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Last week while reporters followed Valerie Plame like paparazzi chasing a move starlet, another hearing took place which held far more significance for the American people than Plame’s testimony–the future of their children. The witnesses who testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and House Committee on Education and Labor on the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act did not see their pictures on newspaper front pages or their words in oped pieces and blogs. Yet that hearing and those that follow will decide the direction of American society for the next decade.
As leaders of the teachers’ unions, the Council of the Great City Schools and other key organizations gave their testimony, their remarks seemed little more than variations on the script of opening witness Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes, Co-Chair of the Commission on No Child Left Behind. Barnes admitted, “While the goals of NCLB are sound, our work has shown that the statute and its implementation are not perfect, and in some instances need significant improvement.”
A report from the Center for American Progress and U.S. Chamber of Commerce showed the effectiveness of NCLB. “Education By the Numbers” points out that the number of states receiving above average grades in all categories is zero as is the number of states with a majority of 4th and 8th graders proficient in math and reading. It also documented the manipulation of data by various states. Alabama, for example, reported 83% of its fourth graders were proficient in reading using the state’s own test, while the National Assessment of Educational Process calculates the number is closer to 22%.
One “witness” the Committees might have called to provide meaningful testimony about NCLB has disappeared: the now-forgotten SCANS report. SCANS stands for Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. The secretary referred to is not the Secretary of Education but the Secretary of Labor. SCANS began with the George H. W. Bush administration when Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole proclaimed,
If you do not possess the basic skills required to survive in today’s world, then you can not get into the system, you can not get a job, you can not succeed, and you will spend a lifetime on the outside looking in.
In November 1989, Dole authorized a series of initiatives charging that “Simply put, America’s workforce is in a state of unreadiness.” Among those was SCANS, which was carried on by her successor, Lynn Martin.
In 1991, the SCANS committee consisting of representatives from business, labor, education, and foundations issued its first report What Work Requires of Schools. A decade and a half later its recommendations still seem fresh and far-sighted. The report begins by painting a bleak portrait,
What we found was disturbing: more than half our young people leave school without the knowledge or foundation required to find and hold a good job.
The basic thrust of SCANS follows: “Good jobs depend on people who can put knowledge to work. New workers must be creative and responsible problem solvers and have the skills and attitudes on which employers can build.” The report identifies the skills those workers will need, dividing them into two areas-competencies and what it termed “the foundation.” The five competencies called for workers who could productively use:
Resource allocation of time, money, materials, space, and staff;
Interpersonal Skills including working on teams and with people from culturally diverse backgrounds
Information skills such as acquiring and evaluating data;
Systems skills–understanding social, organizational and technological systems;
Technology skills such as selecting, applying, maintaining and troubleshooting equipment
The foundation included what SCANS termed the “Basic Skills” of reading, writing, math, speaking, and listening. But it also added:
Thinking Skills such as creative problem solving and knowing how to learn, and
Personal Qualities including individual responsibility, self-esteem, and integrity
In explaining the list the report stated, “In the broadest sense, the competencies represent the attributes that today’s high performance employer seeks in tomorrow�s employee.” The report concluded, “If your children cannot learn these skills by the time they leave high school, they face bleak prospects & dead-end work, interrupted only by periods of unemployment, with little chance to climb a career ladder.”
Fast forward to the presidency of the son of the man whose administration created SCANS. Instead of SCANS we have the No Child Left Behind Act which says nothing about the need for these skills. It is as if SCANS had never been written. The George W. Bush plan for renewing No Child Left Behind begins,
The law’s ultimate goal: [is] steady academic gains until all students can read and do math at or above grade level, closing for good the nation’s achievement gap between disadvantaged and minority students and their peers.
The goals for the reauthorization are as follows:
Close the achievement gap through high state standards and accountability.
Middle and high schools must offer more rigorous coursework that better prepares students for postsecondary education or the workforce.
States must be given flexibilities and new tools to restructure chronically underperforming schools, and families must be given more options.
Reading such language (“flexibilities�” maybe these people need NCLB) and reviewing the SCANS competencies, makes it abundantly clear that the administrations of George the father and George the son have entirely different perspectives on education. Which of the goals would you want to guide your child�s education: SCANS or NCLB?
Even more troubling is how in two decades, America’s vision for education has become pinched, pedestrian, and downright primitive. SCANS presciently looked forward to the global economy we now inhabit, while NCLB looks backward to the 19th century of McGuffy Readers and rote learning. NCLB at best prepares students to work in service economy McJobs, while SCANS aims to prepare them for technological, fast-paced careers that require workers to think on their feet.
The educational philosophy of the son focuses only on reading and math and doesn’t even mention the third R-writing, let alone all the skills in SCANS. “Math and science have become the new currencies of the global economy,” says the NCLB renewal, “Our students must have the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in this changed world.” One wonders what world NCLB refers to since math and science have been part of the global economy for at least two centuries? SCANS had little use for the philosophy that underlies NCLB, noting, “The scenarios make clear that tomorrow’s career ladders require even the basic skills & the old 3 Rs & to take on a new meaning.”
The contrasts become more striking when one examines the difference between father and son on what motivates students. No Child Left Behind takes a punitive approach which is wrapped up in the buzzword associated with it, “accountability.” With NCLB, if schools and classrooms (and by implication students) do not meet performance goals set for them there will be consequences, as my parents used to say.
SCANS comes from a entirely different mental model. It is motivated by a belief that students must see their education as relevant, not as some requirement to be met.
We know that many students work very hard. But many more do not because they do not believe the lessons they are learning are connected to the real world or that the diplomas they are earning will bring them a brighter future.
This brings us to the most controversial part of NCLB and its key difference with SCANS–assessment. NCLB has brought the return of “high stakes testing” employing the multiple guess, short answer, fill-in-the-blanks tests we all loathed, especially when we had to take them to get into college or some other program.
In contrast, the final section of SCANS acknowledges:
The thinking inherent in many of the competencies, such as improving systems and allocating resources, is much more complex and open-ended than generally can be assessed using conventional testing methods. A variety of innovative assessment techniques undoubtedly will be required to solve these problems.
SCANS envisions what educators refer to as �performance-based assessments,� in which a student actually must demonstrate what they know. In SCANS educators and business people alike openly opposed the kind of testing used for NCLB, saying that the ability to fill in blanks on an answer sheet had little relationship to real-life. With a multiple choice test a student could guess the answer to the question what if someone handed you a dollar for a 75-cent purchase, what was`their change?
So what happened to SCANS? Its date provides the clue: it came at the end of George H. W. Bush’s term. When the Clinton administration came to power, it concentrated its efforts on Goals 2000, a continuation of another Bush initiative, America 2000. Under Clinton, Goals 2000 became proscriptive and federally-managed, which simultaneously raised the ire of educators and those on the far right. After the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994 with much help from their fundamentalist Christian allies, education reform of any kind atrophied under the Gingrich Congress and the combination of budgets cuts and “back to the basics.”
SCANS still stands as one of the most notable casualties of what I term the Republican Counterrevolution and as such is an important historical lesson in how easily democracy can move from a place of freedom and innovation to one tinged with authoritarianism and thou-shalt-nots.
Under the assault of Christian fundamentalists who dictated much of the GOP’s education agenda, even the business supporters of SCANS faded into the night as a new Dark Ages descended over American public schools. Two developments exemplify this: the rise of so-called “creationism,” which like some sleeping beast arose from the days of the Scopes Trial to once again stalk the land and the Counterrevolution’s open support for private school vouchers so people can send their children to American versions of Iran’s “Ayatollah Academies.”
In the Dark Ages, corporate executives no longer advocate “workers must be creative and responsible problem solvers.” The forward-looking corporate leaders who backed SCANS appear to have gone into exile or ceded education to the fundamentalists. This Era of Bad Feelings with its vitriol and the return of McCarthy-like attacks has America’s vaunted public school system fighting for its life. Some believe NCLB is nothing more than an attempt to ultimately do away with public schools.
As the Counterrevolutionary assault on public education gathered momentum, the Democratic Party began triangulating rather than standing for principles. Somewhere in the 1990s it lost its moral compass, leaving those who still believed in public education and reforms like SCANS without allies as they fought a rearguard action with diminishing resources. Like the vote on the Iraq War, the Democrats cowardly voted for NCLB, ceding education policy to the Counterrevolution. So they casually discarded one of the four best cards in their hand–the defense of public education.
As we head into another presidential campaign, the waffling and lack of unity the Democrats have about NCLB is strangely reminiscent of similar reactions to the Iraq War. In fact the official Democratic Party website section on education makes no mention of NCLB! It would be so easy for Democrats to run ads picturing Jerry Falwell that ask, “Do you want this man to decide what’s right for American education?” Or to show a one-room school with children writing on slates that asks, “Is this the education we want for our children?” Then there is Dubya reading a book upside down!
Rather than admit they made a mistake voting for the Iraq War and NCLB, the Democrats have tried to finesse the American people. But America is fed up with finesses and spin-mastering by a party that seems to no longer stand for any fundamental principles. Yet in education, if they had any imagination–or sense of history–they could easily point back to the bipartisan goals of SCANS.
Like Iraq, NCLB seems to be unraveling. The second Bush administration has made many of the same mistakes with No Child Left Behind as they have with the war, the most indefensible being their refusal to supply those on the front lines–teachers and troops alike–with even the most basic tools they need to survive. Like Iraq, NCLB also fails to acknowledge cultural and community differences. Finally, like administration officials making Iraq policy, NCLB officials appear to have no strategic sense. Perhaps had they been educated under SCANS, their systems, resource allocation, information and critical thinking competencies might be better.
Meanwhile SCANS’ vision still stands unfulfilled.
For over 200 years Americans have worked to make education part of their national vision, indispensable to democracy and to individual freedom. For at least the last 40 years, we have worked to further the ideal of equity & for minority Americans, for the disabled, and for immigrants. With that work still incomplete, we are called to still another revolution & to create an entire people trained to think and equipped with the know-how to make their knowledge productive.
Resource Shout Out for NCLB: One of the best sites opposing NCLB is Fair Test. Give them a look.
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