Is No Child Left Behind Making the Grade?

While the No Child Left Behind program has reports of great success, some children fall through the cracks and are left behind.  I perceive the gap as widening.  There are more children lacking skills for everyday life now than there ever were before.  We are trying to close the achievement gap our country has compared to other countries.  Before we can do this we need to go back to the basics.  Before we put pressure on our children to excel in everything else we need to ensure that they are proficient in the basics.  No Child Left Behind is the wrong way to fix the problems of the education system.  It is in need of a fix itself. 

While our government is putting a lot of money into special programs to help educate our youth we are still falling short of the mark as far as making the grade.  Our youth can not function without the help of a computer and/or a calculator.  Our children are graduating out of high school knowing less than we did when we graduated.  Other countries have education programs that exceed far beyond where ours reach.  America’s youth have become lazy and uncaring when it comes to knowledge.  They no longer read books, but revert to looking it up on the internet.  We have created a generation of chat room junkies downloading music and chatting on computers daily.  Teens no longer spell out words; they use symbols and codes to text message and instant message friends.  They have become proficient at cheating instead of learning.  More and more I see children that can not count back the correct amount of change without a computer or cash register telling them what amount should be given back.  Sadly, they still make mistakes.

The tutoring programs put in place are a technicality to show that schools are complying with the law.  I have experienced how this system works.  My daughter goes to tutoring after school and is told she can do any homework she has at this time, and if she doesn’t have homework she can go ahead and leave.  No one is helping her with the things she doesn’t understand or needs help with.  The tutoring program is a glorified study hall with no personal help at all. Our government sees it as a tutoring program put in place to help children to progress with their academic achievements.  It is a joke and the students do not take it seriously.  They know that there is no help for them in tutoring. 

Accountability for academic progress is put on the shoulders of the school.  If a child is failing the school is accountable for ensuring that the child will pass and even excel academically.  This is especially true if the child is a minority.  If the school doesn’t show a success rate for the minorities in their school system they will be put on the Needs Improvement List.  If the school remains on this list two years in a row they must offer the parents of children in their school the option to attend a passing school.  The receiving school does not get additional funding for the extra students that they will take on nor can they refuse to take them.  If they have to hire additional teachers and get additional classrooms they will have to fund the extra expense.  I don’t know of any schools that can afford to do this.  As it is, federal funding is only allowing them one dollar for every three dollars it is costing to implement this law into our school systems. 

 Moving a child from one school to another is stressful for the student as well as costly for the parent.  The parents will have to find a way to get their child to this new school, and it is difficult for a student that is already failing to go to a new school where they know no one and have to try to understand and/or catch up with the class work.  The new school may be ahead in their curriculum which makes the student feel even more lost.  If this child is from a poor district and they are sent to a rich school district, how will the children treat this new student?  Would this help or hurt this child?  Is anyone looking at how this will psychologically affect these children?  Do they care? Honestly, children can be cruel these days and our children have enough pressure on them without adding more.  Let’s not forget Columbine and how the cruelties of a few led to children loosing their lives.  Our children need a learning environment they can feel comfortable in.   Overcrowding another school is not the answer to this problem.

By making the schools accountable for the progress of every child while tying in funding for success, you have forced the schools into passing kids that aren’t progressing as quickly as others which in turn make them fall further behind.  No Child Left Behind has taught our schools and teachers that if you have students that aren’t passing, give them something trivial to do for extra credit and pass them for doing it.  While extra credit is good for someone trying to bring up a low grade, it should not be used as a tool to pass someone who obviously learned nothing all year and has no understanding of the subject.  I have experience this atrocity first hand in ev­ery level of school.  In elementary school my step-daughter was having trouble.  They put her in special-ed.  That really didn’t help so they passed her on to Junior High School.  When she didn’t do well there either, they gave her extra things to do.  One teacher told her to stay late, help clean up the classroom, and clean the chalk board.  She would then receive enough extra credit to pass the class.  Another teacher told her to go downtown to an art exhibit they had on display. She was to write a small blurb about what she saw, what she thought about it, and she would be passed.  I saw the paper she turned in and the spelling was atrocious, yet she passed. 

Finally in high school she was failed and was about to fail the same grade for a second time until she tried to kill herself.  The pressure of being behind the other students was getting to her.  Now the teachers are passing her again.  She doesn’t take her books to class and does no homework. At this time she is reading at a third grade level and doing math at a fifth grade level.  This child was left behind a long time ago.  What help is there for her now?  Schools can’t stop and teach her now.  How would they explain her getting this far knowing so little?  Wouldn’t that mean that they were not successful?  How many more children like her are out there?  If a school were to actually admit that they have students that can’t read or write they would be jeopardizing their federal funding and that just isn’t going to happen.  They simply pass them on to the next level and let the next teacher worry about them.

Being a parent of a minority child, it is my duty to inform you of what it actually does do to the children that need help and are falling behind in our country.  My child goes to a prominent, well thought of school in the wealthier school district of the city we live in and is not receiving the academic help she deserves.  The problem has been handed from grade to grade and they are hoping to pass her on through the system soon so that the problem will no longer be theirs.  Most of you believe that the No Child Left Behind law is giving low-income and minority students the educational attention that they need and deserve.  You all recognize that it needs to be tweaked and falls short of your expectations but you feel that it is doing what it was put in place to do.  Although No Child Left Behind was a nice thought, it falls short of helping the children it was set up to help.  It is time that you untie the hands of the school systems and let them get back to the basics.  Every child needs to at least be proficient in the basics.  Schools shouldn’t have to be afraid to say they have a problem and need help.  Punishing the schools that ask for help by cutting funding is wrong.  The extra funding should actually go to the schools with the problems to allow them to get more help and better equipment.  By helping the schools that are on the Needs Improvement List instead of punishing them we will better serve our children’s educational needs. If we take a stand now and ensure that the schools that need help receive it we will bring a brighter future for all students.  Only then will we truly have No Child Left Behind.