No Child Left Behind - more truthfully stated - EVERY CHILD MENTALLY SCREENED AND DRUGGED ACCORDINGLY! 
BEWARE, these mental screenings are disquised as a "well-child" exam or check-up in your local Headstart or pre-school program. The "good" children (the ones who correctly answer the prepared psychological questions) move forward.  The "disturbed" children (the ones who don't answer according to psychobabble guidelines) are drugged down to non-annoyance and rendered unuseful (special) to society. After all, child psychologists and teachers must continue to promote the selection of the fittest!

NCLB puts ever increasing pressure on public schools to get the highest test results possible whatever the cost. Higher order learning has been sacrificed because school administrators must turn their teachers into test coaches and facilitators.  Anyone can fill that job description for minimum wage.  We don't need to use our tax dollars to give pay raises to test coaches and test cheerleaders.

Most teachers are unable to use their creative abilities for traditional teaching.  Many teachers just don't care anymore.  They need their job so they don't rock the boat! They are reduced to coaching, drilling, and practicing test material over and over and over.  How dull and uninviting is that for our children?  It is no wonder that there is little or no improvement in the test scores!  Kids have no choice.  They are forced into this dull, uninteresting mind game.  They cannot study and learn about the things they love.  It's always FORCED schooling, FORCED test performance, and for what?

In the beginning stages of life learning is worth getting up for. It is exciting.  Babies learn to talk, crawl, walk, feed themselves, manipulate, play, and run because they WANT to.  Life is a cool adventure.  Each day presents new and refreshing opportunities for learning and discovery.  Infants and toddlers are like scientists, a new discovery everyday!  No one has to FORCE children to learn.  It is only when they enter the American public school arena that learning experiences soon turn sour.  Going to "big school" is very exciting for a first grader, but once through the doors the "system" begins to wear and tear away that natural longing to learn.  The teachers (who think that they are pseudo child psychologists) enter with repetitious, monotonous, monotone, imparting test material in the same square room every day. Teach the test, raise our scores, teach the test, is the rallying cry of school administrators. That call reverberates in the teacher's ears on a continuous basis since NCLB.

Fourth grade arrives, high stakes test year, and our children are subjected to more superficial, rote, memorization drills.  Practice, Practice, Practice!!  Schools are boring the brains and enthusiam out of every student in their reach just so the "school" can look better statistically and thereby garner more federal dollars.  It is all about money - not about the nurturing and well-being of children!   Poor comparative test scores have resulted in all else stopping except, of course, the ultra-fanatical rage and addiction of sports!

Can anyone prove, please, that correct answers on standardized tests  equal real knowledge of subject matter?  Can they predict academic or future real life achievement?  No! No proof exists!  Does it not strike you as strange that a child who has maintained a 3.5 grade average for the entire year, flunks the promotion test, and has to attend summer school to see if she can move on to grade 5?  Or how about the young boy who has consistenly made D's and F's in math then passes the "test" and the school is ready to move him up, no questions asked!  Absurd - unless it really is about numbers and money!  Must we subject our children to this? Must they spend 13 or 14 (16 if the New Freedom Initiative continues rolling on) years HOPPING to the tune of bells, hall passes, test anxiety, peer pressure, drug abusers, sex abusers (teachers?), and report cards? 

What a lovely introduction to the real world we give our children when we place them in the jaws of American public education!!  Here are a few quotes worth remembering.

U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, a former college professor, characterizes high stakes testing as "stressful, unfair, and a failure of moral imagination on the part of policymakers".

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College  in New York, says that "testing is little more than an adult political obsession that just results in more tests and profits for test makers...The most egregious aspect of our mania for testing is that pupils never find out what they got wrong."

George Bernard Shaw said, "There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school."