I graduated High School in 2009. I want to tell a story about what my experiences lead to conclude the root problem is in public education and how NCLB impacts it.

My school was a public high school in a college town, so a large fraction of students were children of professors or college staff. The school did fairly well from local taxes so we had a lot of programs other schools couldn't dream of - for one, we had school provided Macs. Starting in 2004, every student got a laptop to use in class if a teacher wanted to use them.

I was in 5th grade when NCLB hit the scene, and experienced the noticable shift (though the causaution of this is questionable) I saw a significant repetition of topics to such a degree that between 4th grade (I was reading at "12th grade" reading level, had experienced everything up to algebra in math) and 8th grade, I learned nothing new. They were completely dead years. My middle school at the time went through a transition into this new model and structured around standardized tests that moved a significant chunk of the material I had covered in gifted / advanced classes years earlier into every classroom in reaction to the tests. That is the fault of the school though, and doesn't necessarily indicate a systemic issue.

The problem showed itself in high school, and presented itself in two ways - one, I took AP classes, and it was the same 15 - 30 kids taking every AP class. I had a few gen ed. classes (Spanish, Art, Technical Writing) where I got to experience an entire seperate class of student who were thoroughly disenfranchized with the system and being in school was wasting their time, and everyone elses. They were in the "basic" of the basic-standard-honors class placement, they didn't do the homework, they got D's/F's, and got pushed through an assembly line to meet quotas. Everyone involved behind the scenes absolutely knew this was a tremendous waste of time, but nobody did anything about it, mainly because it was systemic and inherent to compulsory standardized rote education.

I had some really good high school teachers. I got scores in 5/5 AP tests that placed me out of an entire semester of college courses and I graduated a year early with my BS as a result, combined with some extra courses to meet the credit requirement. They had passion. They were being crushed by the mass of the student body that wasn't in that select AP student group.

The laptops actually demonstrated something peculier - state assement test scores fell dramatically following their introduction. The school went from top 20 in the state to bottom 50. However, that select group of 30~ students (in a graduating class of 150, the school was delightfully small) were getting better scores than ever.

It is much more generic than this story, but from my experiences technology dramatically enhances the learning potential of an engaged learner, and acts as the ultimate distraction from the disenfranchised. The 80% of students who didn't care and didn't want to be in school used the laptops as a get out of jail free card, intentionally taking classes to get teachers that let them use them. The AP and honors tier of students had group collaboration projects, we make power points rather than cardboard posters, we would regularly look up bios and short stories of famous authors in real time.

That divide comes back to NCLB because the students that want to go further with good teachers that can promote that lose the capacity under a strict standardized testing regime. The year I graduated, the freshman class (the 4 years of "honors" students pretty much knew each other) had around half as many "honors" quality students in a class that was 200 students in size (133% the size of ours).

I think the perspective of someone who went through the NCLB origin years might be useful. I agree the article does come off as somewhat circlejerky "kids these days just aren't as good as they once were" in some aspects. But I definitely felt the impact of standardization strangling the good teachers and students and it made it blatantly apparent the root problem in public schools is that you are carrying around a majority of students who don't want to be there. And the solution to the latter is a harder problem to solve than throw more tests at them.