I followed a link from Young Pundit to a story about a group of teachers who cut a CD to protest the No Child Left Behind Act.

I was hoping to find some silly protest songs to make fun of (I did, you can scroll down), but I also read that these teachers were from a new school "called World of Opportunity (WOO) - a school designed to accommodate students forced out of regular public schools due to their poor performance on standardized tests." That didn't sound right to me, but apparently it's true:

Mr. Orel enlisted the support of Virginia Volker, a Birmingham school board member, who learned that some 522 students, or 5.6 percent of the high school student body, had similarly "withdrawn." They were told to leave school after Feb. 15, when the state calculates reimbursement levels based on enrollment, but before April, when they would have taken the Stanford Achievement Tests, and could have dragged down their school's scores, Ms. Volker found.

"A lot of our parents are poor and overworked, and they didn't object," Ms. Volker said.

A spokeswoman for the Birmingham public schools, Michaelle Chapman, said that it was not the prospect of poor test scores that caused the withdrawal of so many students. At least some of the students involved, whose records the district examined, had missed more than 100 days from school, she said, and would not have passed anyway.

I'm shocked by the actions of the Birmingham schools. But, why is this the fault of President Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act or standardized testing? The fault lies in those that are refusing to do their jobs: parents, teachers and administrators. In the past, these same people would refuse to do their job by passing and graduating these kids. Now, they're refusing to do their job by throwing them out of school. In any case, NCLB isn't to blame for these school districts acting like whiny bitches: "How dare you force us to teach these children. We'll show you!".

Schools like this aren't even trying to do better. They're simply looking for loopholes to beat the system. And, I think they found one. But, that doesn't mean NCLB is a failure. It's really a great illustration of the need for further education reform. Can you imagine if Birmingham parents had school vouchers and they could get their kids out of this district that refuses to teach kids? Don't you think that threat might actually get the district to change their ways?

I don't understand what it is that opponents of NCLB really want. From the World of Opportunity site, I think they want teachers to be able to evaluate students without the benefit of any kind of testing. Because, after all, there are "so many ways to be smart":

Some folks are good at getting along
Some folks are good at making up songs
Some folks are good at stopping a Wal-mart
So many ways to be smart!

Oh good lord, where do I begin? Sure, some kids have greater emotional intelligence and some kids are more creative. But, at the end of the day, there are basic things we all need to know in order to survive in this country. And frankly, just being "good" at protesting a Wal-Mart doesn't merit a high school diploma in my book. They should at least have to make some cool signs too ;-)