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June 6 the House Committee on Education and Labor took up one of the worst laws to come from beneath the marble Capitol dome–No Child Left Behind. Although, the hearings rated little media coverage, like fingers scraping a blackboard they send an uncomfortable message of the Democrat’s exasperating spinelessness.
The buzzword coming from both Democrats and educators was “flexibility.” In fact the word appears so often in their websites, speeches, and other materials that you swear they all had the same writer. At the June 6 hearings, Dr. Carol Johnson, Superintendent of the Memphis City Schools stated:
I am pleased to be testifying today on the issue of flexibility under NCLB.
Kathleen Strauss, President of the Michigan State Board of Education, echoed Johnson:
We came to the conclusion that while we are meeting the spirit of the law we clearly needed more flexibility to help our good faith efforts in meeting the letter of the law.
Rick Melmer, South Dakota’s Secretary of Education and president-elect of the Council of Chief State School Officers added his testimony:
Congress must continue to hold states accountable for improving student achievement and closing achievement gap, while also providing them with the flexibility needed to implement innovative models for accomplishing these vital national goals.
The positions taken by the witnesses echo positions taken by some of the nation’s major education organizations. The National School Boards Association has put its considerable weight behind a revised bill sponsored by Representative Don Young (R-AK-At Large). Its first three recommendations all contain the f-word:
- Increase the flexibility for states to use additional types of assessments for measuring AYP—including growth models
- Grant states more flexibility in assessing students with disabilities and students not proficient in English for AYP purposes
- Create a student testing participation range, providing flexibility for uncontrollable variations in student attendance.
In a joint statement with the National Conference of State Legislatures, The American Association of School Administrators also has a preference for the f-word. For example, the statement asks for:
Flexibility for States to Address Unique Schools and Districts: The federal government should recognize the unique circumstances present in rural and urban schools and provide incentives and flexibility for improvement in these school systems, rather than impose penalties and sanctions for failure to comply with the process requirement of the law.
Still, as Dr. Johnson noted in her testimony to the House:
Flexibility, of course, means different things to different people.
For some inexplicable reason, the prevailing stance on NCLB by the Democrats and major education organizations has avoided calling for its repeal, but instead seeking to seek to modify it. Trying to fix a bad law is like trying to repair a downed power line by grabbing onto it. It creates lots of sparks, but besides doing little to solve the underlying problem, it ends up killing those trying to make the repairs.
Yet very few educators and even fewer politicians seem willing to call for the repeal of NCLB. One organization that has gone further than most is Fair Test, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization funded in part by grants. Its Action Alert on the renewal of NCLB states:
The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies are trying to push through fast-track renewal of the fundamentally flawed “No Child Left Behind” law without the public debate it requires.
Now is the time for assessment reformers like you to act. Contact your U.S. Senators and Representative today. Tell them NCLB should not be reauthorized unless all these issues are addressed. Ask them to contact the Education Committee and press for adoption of the reforms listed here.
Another organization, the Educator Roundtable is circulating an online petition to repeal NCLB. The petition’s opening paragraph intentionally echoes the opening of the United States Constitution:
We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Childresearcher and Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law’s simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.
The petition cites 16 major reasons for repealing NCLB. Among them are:
1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.
11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.
13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.
16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all “failures,” so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.
Yet the major education organizations and the Democrats continue to stick to the f-word. A curious bit of trivia about the petition is that one of the signers is none other than Paul Houston, who is the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that Houston has been unable to convince his own organization to back his position.
Other prominent names who have signed the petition include education writer and critic Alfie Kohn, writer and education researcher Gerald Bracey, researcher and education reformer William Spady, and Arizona State University Regents’ Professor in the College of Education David Berliner. To anyone like me who was involved in education reform during these last three decades these names represent some of the most inspiring and innovative thinkers in education. Their work served as the guidepost for those of us working at the grassroots level.
What is interesting about the failure of education organizations and the Democratic Party to voice stronger objections to No Child Left Behind is that the American public, as usual, is out in front of them on this issue. A June 13 Pew Research Center report notes:
Among those who have heard about the law, 34% say the law has made schools better; 26% say it has made schools worse; and 32% say it has had no impact.
In other words, only one-third of the American people believe NCLB has helped to improve schools and a quarter of the nation believes it has actually hurt them. The “report cards” for NCLB issued by various organizations also give it mixed grades. The Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind reports in the Executive Summary of its report on NCLB:
While the law set us on a more productive course and spurred some improvement, it has not been enough. Far too many children are still not achieving to high standards in every state.
Fair Test points out the following weaknesses with NCLB:
NCLB is based on false assumptions-e.g., test scores equal educational quality, and sanctions based on low test scores drive school improvement–and therefore offers false remedies.
Nearly all schools will eventually be rated “In Need of Improvement” (INOI) and sanctioned under NCLB because of the way “Adequate Yearly Progress” statistics are calculated.
“Teaching to the test” narrows the curriculum and forces teachers and students to concentrate on memorizing isolated facts.
The law’s remedies for “failing” schools do not work.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is nicknamed “the nation’s report card,” has been conducting a trial evaluation of the performance of urban districts. Its 2005 report showed that 51% of students in large central city schools scored below basic in 4th and 8th grade reading as compared with 38% for the nation as a whole. An astounding 67% of the students in OUR NATION’S CAPITAL scored below basic level. In math the differences were 32% below basic for central cities versus 21% for the nation. In Washington, D.C. 51% scored below basic.
Although the report did note that scores had gone up slightly since 2003 the increases are so minuscule as to be statistically insignificant, most being in the 3-4% range. If ever there were an indictment of the failures of No Child Left Behind these figures provide one of the most compelling witnesses.
Thomas Jefferson recognized that education was one of the major cornerstones of a democratic society. He was among the first to see that education could serve as a prime mechanism for keeping the playing field level. Yet the performance of students of color and poor students is nothing less than a national disgrace. This country is in danger of losing the third generation since Brown v. Board–in essence half a century of what amounts to de facto discrimination every bit as malicious as what Thurgood Marshall argued against in Brown.
For those who persist in thinking we have a contemporary equivalent of separate but equal, ask them to take a trip to a nearby inner city school and spend some time walking the halls and even sitting in on classes. Note the quality of the textbooks, the number of computers, the state of the restrooms, the amount of supplementary learning materials. And while you sit in on a class note the number of students the teacher must deal with, the experience of the teacher, the number of aides or volunteers helping in the classroom, the number who English language learners (ESL), and the percentage of students who have learning disabilities or behavior problems. Then make a similar trip to a rich suburban district and ask, “Which school would you pick for your child?”
With NCLB, the Counterrevolution has largely succeeded in reframing the debate about education funding much as it reframed debates about taxes. Resource poor schools where the toilets work intermittently, the textbooks have pages missing, and teachers must buy their own classroom supplies also tend to have large numbers of students not performing well on the standardized tests at the heart of NCLB. For these schools, the GOP moved the debate from lack of resources to lack of performance in a way that would earn the admiration of the most sophisticated river boat gambler. The problem is that they are gambling with our children’s futures.
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