I seem to feel that the more I read about the No Child Left Behind act, the more I feel it was not to help lower-income, lower-performing schools. The whole premise behind the act, to ensure that no child is left behind, seems to be difficult for a school which will have a 93% graduation rate. The idea of trying to take a school which has a 45% graduation rate to 100% just seems utterly ridiculous. I understand they would have a significant amount of time to achieve this goal, but why would President Bush’s plan be any better implementing new teaching styles for students to learn from than any other previous plan.
With that being said, I see that a significant amount of people aren’t happy with the “teaching to the test” and the “standardized testing”, but if the Federal government is to allocate funds evenly to schools, what other way would they have to measure which schools are performing better than others besides this? I’m not sure there is an answer to this question. People have brought up taking grades from the individual classes, but who says that teachers can’t (or haven’t already) dumbed down their own curriculums, especially if funding for their school is on the line.
The only solution I seemed to find, is giving every state a specific amount of funding per student, regardless of whether or not the teachers/students perform. Of course, this would probably make a lot of people angry, especially if teachers weren’t performing up to par with another teacher yet getting the same amount of cash/student allocated to their school, but I truly can’t come up with another answer.
My question stems from my first argument I made regarding a possible motive behind the implementation of the NCLB act. Could President Bush possibly have implemented this program, knowing that many lower income areas that aren’t performing well wouldn’t be able to meet such a goal?
