No Child left behind.

It's teaching to the test. It's one-size-fits-all. It is stultifying red tape. And it is especially the funding -- the end goal is supposed to be improvement of schools. If all that is happening is that they are being penalized, without equal proactive efforts -- training existing teachers, attracting good new teachers, providing better materials, etc. -- the sum effect is destructive rather than constructive.

I have mentioned this before, but my own elementary school, which I see as a paragon of public school education, has been decimated by NCLB. It has lost 20% of its operating budget each of the last three years. (20%, then 20% more, then 20% more...) It is a relatively inner-city school that has fantastic, motivated teachers, and a wide variety of students, many of them recent immigrants. I am still in touch with my teachers and with fellow students, and the students are disproportionately "successful" -- doctors, lawyers, artists (actual money-making artists), presidents of this, CEOs of that. This group I am thinking of above includes a boy who was born to a Vietnamese mother and a black American soldier in Vietnam, was ostracized there, and adopted by a white American couple with many other adopted children just a few years before I met him in 2nd grade -- we were together 2nd through 6th grade, and the progress he made was absolutely astounding.

But the thing is, while he personally was making astounding process, recent immigrant children (especially Hmong) were arriving at all grade levels, bringing the average of the whole school down. This law ignores such individual success stories. It's all big picture, broad brush, and doomed to failure.

A couple of months ago I got a notice from my teenage son which said that "Due to provisions in the 'No child left behind' legislation" the school was giving a list of the names and numbers of high school students to a military recruiter.

That night, after listening to the news of a couple more casualties in Iraq, I gained a new perspective on what "No child left behind" means.

(... no, I didn't make this up.)

Wonder if the Bush twins and all their cousins had their names given to a military recruiter? Nah.

ebrown, yoiks.

Nasty little provision, there.