Who benefited from the No Child Left Behind?

[ASUADPi]

NCLB, AYP and AZ Learns are the reason I'm getting out of education. NCLB is a crock of "bleep". It is an unfunded and retarded mandate. I'm sorry, even if the stupid thing was funded, it would still be a crock. There are some amazing teachers out there (and there are some who just need to get out of the profession all together), but it doesn't matter how great the teacher is, some kids WILL NEVER be at grade level!!! To expect a special needs child with an IQ of 75 to take and PASS a test at GRADE LEVEL is asinine. Right now the kids aren't 'required" to pass but to take and have a score, but that will eventually go the way of the dinosaur as the whole point of NCLB is to have "all kids to grade level by 2013, which is a another crock of crap in itself).

There are lawsuits going on in AZ right now because our stupid superintendent of public instruction (who has never set foot in a classroom in his life!) is wanting to change the "law" so that those kids who do have an IEP and don't "pass" AIMS (our state high stakes testing needed for graduation), it will "say so" on their frickin diploma!! Talk about truly labeling a child!

I got so tired of the crap associated with everything. I spent more time "teaching" for some stupid district assessment or state assessment that I rarely did anything interesting or even remotely fun with my students. No wonder kids hate school now! Plus, how does it really show how "smart" my kids are in the first place? Prior to my kids taking the 3rd grade AIMS (in 2008), I spent like a month doing practice AIMS (which had the same standards and essentially very similiar questions).

I "taught" them how to "take" the stupid test. You know why I did this? Because whether I'm considered a "good" teacher or "not" is based on those stupid scores! They don't care about their work in class, their grades in class, their progress monitoring or DIBELS scores, all they (the district, state, government) care about is AIMS (or any other high stakes test). Yes, most "good" teachers actually have their students do well, but I worked in a low income district, where I would say 80% of the students were hispanic and of that 80%, 60% were monolingual English and of that 60% I would say 40-50% were illegal. You do the math on how well most of the kids in this district do on state high stakes tests!

Education has become more and more political due to NCLB and quite honestly it has taken the fun out of teaching and I think out of learning. Yes, there were problems in education when I was a kid, but I graduated from high school, went to college, got a Bachelors and even a masters degree. I have owned two homes, own my car, I'm pretty sure I turned out okay based on the education I got as a child. My parents are highly educated (mom has two masters, going for her 3rd, dad is working on his masters), I'm sure they turned out okay and education was so much more different when they were kids.

Okay, I'm totally rambling now and I'm not sure I'm making any sense so I'm going to "shut up". LOL.