For the first time in 10 years, I am not spending the last weeks of August revising curriculum, preparing lessons and arranging my classroom for the young students who will soon stream through the door in all their impatience, ambition and vitality. Instead, while my former colleagues are completing their back-to-school rituals, I am left to reflect on the reasons why I dropped out of my career as a public school teacher, why something that once energized me more than coffee at 7 a.m. is now stagnant, why living with words and ideas as they danced among students no longer holds the charm it once did.

	Anita Dufalla, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version. Esther Mellinger Stief, a former English teacher at Seneca Valley High School and Steel Valley High School, lives in Regent Square. She is at work on a book about transracial adoption (estherstief@yahoo.com).

But as so often is true, the question itself holds the answer -- teaching for me has become less and less about language and meaning and more and more about standards, politics and appearance. Had I more stamina or hope, I'd be in the classroom this fall fighting the bureaucracy that is constricting the profession that I once loved, guiding students towards new ways of seeing the world instead of new ways of taking the latest, mandated performance test.

The No Child Left Behind Act, love it or hate it, certainly has generated change, or the appearance of change, within most public schools. The real issue is not whether change is needed -- it is -- but what type of change is required in order to ensure that all children in this country have access to a quality education.

With the movement towards standards and high-stakes testing, we are consigning our children's learning to the dictates of what politicians, academia and, yes, some educators, have determined is valuable knowledge. We are ignoring the local context and, most dangerously, we are ignoring the complex, innately curious individual mind.

In many ways, we've taken the industrialized, factory-style education too far. We now are seeking to replicate a core group of facts and skills in every student who completes a public school experience. In our haste to increase reading, writing and math scores, we continue to de-emphasize instruction in the arts and sciences themselves.

Is this truly education? Is this the best we can do for our children? For our future?

More problematic than simply a generation of students who have not been taught to think independently is that same citizenry who have been covertly indoctrinated in the insidious class system that is alive, well and clearly manifested in our public schools.

A student in an urban district will receive a standards-based education under threat of government intervention and will perform adequately on the state-mandated test if he or she can withstand the social and economic barriers to graduating from high school.

Within the same system, public school students in an affluent, suburban district will receive enough instruction on the standards to perform well on the required test but will also, depending on district and parental values, be exposed to additional creative and independent ideas, enough so that they can satisfactorily transition into functional college students and middle-class workers and consumers -- a model citizenry.

Often removed from these public schools because of concern about the quality of education, students in private schools not bound to national and state educational dictates will be the recipients of an education driven by independent thought, perhaps the highest standard of true knowledge and ability. Have we truly left no student behind? Do the poor, non-white, undereducated youth have better opportunities for success in this brave new system?

For many students, the No Child Left Behind Act is not cultivating educational change in a meaningful and authentic way. Millions of dollars are being spent to divert the public's attention from the real problems in our public school system -- which, of course, reflect society's larger problems as well.

In the public arena, this means that we can continue giving lip service to making improvements in the free, obligatory education we offer our children, while parents who are able move their children from public school into a quality private school. In the public schools themselves, this discourse all too often means additional paperwork, meetings, programs and responsibilities for the teachers who should instead be directly interacting with the students. Meanwhile, this legislation supports political agendas, publication opportunities, one-minute news blurbs and renewed authority for those in political, academic and administrative positions.

Is instruction improving, the average student-teacher ratio falling, teacher quality increasing and academic rigor rising under this new wave of standards-based education? Are the single biggest contributors to student success, the teachers themselves, given the professional autonomy needed to do what is best for each of their students?

In some districts, perhaps, the answer is yes. But for too many others, NCLB is yet another government mandate that demands resources and time, but which does not dramatically and positively impact the educational culture.

High standards, in and of themselves, are useful, necessary tools. When expectations are established and emphasized, children can and will meet them. But Pennsylvania state standards are by definition proficiency standards; they are not high academic goals. When schools spend so much time concentrating on meeting these standards and scoring proficiently on the PSSA's, they are, in essence, focusing on being average.

As Socrates so wisely stated, "Excellence is not an act, but a habit." What habits are schools developing by concentrating money and time onto something guaranteed only to make students proficient?

In many ways, I am a quitter. I am stepping out of the public school system at the age of 35 instead of continuing to work within it for change. But I prefer to view myself as a realist.

I vowed at the beginning of my career never to view my profession as a "job" -- as something I did for a paycheck -- for young people, their ideas and their potential are worthy of so much more. As a teacher, for years, I was most alive in the classroom helping students learn to express their ideas and analyze others' thoughts. Every time a student understood a new concept, wrote an impressive essay or argued a reasonable and well-thought-out position, I reveled in the fact that my life's work could be this stimulating and rewarding.

But I became increasingly frustrated at the mechanics of the system within which I worked and I knew, inevitably, that this frustration would lead to burn-out, and burn-out to doing the minimum required, so that in the end I would be, like the system itself, content with mediocrity.

Most teachers begin their careers full of optimism and dedication to their chosen profession just as most students begin kindergarten full of curiosity and an energy for learning. What, then, happens that causes passionate teachers to close their classroom doors and slowly fade away? What changes eager young students into sullen teens who just want to get out of the system? We cannot be content with our current public school system, nor should we feel confident allowing our children's education to be driven by national, state and local politics rather than by the parents, students and teachers themselves.

In order for NCLB or any other educational reform initiative to create meaningful improvements in our public school system, the change needs to be cultivated and driven by the community, not by punitive, rigid legislative measures.

Perhaps it is time to turn a more critical eye to the problems and supposed solutions in our schools. Maybe the answers we are being given do not address our most pressing questions. Or maybe for too long we've been satisfied not to question at all.