"No Child Left Behind, No Child Leaps Forward"

Not really sure where this blog is going to go, but here it is...

Has anyone ever heard of the "No Child Left Behind Act"? It is an American act involving its public school system. The above link is from the U.S. Department of Education. Here is a wikipedia link. From what I've been able to gather, it seems like an act with the right intentions, using the right words, but in practice is stifling those it affects.

It basically states that it wants every child to reach a certain proficiency in their classes once they graduate. This is determined through standardized state testing that the students must go through. The goal is to have every student proficient (in core subjects? all? not too sure) by the year 2012 or something like that. This includes minority groups, low income, and disabled children. This is actually a noble idea however, in the end it reminds me of affirmative action. Its true that minorities etc.. get the shaft, but these programs seem to have difficulty taking action where it needs to be but ease at places where it may be a hindrance. Now schools must make sure that they have kids passing, and may even make the tests easier so as not to garner the attention of the higher ups. I've already read that they have increased the science and math portion, while cutting back on other things such as phys. ed.

Regarding testing, I found an interesting link on the U.S. Department of Education site. It lists at the bottom testing myths. After reading this I just had to go, huh?! The answers to those myths seem to be mislabelled "reality", as it is more in line with "in theory". They also didn't really give solid answers, but just seem to say "thats not true!" and moved on.

This leads me to the other big test, the I.Q. test. A long time ago, a psychologist wanted to be able to identify schoolchildren who may be developmentally challenged so resources could be directed to help them as early as possible. It wasn't about finding the smartest or the best, it was about finding who needs help. The problem is, once you found out who needed help, you then labelled them. Those who did really well must be smart, so obviously those who did poor must be the opposite, stupid. And once a label sticks to you, sometimes people go out to try and help you, or the label provides them other information so they can "deal" with you.

Another that I've seen is to hold teachers accountable. What a concept! For all the great, wonderful teachers, there are also some that should be fired but won't be unless there is gross misconduct. The flaw is that this is based on how their classes do on the exams. Clearly this may be unfair when for example they may teach classes with kids in a lower academic stream.

Now there are plenty of other critiques, but I won't put them here. I'll just say that at least the core of this act is to say, "right now our school systems need to get better" and I think that is a good step. But its not like there is a great need for American math scores to beat Japanese math scores at the grade 5 level. Hopefully they can keep tinkering with the act to get it right...

Thats all for now... oh yeah, if you're bored try this "I.Q." test from CBC. Although, it is clearly broken since I got a 111 while Maggie got 126... =P