Feeling Left Behind

No Child Left Behind is dead. At last! Now we can start leaving children behind again!
Just like that, with a one swoop of his pen, President Obama put us all on a path toward ignoring kids and their progress through school. Educators everywhere rejoice. Standardized testing is over. All that high stakes pressure to fill in the correct bubbles to avoid a future in vocational training can now cease. School is now optional. If you don't feel like coming, just send us a text and tell us what grade you think that you deserve and we'll just stamp that on the bottom of our free-form learning is fun form.
Or maybe not. Over here in the seat perhaps furthest away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the continental United States (a concept that might be lost on those who were not compelled to study geography), things don't seem that different. We still test our kids. We still ask a lot of questions and we keep track of their answers. And so I thought I had better check in with the Head of Administration, the guy who signed the Every Student Succeeds Act. “I want this not just because it’s good for the students themselves, the communities involved, and it’s good for our economy, but because it really goes to the essence of what we are about as Americans,” Obama said at the White House signing ceremony. “There is nothing more essential to living up to the ideals of this nation than to make sure every child is able to live up to their God-given potential.”
The idea that every child will succeed is certainly the ideal we all hold. We also know that the obstacles to that success are different for every child. So are we going to have a sliding scale on those newly created assessments that will allow all children to succeed while they are being oh-so-carefully monitored? We won't ask kids to take a dozen tests each year. More like ten. Or eleven if we're not exactly sure. But not twelve. That would be ridiculous because then we teachers would spend all our time teaching to the test.
Teaching to the test. 
What does that mean? We want kids to learn material so that they can be successful when they run up against whatever measure is put in place to assess that success. By making the number of tests smaller, we make the pressure on those remaining tests even higher. Or maybe I missed something back in teacher school where they taught us how to test kids to see how they were doing with that whole potential thing. And maybe I missed the part where we are still going to be held responsible, as educators, for the progress those kids are making toward their God-given potential. Because we are. No pressure left behind.