This I Believe

This is my This I Beleive essay along with the script. Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/greymichmaus/this-i-believe

We All Got Left Behind

My story is very similar to many other millennials. I was an excellent reader when I was young and was placed a number of grade levels ahead when they measured my reading level. My mother was very proud and encouraged me to keep reading at my own pace.

Not too long after that, however, the No Child Left Behind act was passed. Gradually, me and all of the top readers of our generation began to fall back into the reading ranks.

The No Child Left Behind act was meant to be a series of standardized testing that would measure how well the schools are teaching children. But what it really did was change how the entire school system operated.

The teachers started to only teach what would be on the tests and minimized talking about anything that wasn’t going to be tested. The tests control what children do or do not learn in class. That was the mark of when schools stopped producing exceedingly bright students. From then on, it was up to the forever busy and stressed out adults to make sure that their children were actually learning things.

My best friend tells the story of when they were little and loved going to school. But after No Child Left Behind was passed, they lost all of their spark. Often, they came home from school and their mom asked what they learned that day. They would always respond with “nothing” because it was the same thing that they learned the other day. And even when the next school year came and they thought they would get to move on to more interesting things, they were still stuck on simple mathematics because a few kids were still struggling. Eventually, that person grew to dislike school and they never really tried as hard again because they knew that it would all just come back around again soon.

This is a common trend among individuals who need a challenge to thrive. With standardized testing and re-occurring topics, nobody is challenged. Everyone stays at a level that is just hard enough to get the majority of the students to pass the tests.

This is why I believe that the No Child Left Behind act is ruining the education system and needs to be overruled. We need to be thinking about the future and what type of people—what type of adults this learning system is going to create.