Yule Cry

According a Huffington Post from today:  Nearly half of America's public schools didn't meet federal achievement standards this year, marking the largest failure rate since the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Law took effect a decade ago, according to a national report released Thursday.

No Child Left Behind cost the nation in the billions of dollars.  The train wreck that is No Child Left Behind is doing exactly what it is intended to avoid.  It is leaving children behind.  Entire school districts worth of children behind.  It is not capable of providing the opportunities that it was hoping to provide.

I don't claim to be an authority of the education system, and we are all aware that many factors effect the efficacy of this type of policy making, but it is still so painfully obvious that failures in the school districts of our country, in my very own city, are, in part, impacted by the No Child Left Behind Fiasco.  At face value it was marketed at a way to preserve and bolster poorly-performing schools.  In reality, schools closed, leaving families in educational failure situations.

In the meantime, I was at a holiday party this weekend for my husband's employer.  While speaking to a very nice woman who works as a teacher in a Montessori school, when she discovered that we homeschool, she leaped to the "socialization" argument, straight to the "you can't teach high school" argument, followed that up with the, "children being isolated" argument, and hit  her homer with the "taking good kids out of the school systems" argument.
Seriously?

And I sat right there, in holiday splendor, as she quietly and with certainty made her statements.
I should not have to deal with that every time I go out.
I stood there wishing that Rayven was there.
And I drank my soft drink and let her quietly rant.

According to The Atlantic this week, Study of the Day: Home-Schooled Children Score Higher on Tests.   

I fear for the children in this generation.  Global Warming, underfunded schools, poor access to health care for all families.  But I also have a certainty in my heart that these are the very kids who are going to grow up wiser, more capable, and able to make decisions with a world view.

I DO have faith...In the children!