Language Learning

While I was reading Daine Ravitch's excerpt, "Stop the Madness", I realized how flawed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy is. In short, it required all students to be "proficient" at math and reading by 2014. This was obviously filled with the good intention of making our students smarter so we can catch up in the global education competition. However it has one fatal flaw, its strict and rigid goals for achieving this. Ravitch does a great job at explaining the downsides of the system so I won't go into too many details but the one I would like to stress is the differences each student has that could affect tests scores. Some people don't have English as a first language so they are naturally disadvantaged. It's worse if they are only beginning to learn it as they make their way through high school. I know people who had a hard time at first because they had to learn English in order to understand what was going on in their other classes. After much hard work they now know English well enough to be successful in their classes, but it took time. They did become good students yet it took them much longer to become one as a result of their disability. The strict and rigid goals of NCLB caused schools who did  not reach the goals to be heavily punished. My friends had no control over which language they grew up learning and the schools don't have much control over how fast someone can learn a entire new language. Imagine what would happen if a school had the majority of their students be English learners. That school would be punished severely as it couldn't meet the goals of NCLB. This is a very unlikely situation but the thought of my friends being the laggers in a strict education policy that they didn't want to be, or even know that they were, participating in left a bad taste in my mouth that emphasized the flaw in the NCLB policy. How do you feel about this policy? Do you know anyone who had to undergo the entire process of learning a new language?