I step into my first period class, Foods and Nutrition, which is supposed to have twenty-four people. We have thirty-five.
"Okay." I think. "It's a popular class. Maybe they decided to expand it."
The next class, Econ, has forty-two people. A bit high, but then again, we had a few retirees in this department. And, it's possible that more seniors are taking Econ first semester. So it's understandable.
Next is Living On Your Own. Five people in that class chose to take it. There's thirty-six people in the class. This confused me: we hired new teachers for that department, nobody retired from that department, and yet the classes are overcrowded. But then again, not everybody could get the electives they wanted, and this class is always crowded. So it makes some sense.
Fourth period Comp Tech has thirty-some people, mostly freshman. So that class was fine. Next comes Newspaper/Journalism, which had as many people as last year, minus the great Lili and a few other seniors.
Then came Creative Writing. The class is supposed to be twenty. It's thirty-six. Way too overcrowded. But then again, the rumors of the class being an easy A could account for it.
Finally, there's Gov. Forty-two people. Well, that blows my theory of "More people took Econ," but the retiree theory works.

Do you see anything wrong with this picture? Not yet? Well, here's some more images.
Most of those classes I described had people standing up. There's not actually enough desks for people in the classes. A good portion of the desks are bent, broken, or, in some cases, held together by duct tape.
The power grid at our school fails if people turn the A/C below seventy-five.
Usually, there are a hundred people waiting to fix the two or so holes in their schedule. Now, practically the entire school is waiting to fix the three-to seven holes in their schedule. Out of seven classes, that's pretty bad.
We hired twenty-one new teachers this year, and we're badly understaffed.

See the problem now? Now, if I lived in a city and went to a bad public high school, this would be normal. I don't. I go to a "California Distinguished High School." Stanford sends admissions officers all the way up from Palo Alto to compete for our graduates, as well as some of the more elite military services.
In the classrooms, students have no choice but to compete for attention. I have to screw people out of their education in order to get mine, and it's not a good feeling. (Although some of you social Darwinists might insist that's a good thing.)
This isn't just my high school. It's all the others in the District that suffer from this problem. I'm almost afraid to ask what's happening at the bad schools.
Wasn't the point of "No Child Left Behind" to make sure that all of the U.S.'s students got an acceptable education? Because if so, that program's failing, and pretty badly.