Many educators are not fond of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, which Obama doesn’t seem intent on scraping. I suppose education is never the priority politicians claim it is, though to be fair, neither candidate made much of education in 2008.

Some outside of education are confused as to why a teacher would oppose NCLB. They see it as an unwillingness to be held accountable for what happens in the classroom. Or even a fear of accountability. This is deeply inaccurate, at least in my case.  I (and many others) oppose NCLB because of how it (claims) to hold teachers accountable.

One effective way of illustrating some of the absurdities of NCLB is to apply it to sports. I’d seen this online a time or two, but a professor posted this for us in class the other day and it made me realize anew how skewed some people’s perception of NCLB actually is. So here’s the scenario: football is run according to guidelines similar to NCLB:

The regulations:

  1. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship.
  2. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.
  3. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities.
  4. All kids will play football at a proficient level.
  5. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction.
  6. Coaches will use all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.
  7. All coaches will be proficient in all aspects of football, or they will be released.
  8. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.

This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

The fact is, children in the same grade start at different places intellectually, emotionally, and socially.

What’s worse, NCLB is a moving target. Every school must achieve “Adequate Yearly Progress.” If you fail to make that progress, you have to make up all that ground and then some for the next year. Another sports analogy (this time, my own) might make it clearer:

Let’s say to make the football team, you have to run the 40 yard dash in 5.5 seconds. You fail to make it by one tenth of a second. You work out. Finally, you reach 5.5 seconds and come back to try again. The coach now tells you that now you have to run the 40 yard dash in 5.4 seconds. You can’t do it, so you go back and work out some more. When you can sprint it in 5.4 seconds, you go back to the coach, who informs you that now the bar has been moved to 5.25 seconds.

Or, as someone else put it:

The annual measurement bar is a moving target and once missed it is like chasing after a train pulling out of the depot year after year. Of course then it becomes the fault of the instructors, and not the curriculum , or the administration, or heaven forbid the students themselves. (Source)

Accountability is good; poorly-thought-out accountability can only be harmful.