Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

Other groups, too, had been claiming their pieces of the school-funding pie. Families who had always sent their kids to private schools were now getting voucher money to help with tuition, and public-school money was draining into ever more questionable alternatives. Some were not public. Others barely seemed like school: there were religious academies that didn’t allow gay kids, charter schools located inside private golf clubs, glorified homeschool setups whose students didn’t even take the TCUP test.

Rich kids could mess up and still go on to college. They could commit crimes and still go on to become CEOs. They could cheat on their taxes, or defraud sick people, or run banks into the ground, and leave others to clean up their messes. Hell, they could even become president.

What, in any case, was an adequate amount of progress to make in a year? If he’d learned anything, it was that there was no happily ever after in education, no riding off into the sunset. There was only one yearly fix after another. Then, in August, the whole cycle started again. It was exhausting.