages if we fail to catch any student who falls through the cracks or slips out under our careful watch. As teachers, most of us already do everything we can to keep every child caught up and moving along with the collective group. However, what about the child who chooses to be left behind? In my state, the students take standardized tests that have no importance for many of them: their scores do not directly affect them, and they will not suffer any consequences for drawing Christmas trees on their answer sheets. Sure, we patrol the testing rooms and escort disinterested students to the dean's office, but we cannot physically make the students do their best work.

Similarly, what about the student who comes to my school as a sophomore? Even though his previous education has been broken up by his family's frequent movement around the country, including that semester when he "just didn't go to school," he still has to be proficient on an exam that we have never had the opportunity to prepare him for. This challenge is made even greater if his first language is something other than English.

Most teachers could go on forever listing their concerns about NCLB. Some of these concerns deal with the rigidity of the system: one set of standards cannot be applied to all students, for instance. Other concerns deal with the lack of consistency in the system: a neighboring state might administer relatively easy standardized tests while my own chooses to challenge students to a greater extent. Yet we are all measured according to our Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), regardless of how we measure that progress.

I teach in a diverse school with a geographical location that brings in students from a wide variety of sub-groups. This year, our high school failed to make AYP because of the scores of the students in the special education and economically disadvantaged categories. The other two high schools in the city have the great luck, at least when it comes to NCLB, of not having enough students to constitute even one sub-group - or so they report. We in the middle-city school have our doubts about the accuracy of their reporting, but we are too busy trying to figure out ways to leave no child behind to concern ourselves with the fairness of the system. Fortunately, I would choose to work at an amazing high school any day, even if it does not meet somebody else's definition of annual yearly progress.

In conclusion, while some of the theories of NCLB are well-intended, I would suggest that the politicians include teachers in the revision process. Unfortunately, neither politicians nor administrators can speak as accurately about what goes on in our classrooms as the teachers who "bring up" the rear on a daily basis.

Learn more about this author, Kate McGuiness.
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