Children still being left behind

My sister teaches high school kids back in my hometown and, just as I suspected, many of the teachers socialize together and talk about school in their free time. After one of these gatherings, my sister called to tell me a joke that touched on a sore subject for many of her colleagues.

One morning a mother calls up her daughter's school to tell the principal that her daughter is running late and might miss the bus.

"Is there any way you can change the schedule so she can be picked up last and won't get another tardy?" the mother asks.

"I'm sorry, but that would be completely unfair to all the other students on the route if we rescheduled just because your daughter is running late," the principal replies.

In a huff, the mother scoffs, "Well, what about 'No Child Left Behind?'" and hangs up.

It may seem like a corny joke, but many of the parents my sister deals with share the same misunderstanding about the No Child Left Behind Act. She gets things from parents telling her it is illegal to fail their child, attempting to force her to change her curriculum so it's easier. My sister has heard a pretty hilarious (to me) range of what parents believe the law entails.

Sadly, it's not even the parents misunderstanding of the law that really gets to most teachers I know. In all honesty, I've never met a single teacher that thought that No Child Left Behind was a good idea or should even still be around. President Barack Obama promised a plan to reform the law to include more accountability to teachers, more power on the part of the parents and better distribution of funds. But you know what? At this point it just comes across as putting makeup on a pig. No matter how much eyeliner you use, it's still a pig deep down.

All I've seen from the No Child Left Behind Act is more kids being taught to take one specific test and not being shown how to absorb information. When I was in school, parents claimed that grades were no way to judge students because there were different types and levels of intelligence (an idea I get behind in theory but it's pretty hard to practice).

With how terribly schools are at attempting to keep up with the strict standards of No Child Left Behind, I think a lot of these kids would benefit more from a slightly flawed grading plan than the disastrous results many schools are seeing from forced learning at the end of the year. In fact, many students, like myself, do worse on standardized tests than in regular classes.

Additionally, if you look at the statistics on how many schools meet these criteria in order to receive funding in places like Pitt and Wake Counties, you'll notice that even the so-called "elite" high schools that pump out students who head out with full in-state scholarships or acceptance to Ivy League schools, they still don't measure up. It's a Catch-22. Schools need funding in order to help kids pass the end of year tests but the kids need to pass the end of year tests in order to receive the funding.

It seems that in an attempt to prepare students for college and the real world, the former administration lost track of the kind of well-rounded education children need and instead focused on countable results that never actually meant anything. I'm hoping that, instead of reform, Obama will just scrap the entire thing and go back to the lesser evil we were using beforehand.

At least it'll get rid of all the bad jokes.

This writer can be contacted at opinion@theeastcarolinian.com.