No Child Left Behind

In America, slowly and sadly, there are children falling behind in school. They can't focus in school, they aren't motivated to pay attention, or do their homework, and this to parents, who care for their kid's education, fear that this is a big problem. So the Congress supported the bill, and gave it to George W. Bush who was current president, and he signed and approved of it, bringing the No Child Left Behind program into action. This act is basically the schools give their kids a test, and if the schools don't reach a certain score than they have to re-think their teaching. People now are beginning to debate against the No Child Left Behind policy, which in my opinion is very smart.

As productive and as effective as NCLB sounds, to test kids and get them to a smarter level, is a big time waster. Students will spend months and months studying for tests, when they could be learning new curriculum, or reading about current breakthroughs or events. One example is Dena, a high school freshmen who wrote that she spent 2 months learning about root words because it was on the test. She thinks it would be better if we could learn critical thinking, or analyzing events.  Even though I think that root words would be helpful to learn, I think that you shouldn't spend too much time learning about them. I think it's more important to learn new strategies and develop your thinking.

NCLB runs on a budget, printing tests, reviewing the average score,  and hiring people to help with the tests. What I think is that American's shouldn't pay for this, it wastes our money on tests that aren't current, and although the studying for the tests are good review of the whole year, what are the chances that the kids are going to remember what they learnt in the beginning of the year? We should spend money on new curriculum, new text books, new technology. If we are the future, don't you think we should at least invest some money for the new generation? Instead of testing, they should use the money to give us new and updated books, technology, and resources, so that we can challenge ourselves with new thinking. Isn't that more important than testing us? We should be treated like stocks in a sense. If you pay for a share of a stock, you can benefit greatly. They should spend money on us, and educate us, and hope that we can create a better future and solve the current problems that we are debating over.

Students and teachers are beginning to wonder if NCLB testing is really helping. They're spending so much time just learning things for the test and trying to review it. Going over the same books over and over again just to make sure you know everything and lets be honest, it can get tiresome, boring, and it can make it hard to focus. Teachers will have to break it up so that the low achiever kids can understand and the high achiever kids will be challenged. But considering how NCLB makes the teachers teach in a way so that they can't break out of the teaching method so they can't teach by their own ideas. Teaching comes from the latin root  Kids can't learn by books, they can read it, but they can't understand it. To me, it's important to not only read something and learn it, but to understand how it happens and why it happens. I think that's what makes school so interesting. Not the learning (although that can be interesting) but to understand the learning. It's so important that what we read and we understand, because when we understand, we learn.

Although there have been many problems with NCLB, the intentions are positive. They're trying to get teachers to work harder and students to pull their weight at school. However, their approach is wrong and summing up what I have said in my blog post, there should be a better way rather than testing us. It's not like testing was a bad idea, but there are better ideas. Using the money for better technology, resources, teaching curriculum, investing time and money towards us because we are the future.