No Child Left Behind Act,

¶ … No Child Left Behind Act, legislation purportedly aimed at providing better support to schools -- both financially and through increased access to other resources and clearer guidelines -- could easily prove itself to be more of an encumbrance to local districts and schools than it was a benefit. These fears are outlined in Anne C. Lewis' article "New Congress Should First Do No Harm" in the February 1999 issue of the Phi Delta Kappan. Noting the supposed increase in the number of Congressman elected in the 1998 election cycle who were "pro-schools" and "pro-children" (as opposed to those who made their hatred for children and education well-known, of course), she displays a definite fear that in attempting to good, and more importantly in attempting to give the public the appearance that they are doing good, this Congress would become too engaged in reform and not realize the importance of existing programs and methods.

This was not the Congress that passed the No Child Left Behind Act (nor was the executive who pushed it through sitting in the White House), but this piece of legislation ahs justified these fears in the minds of many people. The need to provide simple and basic instruction is not fashionable -- isn't sexy enough, to paraphrase Lewis -- for it to become a matter of legislation or of strong public attention and sentiment. No one is going to get elected, in short, for promising to make sure children entering high school can write a grammatically correct sentence -- or to make sure they can do so before graduating from high school, for that matter. And so we have a system of intensive reform and a generation of students who are entering adult who cannot write grammatically correct sentences.

The issue is fairly straightforward, and it does not require special teaching theories or extensive legislation in order to be corrected. Students are being failed at a young age and throughout school by a system that is so intent on finding ways to show progress that it stops paying attention to any real measures. This problem is exacerbated by funding that is performance-dependent, as it only leads to the inflation of assessment scores. This not only helps to masks issues on a national level, but it fails countless individual students who deserve a better education than the one they are being allowed to skate by with. Reform is wonderful when it is useful, but when it is a tool for legislatures, administrators, and educational theorists to feel like they are getting things done, it becomes far more destructive than simply letting things continue unhindered would.