The road to hell, so the saying goes, is paved with good intentions, and nothing could be truer than the “No Child Left Behind” educational program, which was signed into law in 2002. Designed to improve the performance of primary and secondary school children, NCLB also required accountability of school districts nationwide.

Touted as education’s salvation, NCLB is, in a word, a failure. That’s not my opinion — I am merely the messenger. That is the opinion of several area teachers I have spoken with recently.

One teacher told me this about the No Child Left Behind program: “I think the most obvious but ignored fact about children is that they are cognitively different. There is absolutely no way that a student with an IQ of 70 is going to perform as well as a student with an IQ of 95 or 100. However, No Child Left Behind mandates that all children be able to read and perform at ‘grade level’ by a given year.”

The teacher goes on to say, “Unfortunately, we have used a norming system to determine what ‘grade level’ means. (Norming is the practice of adjusting scores on a standardized test by using separate curves for different ability groups.) In doing so, we have failed to make allowances for different rates of a child’s intellectual development. Traditional education has always grouped children by age instead of by ability, and we are doing a huge disservice to many students because of this. Ultimately, we lose good teachers, turn good people off to teaching, and have a high incidence of stress-related illnesses, time off work, and the list goes on and on.”

The science teacher added this comment: “So many people talk about how kids these days fail to perform the way they used to, and scores or ability levels continue to drop. A major problem is class size. There are far more students in classrooms than ever before, but we haven’t increased the number of teachers in those classrooms. The expectation is that we can increase class size and the teacher should still be as effective as she or he was 30 years ago. Come on, now, that’s not reasonable.”

The 2002 education law, which is up for renewal in Congress, offers a broad menu of options for restructuring. They include firing principals and moving teachers, and hiring “turnaround” specialists.

Republican presidential aspirant Fred Thompson was one of the first to suggest making changes to the program. “No Child Left Behind is a good concept, and I’m all for testing,” Thompson said. “But it seems like now some of these states are teaching to the test and making it so that everybody does well on the test — you can’t really tell that everybody’s doing that well. And it’s not objective,” Thompson added.

Thompson voted for the No Child Left Behind law in 2001, as did most of his fellow senators.

The former Tennessee senator and star of NBC’s “Law & Order” was responding to a question on a recent bus tour of Florida. A woman asked what he would do for education. He told her decisions on how schools are run should be made by local and state decisions, not dictated out of Washington.

As a father and grandfather, I can certainly understand why parents would insist that their children — if they were classified as disadvantaged, for example — should receive the same quality of education as the other students. However, the issue is for the greater good, and shortchanging smarter students in the name of equal education for all seems flawed. It is these smarter students who will ultimately suffer. It certainly is not an easy decision, regardless of on which side of the fence you stand.

Another area teacher told me this: “At the risk of seeming insensitive, an analogy of the No Child Left Behind program can best be explained when a blind person is expected to drive a car, but when the car crashes, the driving instructor is held responsible.”

No Child Left Behind has major flaws, and these flaws need to be addressed before any more damage has been done.

Ron Hutchison is an author and freelance writer. He resides in Joplin.