Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on becoming the new president of the US of A. This is going to be one heck of a presidency for you. May God smile upon you, because you’re going to need all the help you can get. There is one issue that is bugging me. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a good program at heart, but it never seemed to pull through.

            This Act is trying to help kids improve their education. It focuses on math, writing, and reading. It also sets certain qualifications for teachers. It makes it so that each teacher must be well learned in which ever subject he/she is teaching. NCLB requires schools to focus on providing quality education to students with disabilities, students that come from low-income families, and non-English speakers. Parents are also provided detailed reports on the student’s performance in class.

            Even though the NCLB says all this, many of it is ignored. Teachers only teach things that are going to be on the standardized test. They focus more on test taking skills and test limited knowledge. NCLB also ignores many other important subjects like science, history and foreign language. Each state can set its own standardized test. So it depends on how hard the states want to make it. Many states set the standard very low for the low performing students. NCLB also set the standard for teacher extremely high. It requires teachers to have more than one college degree. On top of that, teachers have to also take many proficiency tests. This includes old and new teachers.

Because schools focus on test-taking skill, many high level students are affected by this. They are held back because of everyone else and it hurts them. Schools don’t offer enough challenging classes because many kids don’t qualify to take them. Only a minority of students actually want to take these classes. Just because there aren’t enough “qualified” teachers to teach them, these students should stay in classes full of kids with no determination of completing high school. Many kids don’t go to college and even more don’t complete high school. Are these the classes that we should put excelling students in? Oh dear God, no. Schools should be able to provide these “rare commodities”.

So Mr. President, I leave these questions up to you to answer. I hope that you make the correct choices in the next 4 years. Just remember that we will all be able to vote by the time the next election comes up. I hope you have a good day.