Nothing makes me feel more connected to the current society that I live in by slowly realizing how much current issues fully impact my life. The older I get and the more that I look at the news or see and hear people discuss the current issues surrounding our society, I feel more and more connected to the issues than I ever have. Besides just being headlines that have little to no importance to me, the issues that we now face on a daily basis involve a lot of our time and attention, in order to ensure that we are evaluating society in order to make it better. One current issues of our generation, the No Child Left Behind Act, has finally come to an end, which is good news for both societal reasons and personal reasons, I am studying to become a high school history teacher.

According to an article entitled “Leaving Behind ‘No Child’ Twin States Await Word On New Education Law” written by David Corriveau and published by Valley News, focusing on the states of Vermont and New Hampshire, both parents, teachers, and administrators are both eager and anxious to see what will become the next regulation, as the No Child Left Behind act will soon end. Further according to the article, the act puts “schools nationwide [under] strict obligations to measure and improve student achievement individually and by school – with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).” Furthermore, the article describes how in December of 2015, President Obama signed a legislation for “handing more responsibility for setting and reaching standards to the states.”

Although there has been steps taken in order to get rid of the act, unfortunately, states like Vermont and New Hampshire, according to the article may still have to live under the act for a certain amount of time. Amy Fowler, deputy secretary of the Vermont Agency of Education who was interviewed for the article, described the current stance of the new education act, specifically state “that until our plan is presented and approved, No Child Left Behind Stays in place. The New system won’t go into effect before the 2017-2018 school year.” Because of the whole complexity in assuring that students are still achieving and learning in their individual schools, there is a great amount of assessment that has to be done in order to ensure that that the act will be beneficial. Reportedly “the federal education department will be fine-tuning its rules for states to account for student achievement, probably with an announcement by late October, state education officials said.” Nevertheless, in order to ensure that actual educators have a voice in creating a new system that will be more beneficial to both students and educators than the last one, agencies throughout Vermont and New Hampshire will meet with both teachers, administrators, and community leaders, in order to “set ideas and priorities.” Heather Gage, a member of the New Hampshire Department of Education working as the director of educator improvement discussed the prudency of discussing new ideas with educators, specifically stating “By this March, we’ll have put together teams of people working around certain areas in the (federal) legislation, business leaders as well as education leaders. … It’s going to be a lot of work, a lot of opportunities to think differently.”

Although it will certainly be difficult to change the system, it will ultimately be beneficial. No Child Left Behind has the ability to damage schools for students that have not reached certain tests scores, which ultimately has the ability to both the students as well as the teachers that have been put in charge.