The irony of the nonexistence of consistent national standards is depicted in this three-part allegorical blog on the No Child Left Behind Act.
Submitted for your consideration, imagine a place where rules don’t always apply. Portrait of a school, in any given town just down the street from any given town hall. A boy of no more than ten is taking a standardized test that when added with his classmates' work, will determine if his school receives the much-needed funding it desires to be able to pay its teachers. The boy also knows that if he does not perform well on the test, that he himself can be sent into a different dimension of pens and rulers for his schooling next year.
The hands on the clock seem to freeze into the beige background that was once a pristine, freshly painted white wall. But, that was years ago, and the money hasn’t been there to touch-up the dingy walls. The boy squirms in his seat as the numbers on the paper seem to be running together, and nothing is making sense in his young mind, until he suddenly has a moment of clarity and begins to smile.
The good teacher sat at the front of the class keeping a boldly optimistic smile on her face to encourage her students as they bravely push through their examinations. Her nightmare had begun years earlier when her progressive lesson plans for teaching young boys and girls how to decipher the mysteries of math had been shelved in favor of new texts that had been published by friends of the local politicians that pushed test-taking skills more than math manipulations. Math teachers are a special group of people - they have grown up loving and respecting the purity of thought and reason that math concepts embrace, but now…
