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I've had mixed experiences with the NCLB. I was in Middle School (I think) when it passed and those years sucked. The administrators were incompetent and basically ran the school like a prison, the teachers (with the exception of one) taught to the test and could give a damn less about anything else, etc. They always got rated an A school but behind that veneer was (in my opinion) a broken system.
High School was the complete opposite. My high school had several unappealing nicknames, a past reputation for drugs and crime and low test scores (they've never been rated above C to my knowledge). Yet, in my four years there I met more teachers who genuinely cared about kids absorbing the material and learning something useful than I did in all my years of school prior. Maybe my experiences were rose-tinted by being an IB student, I don't know. But when you consider the students they had to work with (generally low-income, mostly minority, several first-generation and limited-English proficient, and bad home lives) and the dedication they put into their work, it's hard not to think of that school as a good one. I truly think that the measure of a good education is not what score one gets on an arbitrary state-mandated test but rather the dedication one puts into one's studies and the dedication put forth by one's teachers.
*steps down off soapbox*
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