Leave Behind No Child Left Behind?

A dilemma arose for me when I was reading a recent article I found through my RSS feed for The New York Times.  What do you tell a child who was failing and is still failing but has improved?  Or more to my real point… What do you say about a school that is doing extremely poorly and most of their students are failing but they are still doing better than before?

Do you tell your students that they are doing wonderfully and making lots of progress?  Or do you inform them that they are still failing and will probably struggle with trying to obtain passing grades for the rest of their school career?  Obviously you don’t tell a child that they are a failure, but in this instance what do you do to relay to the student just how important it is to try their hardest if they want to make it to the fourth grade?

“Ms. Muhammad looked over at Dyshirah, a slight girl with a head full of braids, who was tracing sentences in a book with her finger. Mr. Kilgore, 22, assured Ms. Muhammad that Dyshirah had made a lot of progress, earning an average of 51 percent on her class math tests compared with 17 percent at the beginning of the marking period.”

Yes Dyshirah has indeed made great progress but how do you tell a third grader that has worked so hard to make so much progress that they are not good enough?  Dyshirah is likely to not pass the third grade with the grades that she has. 

So I’m not sure where to go on this subject.  Tying it in with NCLB is a tricky deal.  Our students and schools are held to different standards.  Schools that have had the same improvements as Dyshirah are applauded for their success.  Yet schools that had as much as 97 percent of their students pass standardized tests one year and then go down to even a 96 percent passing level are considered failures.  So if we treated our students they way we treat our schools Dyshirah would be passing with flying colors while an A and B student like me would pass then fail then pass then fail etc…

Full Article

Written By Winnie Hu

Published in The New York Times