"Many Children Left Behind" Commentary

In Dave's US Government Thought, the blogger takes on the subject of education and the No Child Left Behind Act, more specifically. He criticizes the required standardized tests and the money that schools must waste giving them. While I feel that Bush thought he was doing something good when he passed this law, I think that there are many things that should be improved on it.

It's been a year and a half since I've been in high school, but I doubt anything has changed in that small amount of time. I think that the idea of standardized tests overshadows the idea of teaching in high school. For those in AP classes students aren't so much learning, they're memorizing facts and dates and fretting about what the specified essay is going to have them talk about. The multiple choice aspect of these standardized tests is also flawed because it focuses on what the students don't know -- not what they do know. I myself did the International Baccalaureate program in high school. It's talked about as the step above AP and feared by many as far as difficulty goes. But the truth is (besides the 150 community service hours and many extra papers/projects), I feel that this program is in a way easier because of the formatting of the standardized tests. With a few exceptions, the tests are all essay. Not just that, but students are usually given a couple of choices for essay. In this way the students are getting to show the grader what they really do know, which I think is extremely important considering the sheer volume of information high school expects you to swallow. And you know what? Only three out of over thirty students at my school who went through this two-year program failed to receive enough points on their tests to get their IB diploma. This is opposed to the half of my Spanish IV class (including me) who did not pass the Spanish AP test. That being said, I got a 2/4 on my Spanish AP test and a 6/7 on my Spanish IB test. I feel like something is wrong with that.

I'm not particularly in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act because it encourages a system that focuses on what we do not know, when school should be about so much more than that. It gives teachers less room to inspire and makes school unbearable at times. There are some areas, such as Math and Science, that are harder to make exciting, but I've had teachers that can do it with a fun project or presentation. The fact is that we are given so much to learn on such a tight schedule that there is no room to stray from the syllabus. I think that if kids are more interested in what they are learning, the test scores would show it. However at a high school level I think that many choose for themselves whether they want to succeed or not. In this sense the No Child Left Behind Act would better serve if it focused on those who really needed it. This money should be used to create new programs for those who aren't taking AP or IB classes, because (I know I'm risking coming off as high and mighty) those are the kids who usually need it the most.