Nicklebee

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, is something I thought I'd be vaguely in favor of the idea of without forming a conscious opinion of the actual working mechanics of. The way I am in favor of Milk Duds' existence without having to get them stuck in my teeth more than a couple of times to know they're just not for me. Because who doesn't like caramel and chocolate? Who doesn't like education? Well, clearly under the new definition, I don't, since I have kids getting educated under this law in the public school system in America today.

The Nicklebee Law is a lot like a Milk Dud getting stuck in my teeth. It seems like a good idea at the time, but then I have to live with it, and it's sticking to the filling I had put in when I was 14, and I'm really rethinking that impulse buy. A Snickers wouldn't have stuck to my teeth like this, and would have been a lot more satisfying. Sure, it might have cost more to begin with, but in the end it would have saved me a trip to the dentist and tasted better to boot.

I'm not anti-public schools. I went to (and graduated from) a public school, as did all of the members of my immediate family. We're reasonably intelligent, responsible, well-rounded productive members of society. We're all gainfully employed, tax paying citizens who happily contribute to our IRAs and 401ks and vacation in the USA and complain about having to press '1' for English in our own country. None of us have been guests of the state, county, or federal prison or jail system, even for one night. Several of us have held at least a local public office of some type at some point in our lives, as well as other charitable do-good type giving of our time, effort, energy and money. We've got all sorts of different occupations, skill sets, and income brackets represented. Are we spectacular? Well, we like to think so, but in reality, we're just an average family living in your average small town USA.

So obviously public schools prior to the introduction of nicklebee weren't producing solely crackhead dropout illiterate criminals who found it impossible to procure and maintain gainful employment due to our sadly lacking public education system. In fact, I find it insulting that anyone would blame their own stupidity on the public school system to begin with. If they chose not to show up, sit down and learn something, how is making a fancy new law- that's completely impossible to even understand much less make standard across the country- going to fix that? It isn't. What it is going to do, though, is wreck what could have been a good thing for generations of average families like mine.

I have several very specific complaints with nicklebee that I'm going to bitch about now. It seems as if knowledge is power, and the more I learn about the Act, the less empowered (and more grateful I am for my public school vocabulary and typing skills) I feel.

We're all given buzzwords and catchphrases and we hear things like "Title I Funding", but how many of us know what that really means? Does anyone know that that means my gifted student is going to lose his "extra" program that'll keep him wanting to go to school because another child never learned to read before he got to third grade? Now that they're in third grade, it doesn't matter that my child is reading at a sixth grade level, the teacher (who is overworked and underpaid) has no time to worry about keeping my child interested when he asks a more in depth question about the curriculum because she's busy teaching to the mandatory state testing all of the students will face at the end of the year. If they don't score well, the school will lose even more of the funding, and then she'll be out of a job.

Not only that, but she's also studying for a mandatory Master's degree in her spare time, because at any given time the parents of the students who can't read can come barging in demanding to know what level of education she has (also under nicklebee), and how dare she think she's qualified to teach their precious Johnny anything? Never mind that they should be teaching their own children a little something long before this point so that he's on par with my child when he can't be left behind and manages to get into the same classroom. Thanks, nicklebee.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much prefer my child be taught by a teacher who earned her degree from an accredited school rather than from some mail order internet program while concurrently serving her time as a guest of the state, but frankly, I've met some Ivy league graduates, and I think my fourth grader already has more common sense. You just can't teach that.

I also have issues with standardized testing. This NCLB Act is not standard across the country, but instead each state makes its own tests, and therefore whatever NY decides is important to test, and at whatever grade level, is not automattically going to be the same thing that NC or AK is testing.

Which seems like it would be fine, except that I happen to be of the opinion that we should all know the same things. You know, living in the same country, voting for the same president and all.

Math is math. History is history. As we all have the same country, shouldn't we all have the same facts? Not only that, but curriculums are being wrapped around the tests. Why aren't the curriculums being wrapped around the things we want our children to know, and if we were teaching them those things properly the test scores would reflect that naturally? Instead, we're only teaching them the things we know (or have a reasonable suspicion) will be on the standardized tests. I can't be the only person who thinks that is backwards.

I received in the mail this summer my son's third grade standardized test scores. He had a Reading and a Math test at the end of last year, and pretty much all of the year was spent prepping him and his classmates for this test. He had homework in reading and math every night. Not one night did he bring home any in science, history, or any other subject. It was almost as if photosynthesis ceased to exist as long as he learned to spell it properly, and he didn't need to know who won the Battle of Antietam as long as he could pull the numbers out of the word problem (McClellan had 90,000 men, 23,000 people died....)
So, they spent all of the last year prepping for this standardized testing, and I get the results. My bright child scores literally as high as it is possible to score on the reading test, and well above the average on the math. You'd think this would be wonderful, and I'd be incredibly proud of him, right? Well, not so much. You see, I watched him write the word "read" and then the word "letter", and he spelled them "reed" and "leder", and I *know* my child knows how to spell and write them properly, but he knew it didn't matter, and he knew his spelling and writing weren't going to be called to task because frankly, he's the best speller in his class- even with those errors. Teachers don't care if he's in a hurry and rushed through spelling them properly becuase the standardized tests are all multiple choice, and he always chooses the correct bubble when it comes time to. Always.

So, clearly there's a problem. My child is labelled as "bright" (by the school, not by his biased parents), and he's misspelling "read" and "letter"! Okay, so even bright kids can make a mistake, I'll grant you that. But still, if he's bright, (which he is, but I was proving a point), how big are the mistakes that the children who are not even considered average making? Where has nicklebee gone wrong?

There are other issues I have with NCLB as well.

It calls for a 100% success rate. How realistic is that? Clearly, it isn't. So they adjust the 100% to mean 95%, which is of course what they meant all along. Naturally 5% of the country's population doesn't really matter. Which 5%? Well, whichever 5% doesn't do well, obviously! Also, the schools can allow up to 1% of students to be classified as having disabilities.
Here're where the real problems lie. Let's assume you have a perfectly normal but slightly energetic child. Let's further assume this child is a girl, and for the sake of this argument, we'll call her Catie. Let's pretend this girl-child called Catie is 7, and in second grade. Next year, she'll have mandatory statewide testing in reading and math. So far, she's been a little active but pretty average. Her grades haven't been stellar, but her behavior hasn't been atrocious. She's been, well, average. She's popular, maybe a little too popular. She's cute and friendly, and basically an energetic kid who likes school because it's another opportunity for her to be around people. Learning something is secondary to making friends, which is, again average for a kid that age.

Now, Catie is not a "dumb" child, but she is not academically an overachiever. There's nothing wrong with that- average is good! However, due to NCLB, there's pressure in schools for her to be labelled as "hyperactive", or even "ADHD" because she's at all remotely active during the course of the day. However, slapping a label- any label- guarantees the school more money. So if they find a label that suits her, they can continue to get more funding and continue to show improvement in their "special education" departments. The public school she happens to go to hasn't yet exceeded their 1% quota, and so she won't be taking special education from those who truly need it.

If they had met their quota, those who needed it more or were truly classified as disabled would be bused to another school, also promised under nicklebee (so you can guess who gets to finance that American dream), to get more specialized schooling, and because their parents would be fighting for more specialized classrooms for their children- and I know I'm sounding heartless here, but I'll get to that in a bit. Catie is not at all disabled, but would be labelled as such since the school slapped it on her in second grade to garner more funding and massage their own numbers.

In high school, she'd find it incredibly hard to get into regular classrooms and out of the special education rooms, which would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get into college. Her peers would also see her as the kid needing extra help, or the kid in special classes. This is going to perpetuate a vicious cycle of totally bogus victimization that I am royally sick of. You tell a kid who's 7 that she's disabled in any way, and you keep telling her, for the rest of her life, and by the time she's 18 and ready (trust me, she'll be ready) to forge her own way in this crazy world, she's going to believe she's too disabled to get a decent job. Too disabled to go to college on her own dime. Then she thinks she's going to live on welfare forever-or worse, in her mother's house. See where I'm going with this?

It's a pretty simple concept I have. Stop pounding it into people that they can't do things, and suddenly, they'll stop thinking they can't. Sure, some people really can't. Obviously, a man with no legs isn't going to be able to run a marathon. But you give him the tools he needs- a wheelchair, maybe, or a couple of wooden legs, and off he goes. But if you just tell him he can't, well, he never will.

As a parent, I have to fight the school that's supposed to be on my side, and certainly on the side of my child. All because of money that I, as a tax payer, am providing them to begin with. All because of a really stupid law.

So, to make a really long story short, (I know, about time, right?) I have one child who has been labelled "bright", which apparently does him no good. The very school that does the labelling (with which I happen to agree, in this case) lacks the funding and resources due to this law to afford him any opportunities at all. He gets lost in the daily quagmire of mediocrity and then they are further forced to cut the few programs that used to be designed for the bright children. The gifted program is all but gone, which is unfortunate because they apparently are really happy to have such a child scoring so well for them on their mandatory tests.
Then I have another perfectly average child that the school would really like for me to allow them to call something other than "girl with energy", as they'd get a little more money in their coffers if they had some other label on her. However, I am not so quick to jump on this bandwagon. Her scores on tests and in the classroom are perfectly normal. Her penmanship, spelling, and math are actually much nicer looking than her brother's but she wiggles and is chatty so naturally she could be disabled in some way. Or she could just be a seven year old girl.

In the end, it all boils down to money, and nicklebee should maybe be called pennyisn't.