No Child Left Behind offers a worthy goal: we must hold our students and teachers to higher standards, immediately. However, due to inadequate financing, faulty implementation, and poor assessment, NCLB has most obviously and tragically impacted our schools by disproportionately weighing the results of high-stakes standardized tests. Because standardized test results may directly and immediately affect school funding, principals urge teachers to "teach to the test." Teacher and student morale withers in such schools, as students are taught to pass a single evaluation without necessarily understanding or comprehending content, and teachers subjugate their practice to rote methodology and myopic test preparation.
I'm not so naive as to believe that I will have anything close to autonomy in the classroom, nor am I so contrary as to claim that general accountability and adherence to rigorous standards is impossible. However, teachers must be willing and able to treat their classroom as a sandbox, "playing" with curriculum to better engage each class. Standardized testing fails to accurately assess all students for any number of reasons, including textual bias, incompetent test administration, and misrepresentation of scores by schools. But moreover, such tests fail to present the whole picture because education is inherently individual. Each student brings distinct learning styles and abilities to bear; each classroom is a unique organism. Teachers must find ways to foster creative intelligence in each class, no matter the means of assessment.
About Me
I'm a University of South Alabama undergraduate pursuing degrees in English and Education, in hopes of teaching secondary language arts. My limited classroom experience to date includes tutoring in an elementary special education classroom, substitute teaching, and field work as required in the course of my studies. My diverse professional experience includes feature and beat writing for newspapers and magazines, graphic/web design, managing publication production teams and overseeing artistic standards, and providing paralegal support for an international law firm.
