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“No Child Left Behind” and Deborah Meier




            “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001” signed into law by President George W. Bush on January of 2002. The law is to assure that no school aged child would fall behind in their schooling. The passage states “Today, nearly 70 percent of inner city fourth graders are unable to red at a basic level on national reading test. Our high school seniors trail students in Cyprus and South Africa on international math test. And nearly a third of our college freshmen find they must take a remedial course before they are able to even begin regular college level courses.”(p. 181). The policies of the law include things such as accountability for a student’s performance, focusing on what works in the system, reducing bureaucracy and increasing flexibility, and empowering parents. While all of these sound like they would help the United States educational system, it would actually hurt the students more. The law is basically a way for schools to compete as a way to be rewarded on how well the student’s achievements are. If the schools fail they would be punished in a way. Since the law was enacted I have read about more school closures with every failure.

The law focuses on making children and teachers into mindless puppets who have to teach without innovation of any kind. Schools are given funds to make sure their students achieve high standards (title I) and schools that fail to reach these standards are given assistance. The differences between suburban schools and urban schools is the size of the classes some schools can afford to have smaller class sizes while others have overcrowded classrooms that are filled to capacity because they have to take in the influx of students from schools that are closed. Deborah Meier writes about how schools can make changes from within by having teachers in a way change their own habits in teaching students. In Meier’s selection “The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem” she writes about the changes that are “necessary to transform American Education,” by doing the three things Meier suggest that will transform education as a whole, “change how they view learning itself, develop new habits of mind to go with their new cognitive understanding, and simultaneously develop habits of work - habits that are collegial and public in nature, not solo and private as has been the custom of teaching.”(p.202). Meier’s thoughts about how to change education is in many ways easier and more efficient than “No Child Left Behind”. The changes must be made from within the staff not amongst the children.
An easier understanding of changing the American school system is that all the teachers, both those already teaching and those who aspire to teach must have an epiphany to their style of teaching. Teachers must have a passion of learning just as strong as the students they’re teaching, or have a bigger and stronger passion so that they can transmit that love of learning to their students. Meier also suggest that teachers should incorporate the same kind of passion they show outside the classroom towards their own hobbies and bring them into the classroom. Teachers can’t have “Habit of falling back on excuses – ‘I had to,’ ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be” (p203) these habits aren’t going to help their students. In many ways they have to think of ways to engage their students in subjects that everyone will find boring and transform them into something fun that will stay with them throughout their years. Teaching shouldn’t have to be boring and repetitive or else children will lose interest and then they’ll become another statistic of why they fail in school or that the school is failing them.
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