Problems with No Child Left Behind
...f students without sacrificing their well-roundedness? How do you overcome the inequities in the system? Those are just examples. Educating me about No Child Left Behind may be the best teaching job you’ve ever done. You’ve told me that NCLB looks good on paper, but some of it doesn’t work in practice. You’ve said that you don’t have enough money, that you’re abandoning broader curricula to cram for reading and math tests, and that the rural schools where many of you teach simply can’t compete with their more-affluent counterparts. You’ve told me that classes are getting bigger and teachers are being laid off. You’ve asked how you can be expected to control whether students attend school. I don’t have any easy answers for you. I believe that funding is not the only problem, but it’s the single biggest one. In fact, I voted against the funding bill for the Department of Education precisely because it underfunded key programs like No Child Left Behind. But this is one of the toughest budget years in memory. We’re dealing with a huge deficit caused primarily by defense spending for costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The revenue lost because of the president’s tax cut could have been better used to help our school systems. Instead, we’ve shortchanged our children on edu...