Leave Behind No Child Left Behind?

Well the title of my edublog is really as simple as it sounds I want to use this blog as a pathway to learning about and, for the time being, working with and around the No Child Left Behind Act. No my blog’s name is not very complicated or incredibly catchy but I think that there are serious problems surrounding the NCLB Act that need to be addressed, and as a future teacher I definitely want to do the best I can to learn from past mistakes.

Despite the seemingly boring and obvious title this blog has, I have every intention of running face first into the barren no-man’s-land that is the NCLB frontier. The act was clearly not made with the intention of hurting schools all around the country. What is wrong with the act and how can we fix it? Well that is exactly what I am hoping to find out. My interest in the NCLB Act stems from several different places. I am a third generation educator, my dad’s mom was a teacher in a one room school-house, my father is a vice principal and my mother is a fifth grade teacher. Naturally, I hear a lot about the issues that effect teachers when I am around my family. Also I recently had to complete a research project in one of my classes and I did mine on the effects of NCLB and how we can try to fix it. Through that research project I realized that I have a very small base of knowledge in terms of the issue. People have been researching this act since it was passed and even before that and I only recently became interested in it. So through this blog I hope to find valuable information on the topic and hope to help shed some light on the issue for others also.

My mother works in an elementary school and my father works in a middle school and I plan to work in a high school so we each have different problems directly involving NCLB and I hope that I can touch on all levels of education and their specific difficulties through this blog. I am a student that has been directly affected by NCLB, my older sister went through school before its implementation and my youngest sister will still be in school when it expires (if it isn’t renewed) so I definitely have seen the changes that it has made. I will admit that there are both good and bad consequences of the act and will do my best to focus evenly on what can be learned both from its positive outcomes and its shortcomings.

In order to begin my research phase of operation “Overwhelmed,” as I have lovingly named this endeavor, I subscribed to a number of feeds to help me establish a base of knowledge on the subject and, specifically, its outcome. I also got sidetracked and subscribed to a few feeds that didn’t really have much to do with the issue. Well anyway, I subscribed to the New York Times education feed also the BBC world news and Time Magazine’s general feed. I figured that one would be specifically about education while the other two would help give me an idea of the importance we in the USA place on education. I also subscribed to a blog titled “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” which talks about education issues in general.

Also just a note, there are more subjects discussed on the adjoined pages listed at the top of the page, they are simply pages rather than posts to make the page more aesthetically pleasing. Feel free to read and enjoy (or not enjoy) them and comment on those matters that interest you.