Who was the genius who wrote this? It’s an internet e-mail masterpiece, and it comes without attribution. Do you know who wrote it? Please tell us in comments.
And if you don’t understand it, you’re not a teacher. Pass it to a teacher to explain to you what’s really going on; tip of the old scrub brush to Pam at Grassroots Science; she pointed to this piece in Shibby’s Alaska Journal:
No Child Left Behind – Football Version
The football version of what is going on in education right now. (If you’re not an educator, this may not make a lot of sense to you. But send it to your friends who are in education. They will love it!) For all the educators – In or out of the system.
1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!
3. Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
One other related article:
http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/no-dentist.html
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@DiscordianStooge,
#1 was spot on when (I suspect) this was written a few years ago when NCLB (at least here in California) used normed testing to ‘grade’ it’s students. For those who don’t understand, norm-based testing is not totally based on how many correct answers you have, but on how many you have compaired with your peers. They take all of the students who took the test that year, and then rank them. Suppose 1,000 students take the test and achive varying scores. To ‘norm’ the results, first you order the students by the number of questions they answered correctly, and then take the top ten students, and give them a 99 percentile (Percentile is a normed percent), then the next ten, give them a 98 percentile, then the next ten a 97 percentile, and so on. This means that for every student that scores a 99 percentile, another student MUST score at 1 percentile, EVEN IF the lower student scored 75/100 questions correct (In order for this to happen, the rest of his peers must have scored at or above him).
It is a way of curving the test, like my worst college professors did. Out of a class of 50 students, 10 got an ‘A,’ 10 a ‘B,’ 10 a ‘C,’ and so on. In one perticular class, I would often achive 80% or greater on my tests, but I ended up failing because my peers did just a little bit better then me.
But I digress. Using a normed-based test to messure students is fundimentaly flawed because there is no fesible way that every student could achive a 99 percentile, much like there is no way that every football team could be a champion.
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This is pretty good (especially the ones about taking equipment away and coaches spending time with the kids who don’t care), but number 1 doesn’t work. By definition, only one team can win a championship (Unless it’s Minnesota High School Sports), but theoretically all students can reach the goals provided. Education isn’t a head to head competition.
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