No Child Left Behind

  For those of you who are unaware, the No Child Left Behind Act is up for vote again this year in congress. President Bush is recommending not only that we continue the act, but possibly add to it. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080107/ap_on_ca_st_pe/bush_2) 

  I'm not a fan of No Child Left Behind. There. That's out of the bag. I haven't been a fan as someone who was drastically effected by this act in school, which is sad remembering that I was only in the public education system for the first two years of the acts existence. I was part of the advance placement curriculum, which was shot to pieces because of this policy. We had kids placed into the curriculum that couldn't handle it, but insisted that they should be there. The standardized test said they should be in AP, their work ethic and all of their grades said they shouldn't be, but "the test is the best indicator". So enter kids into AP that shouldn't be there, who had to cheat to even make it through. What does that say to those of us who actually worked hard and earned our grades?

   On top of that, ever class I had in high school that had a connection to a state assessment test wasn't taught to expand our knowledge base, it was taught in order to help us pass the test. We are talking AP kids here, taking a test that is designed for the average high school student. Instead of meeting us at our desire to learn, our curriculum was dumbed down so that we could pass a test that we were going to excel at anyway.

   And there of course was my parent's absolute favorite. We haven't been raised to a very competitive family. That statement needs clarification. We are competitive against ourselves. My brothers have always participated in sports where it was you as an individual competing against other people, true, but more importantly competing against your own scores. And for me, school and music were always driven by me achieving my best and doing better then I did previously. This was most clearly demonstrated when I went from not even being in the top ten percent of my class my freshman year to being number three in the class, thus throwing the entire top ten out of alignment. But this was hardly even acknowledged. Our school didn't place emphasis on people who had academic achievements, because they didn't want other kids to feel bad. Grant it, there was a large emphasis placed on athletic achievements, but just not academic. 

    So once again, I'm not a fan of No Child Left Behind. If anything, I think it has dumbed down the education system, trying to standardize children to being little academic clones of the person next to them. No one achieves more or less then anyone else. The thing that saddens me even more is that this mentality has seeped into our culture, 'meet the bare minimum for requirements, don't work to achieve more because it won't matter'. The place this mentality breaks my heart the most is in the Church. It seems that the Church is working to standardize the way faith should be lived out and look, which isn't what God intended. God has created us 

uniquely equal. We need to learn to celebrate our differences, because they all play into this greater mission God has for us. 

   This concept that we are unique has seemingly been lost to us. I just came back from speaking at this conference for students who feel that they might be called to a specific form of ministry that takes place in the local church. I was helping my pastor, who co-chaired the committee in charge of the entire event, work through evaluations for the weekend and we both stopped our conversation when I read "you need to teach kids how to discern their call. There were too many individual stories and not enough direction" (paraphrase). Whoever wrote that comment has lost the idea that we are unique and that our calls and their discernment are not standard by any means. The point of all of the call stories the kids heard during the course of two days was supposed to emphasize that, because no two stories are the same. God communicates to us differently, and we interact with his differently as well - or at least we should be.

   Somewhere along the way, the Church has adopted a No Child Left Behind approach to preaching. Save the souls, get them into a pew, and move on to the next person. This makes me physically sick. Don't get me wrong, evangelism is so important, but it is no more important then discipleship, this foreign, abandoned concept in our lives today. Sometimes I wonder how God is going to react when thousands upon thousands of shallow Christians get to Heaven. Is he going to be pleased? Who's going to be held accountable? Faith isn't meant to be standardized. This is why I despise the "four steps to salvation" because not only does it put everyone in the same box, but no one is asking 'well, what happens after step four' because they are too preoccupied with the beauty of the plan. Then if discipleship is addressed at all then it is placed into a box as well. Spiritual disciplines are meant to grow each of us as individuals, and are too be adapted for our own individual needs. There is no one size fits all model. 

   My prayer is that No Child Left Behind loses it's control over our lives and our faith.