In frustration one day I said to my son, “I can’t believe how many kids around here are graduating and cannot read or write.” What I have noticed in dealing with the public in the last five years is that people who have graduated in the last decade (or about to graduate) have a very difficult time with reading and understanding simple questionnaires. In talking to them I get the impression many of them don’t really understand them when read off to them either. I have seen a few that actually can read and understand the questions, but cannot spell well enough to put down answers. Mostly they are written in texting language. Not everyone speaks text language –me included, which I’m sure irritates those who do. Texting is for telephone messages that are sent like email but shortened for space sake; right? So don’t use it on paperwork.
My son’s reaction to my statement was that it was because of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, I have of course heard of the Act and I knew it was supposedly in place to raise standards of schools and education, but I also knew schools had complained about it for years. What I didn’t know, and suspect neither do a lot of other people, was the exact specifics of the law. He went on to give me the shortened version of it, in his opinion. The No Child Left Behind Act caused schools to make their curriculum steer to the lowest common denominator. (He likes to use mathematical references.) They test the students, see what the lowest level of ability is and teach on that level. That can’t be right. The law was meant to make schools be steadily better by 2014 and would cause them to lose federal funding if they didn’t. That was my understanding. He considered that because of teaching on the lower levels they were dumbing down the population.
I looked up the No Child Left Behind Act on Wikipedia and realized what he said actually was correct in a nutshell. It kind of irritated me that he had dumbed it down to tell me what it involved. School districts have until 2014 to improve their standard measured by test results. They have to improve steadily every year to bring students up to a well educated level. States will lose federal funding for education if they do not show improvement every year. States are allowed to create their own tests.
What the schools did was create tests that were below grade level and slowly inched up the level, but they are still below level. As a result, the tests show improvement. They did essentially what my son said; they dumbed it down to lowest level. Schools are putting efforts into what is on the test and diverting from other subjects that would give a good all around education. They are what is referred to as ‘teaching to the test.’ My son came home and complained about what a joke that test was every year when they made him take it.
There are ten states who have actually asked for relief from the requirement to be improved by 2014 and the president granted them waivers. One more is being considered. According to MSNBC (online) the ten states are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Mexico is under consideration. Twenty-Eight other states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are in line to make requests as well.
One thing I noticed with my kids is that they were bored half to death. Year after year they got the same lessons. In history, for instance, they didn’t get much further than the American Civil War and they barely brushed that. There was a mention for about a week each on the Industrial Revolution and World Wars I and II. Forget about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Space Race. Think how much has happened since then! I believe the children would have stayed more tuned in if the lessons had progressed from year to year. We did that when I was in school. What at one time had been called Americanism versus Communism was changed to Comparative Political Systems and the class lasted for a semester. Granted that could have gone further too, like changing geographical lines of countries and their names and their political systems. World History didn’t get far up the historical chain either and they only got one year of that. Until they got into Algebra, my kids were bored with math and eventually that got old until more challenging subjects were brought in.
Challenge our children with interesting classes and they will respond. Don’t just simply decide they are not bright enough to learn therefore dumb down the tests. There are children with legitimate learning difficulties, but those can be worked around if one changes the way they teach those students. That means not labeling them, but still putting them in a classroom where the same material is covered as the other students, just taught differently. Right now those kids, if at all placed in another setting, are put in ‘Special Education,’ and that carries a stigma that makes the kids feel dumb and they get teased unmercifully for it.
Some of the grounds for the waiver requests are that the students don’t speak English well enough to learn the lessons so they are taught in their language and then they can’t understand the test. Seriously? Hold them accountable to learn the language that may not have been legislatively recognized as the official language of the United States, but it sure is the language we speak. If we were in Mexico, we would have to learn Spanish in order to go to their schools. The same goes for other countries. Don’t use that as an excuse. Another reason is that the kids are poor and cannot relate to the requirements of the tests. They are poor; not stupid. That doesn’t have to go hand in hand. If their parents are uneducated then teach the children so that they can indeed achieve the American Dream of doing better than one’s parents. Parents have to take an interest in their children’s education and make sure they do their homework even if they don’t understand it themselves. After a certain point in Algebra I am totally lost, but I made sure they did the work. Find someone who does understand it if they need help that the parent is at a loss to explain. A kindly neighbor works well if a tutor is not in the cards, and for most of us, it isn’t. This is how parents help their children reach that American dream. Our children are the future, they will run the country and industry. How about we make sure they are up to the challenge? Is it really a 'no child left behind' guarantee, or an 'all children left behind' guarantee?
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