No Child Left Behind was suppose to raise the educational standards of the country. I feel that it is an experiment that failed. Maybe it didn’t fail. Maybe it was an experiment to show the disparities between the school systems. The graduation rates are still low even when some of these students “passed” their standardized tests in elementary and middle school. How does this happen?
Most of the urban districts have gone into test preparation mode at the expense of everything else. No Art, No Music, very little physical education, No Theater, No This, No That all because we have to prepare for the test and not end up on the bad list. What about instilling the love of learning into children? What about that?
Growing up, I attended public and catholic school as a child. My mother took me out of public school for 6th-8th grades but I re-entered the public school system in High School because it was a “magnet” high school. I am sure that if charter schools were in existence back then, I would have gone to a charter school for middle school so that she could have saved some bucks. We were not rich by any means, part of the working middle class but my mother valued education and did whatever it took to make sure that I not only attended college but GRADUATED from college.
When I attended catholic school, I don’t remember being tested to death. They gave you one test to determine your achievement level and that was it. Now my catholic school did not have a lot of extra-curricular activities like the neighborhood public middle school that my mother depised, we only had basketball and cheerleading. So I didn’t get a chance to take part in activities such as Academic Games, DAPCEP, Debate Club, Newspaper, etc. in middle school and that is part of the learning experience. BUT I didn’t have to worry about kids disrupting the classroom, metal detectors, peers who were not interested in education, etc.
So not being tested did not make me any less viable then I am today.
Urban schools don’t have the activities and sometime they don’t have the equipment to make learning fun but I have managed to make activities fun and bend rules so that my students can experience activities like other students around the country and world. In Urban Schools if you get too much technology, you might come in one morning to find all of your technology gone and at the pawn shop, this is real people especially during these tough economic times. So everything has to be triple locked up and that doesn’t even prevent some criminals. You would think that the community would watch out for the schools but either they subscribe to a “Don’t Snitch” philosophy, they are benefitting from the thefts or they are numb to the thefts because it happens so much that they just don’t know how to respond.
Therefore NCLB has highlighted the huge differences between the haves and have nots. Now I know in some urban districts people will say that if the money was spend correctly that we could buy everything and more for our classrooms. This is a correct assumption and I agree with you but I know cases where the equipment was bought one year and stolen the next and the major electronic companies will not replace the equipment unless you replace the money.
