I’ve been talking to a bunch of teachers lately about No Child Left Behind. As I understand it, at the end of the year, there are a whole bunch of tests given to the students and a certain number of them need to achieve a certain score. For example, in a class of 20 students (and these are not the actual numbers) say 75% of the class needs to achieve a 65% or better on the tests for that class to achieve a passing result.
If I was a teacher, my initial thought would be “since I have 20 kids, 75% would be 15 kids, so I need 15 kids to get 65% or better.” Then I would count which kids would be part of that 15.
Well, today I went to an elementary school to give some talks related to my work, and wow, I could pretty easily identify the top 5 kids and the bottom 5 kids.
Therefore, in my mind, I would bank on the top 5 kids to pass and not worry about them. I’d probably give up on the bottom 2 or 3, and then bust my ass to get the 10 of the 12-13 middle level kids to pass.
I’d then teach toward the middle 12-13 kids.
This got me thinking even more: was I one of those middle kids? Yup. In fact, I definitely think I was somewhere between number 12 and 17 out of the 20 kids—I was definitely one of the “on the fence” kids who was the focus of the teacher’s attention.
Granted, No Child Left Behind came way after I graduated, but that still makes me think a similar system was probably in effect.
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