Thomas J. West Music

I have been an opponent of the No Child Left Behind Act  since its inception in 2001. While it brought needed accountability to our public education system, its methods and financial penalties have, in my thirteen years of experience as a public educator, been far more detrimental than helpful.

The following was collected on Facebook from a fellow band director. It illustrates the illogical thinking and legislative misuse that constitutes NCLB. Public schools' product: well-rounded, self-sufficient young people, is not a product that can be measured with a finite set of criteria nor subjected to an across-the-board quality assurance test. To think that every community in America has an equal opportunity to test every single student at a "proficient" level by 2014 is utter lunacy. This football analogy illustrates the point well:

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND---The Football Version

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skillls at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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