I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.

For the most part I have focused this journal on No Child Left Behind’s impact in Michigan, but I found this article/blog post through my RSS reader and could not help but post it here.

Alyson Beahm, an elementary teacher in San Francisco, wrote in to the San Francisco Chronicle describing how NCLB has hampered her ability to teach and her students’ ability to learn.  Most of the students in her school are English-language learners, most coming from Mexico, Thailand, and Laos.  The children from Thailand and Laos must first learn English letters before learning how to speak, but all groups of students are expected to read at grade-level within the year.  Beahm feels, and I agree with her, that NCLB and its supporters expect miracles from teachers and then punish them when they ultimately fail.

This year, while the majority of Beahm’s school met AYP, their most significant subgroup, Asian American students, did not, so the school was deemed “failing.”

So, once again, we did not meet the goal. Failing to meet the goal two years in a row labels a school Program Improvement. If you are such a school for five years, No Child can come in and wipe the slate clean, getting rid of all the teachers and replacing them with new, “more qualified” teachers – teachers who evidently possess mystical powers to teach English to nonnative speakers in the blink of an eye.

This same thing is happening across the country, in Detroit ghettos where teachers and students don’t have access to the materials necessary to succeed; in suburban communities where high test scores are demanded and struggling students are punished; and throughout the country where recent immigrants and English-language learners are automatically at a disadvantage when taking standardized tests.

No Child Left Behind is setting these teachers and students to fail.  And once the “failing” teachers are removed and new, “highly educated” teachers replace them, the students will continue to fail because they are not getting an authentic education.  Instead, they are being taught how to correctly fill out a scantron.

Quality Education Gets Lost in Translation

Alyson Beahm, December 2, 2007

The San Francisco Chronicle