Chapter 5

This chapter gives us a good look into the No Child Left Behind Act and it”s attempt to privatize education. This is one of the many failures of the No Child Left Behind Act which hurt education a lot more than it helped it. The idea behind privatizing education is that performance would be better. No Child Left Behind introduced new levels of accountability which had never been a part of the American educational system. The idea was to improve the graduation rates and the overall performance of the students but the issue is it was not really about what the students were going to learn. NCLB introduced a lot of standardized testing which limited to an extent what the students were learning. Meier argues that our students from grades 3-8 are being overtested. They are not really having their knowledge tested because for the most part the things they learn one year usually become irrelevant the next one. Test taking does not really measure success for our students, some children are just naturally better at performing on tests than others, it does not make the one who did better on the test smarter. The teachers are forced to teach strictly to the test, and students will not learn things that will not appear on the test. Many children are just left to learn test taking techniques instead of the some of things kids learn in other countries. How can these tests be used to determine the intelligence of our youth when the subject matter on these tests barely sticks with the students once they have taken the test. Privatization of schools is a very touchy subject as the standards for the students would have to change but just because the schools become privatized it does not mean that they will become successful overnight, as all the problems with education they simply cannot be fixed in a day.