Your sons and your daughters whom ye have left behind shall fall by the sword (Ezekiel 24:21)

I can't believe I am about to do this. I am going to point out something good in the "No Child Left Behind" act. As a teacher at an international private school, my current position is not governed by any federal legislation regarding testing and funding, so I have spent six months on the flip side, and I am beginning to see why this law came about.

First, let me say that I am not going to defend the testing of students in an inconsistent and unattainable way, in my opinion. But I am going to praise one of the intended side effects of such testing: a focused curriculum. Without standards-based testing like in the States, the teachers at my school are left to create their own curricula without any overarching guiding force.

Basically, my school's English curriculum is a map by each teacher explaining what NCTE standards she (they're all women) meets with what assessment. However, since these standards are so broad (see for yourself at NCTE's Web site), teachers must break them down into more specific benchmarks. But because of the generalized standards and individualized control, these benchmarks end up being whatever the teacher can cook up to match what they want to teach, not an identification of skills that students should learn. At my school this means the education has become content-driven, based on what books or texts the teacher deems worthy, which to me is an outdated notion. And therefore, skills-based instruction is overlooked and definitely not aligned from grade to grade.

This, in part, is why my English students are freaking out by my arrival. All of sudden, I am asking them to exhibit skills, without emphasis on knowledge of a book. In no high-school English classroom before my own did they examine nonfiction in any way. So as should be no surprise, my students are frustrated by trying to analyze essays and speeches at the same level they can with literature. Likewise, they are not used to having to write in a nonfiction style that focuses on synthesis instead of reader response. Now, I'm not claiming that nonfiction is something that should be a benchmark necessarily, but I think it's something an objective group has to determine without the influence of subjective preferences. And if the school is going to revere Advanced Placement, then the tenets of that program should be reflected throughout the high school curriculum, not just in a single class.

So, you ask, what are you doing about it, Ms. English department chair? Well, smarty pants, I am starting by merely introducing the idea of a holistic writing rubric based on skills. Many teachers still use rubrics giving points for the inclusion of particular formulaic writing pieces, say 1-10 points for a thesis based on how effective it is. Once again, there is no problem with that, but the only way to start aligning instruction across the grades is to identify the skills that all of us hope to see in our students' writing, without breaking it down into parts, some of which might not be relevant for specific writing assignments. The translation of that to numbers for the gradebook can stay individual.

It's not an easy change to make, considering the teachers are resistant to change their lessons and I feel like I might be inflicting my bias upon them. If there were an assessment, for example, that was developed from the outside and that governed what skills were most important, then we'd all be united under a common goal: making sure our students knew those skills so they could pass the test. "Teaching to the test" might not be fun, but it at least ensures an objective impetus for what happens in the classroom.

Now, now, now, don't start with the red herrings and non sequiturs. This is the ONLY good I find in the act. The tests themselves are often invalid, required passing rates are unreasonable, the consequences for failure are inexplicable. Indeed, one of my British colleagues was explaining to me about how schools in England are put on watch if they don't meet standards criteria, which by the way are based on more than just test scores, including in-house observations. But when this happens, schools aren't threatened with less funding; they are given money to help them improve. Still, she said this had a negative consequence: The diversion of funds to lower-performing schools prompted some borderline schools to lose money and fall into the watch category.

It seems, there is no easy calculation of school success (certainly not one that includes a 100 percent pass rate!). But a deeper look at the necessary variables to manipulate is valuable. Maybe those Impact Games people should make a simulation of running a school under "No Child Left Behind." After all, education isn't a bad place to start in making peace.