Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall 2004 No Child Left Behind? To Whom Are We Accountable? (original) (raw)

Everybody warned me about Larry. He was trouble; he was stubborn; he was a pain. The first time we met, everything went fine; the second time we met, he curled up into a ball and zipped his jacket over his head, refusing to speak to me or anyone else. As a teacher working for a private, nationally franchised tutoring company, I had seen lots of children like him. He was a reluctant reader working on the pre-primer level. He looked like a typical first grader, little and skinny, and I imagined he was being frustrated seeing all of his classmates engaged in reading while he floundered, not knowing his alphabet, let alone the sounds those symbols represented. I was right about his frustration, but Larry was in fifth grade, not first. He was tested and labeled a student in need of special education services; he was getting the majority of his education in a mainstream classroom with occasional assistance from a teacher’s aide. Unfortunately, she was often called out of class to be eithe...