I believe your long editorial in praise of the No Child Left Behind Act neglects two crucial elements involved in public education.
The first is the simple reality that families are more powerful than schools.
Families should be more powerful than schools, but when children show up at school incredibly unready to learn, it is unrealistic and unfair to blame schools when they cannot fix problems far beyond their scope.
This is not “defeatism,” as your editorial suggests. As an experienced teacher, I could give you hundreds of examples where the exhaustive efforts of teachers to help a student achieve academic success have been torpedoed by parental indifference, neglect and even outright hostility.
The second neglected element involves testing, which your editorial rightly calls “the crux of the law.”
The problem here is that it is absurd to use a single standardized test to measure a student’s learning.
First and foremost, standardized tests measure the ability of students to take standardized tests, not their mastery of the subject matter being tested. Schools know this, and therefore the pressure is on to eliminate valuable learning experiences in favor of practicing how to perform on standardized tests.
In addition, students are not held personally accountable for their own test scores. When my 7th graders take the ISAT tests next month, whether they try their best or treat it as a joke will make absolutely no practical difference to their lives. If you know anything about middle-school-age children, you know that this is not a good situation.
I realize that public schools have done many stupid things and can certainly be improved. Unfortunately from what I have seen so far, the No Child Left Behind Act is creating more mischief than help, and its potential for further harm is significant.
