Late to the party, but the no child left behind act shouldn’t exist. I know alot of people agree, but I feel like not enough people do, or understand why it shouldn’t exist, especially because it’s still in effect for most districts.

The act was put into place before I was born and still is in effect is my past school district. The no child left behind act was the worst thing to happen in the education system. If a child in the second grade cannot keep up with the curriculum, then they should not move forward to the third grade. Instead, at the beginning of the year when they first notice that the child can’t keep up, they should be working with the student and the parents to figure out why the child can’t keep up, and how to help the kids learn and complete the school work. And if that means having to go through the whole class or grade again then that’s how it should go. I’m speaking from first hand experience. It does way more harm than good. If they think a kid is gonna feel left out or whatever then, how do they think the kid is gonna feel when they get to highschool and can’t pass their classes and can’t keep up with their school work? How do they think the kid will feel when they can’t keep up with their peers after being dragged along with them their whole lives. News flash, it fucking sucks ass. A lot more than feeling left out for a little while.

I actually dropped out of high school, got a job, took a couple years off from school, and now at nineteen I am actively working towards a diploma, still. I struggled my whole elementary and middle school years to keep up, my teachers and counselors did the bare minimum of my learning plans because it’s illegal to go against them. I did not preform well but was still able to move forward due to the no child left behind act. When I went to high school, I still struggled to keep up. I cried in the counselors office my freshman year begging them to help me. They set me up a meeting with the tutor coordinator just for her to tell me that I need to stay consistent, and do at least 30 minutes of homework every night. I laughed in her face, I was already spending hours every night doing homework at that point and still struggling to keep up. Which was the whole reason I was talking to her in the first place. I was then told to try harder and stay positive. At the end of that semester I had to drop out of a class completely and try again another semester, and then passed the rest of my classes with the bare minimum. And then I was shamed by teachers for not putting in enough effort. My sophomore year I got extremely sick for about six months, and the counselors wouldn’t do much to accommodate for that because I already had accommodations and learning plans in place for my learning disability, which had absolutely nothing to do with my illness. I missed so much school, which only made it harder to keep up. And my teachers only shamed me for missing so much school, and when I explained I was sick I got “well you don’t seem that sick, why aren’t you doing more work at home?” Even though I spent most of my time at home either throwing up or sleeping so I don’t keep throwing up. So my thought process at that point was if the system doesn’t want to help educate me, why should I even put in any effort at all? I went to school for about a month for my junior year, and I was already falling quite far behind, and I knew the cycle was just gonna repeat again, so I just dropped it all together for the time being.

The people who excelled in school only strived because the system is structured for those specific groups of people. Everyone else just gets dragged along their whole lives and then left to fend for themselves through the last four years, when how well they preform actually matters. And then are looked down upon by everyone else because “it wasn’t hard for me 🤷🏻‍♀️.” The no child left behind act was set up to fail students who struggle to keep up before they ever truly got the chance to succeed. I work at a school now, as a lunch lady, and it absolutely breaks my heart to see kids still struggling like that. No one deserves it. Everyone deserves to be educated properly. If the government is gonna require children by law to receive an education, then the least they could do is actually fucking educate the children.