Citiwire.net

For Release January 4, 2009
Citiwire.net

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was much praised at the time of its passage in 2001, especially its ambitious goal to bring disadvantaged and minority school achievement into the mainstream. NCLB was seen as a rare example of bi-partisan federal policy making.

Yet now this famed law is stuck in a twilight zone. Politics permit neither its re-authorization nor its repeal. This is a good thing.

Good because NCLB, despite its laudable goals and its marginal gains, has actually done considerable damage to American education. It has resulted in a rush toward standardization–trying to make every school and every program the same–precisely when we need a rich variety of different schooling opportunities for today’s diverse youth.

First the politics. Everyone supports closing achievement gaps; and who’s not for standards? But the NCLB law has become a toxic brand. Rural Republicans hate the idea of the federal government meddling in local school affairs; and a slew of congressional Democrats elected in the last two cycles ran against NCLB. Civil rights groups are adamant about maintaining NCLB; teacher unions counter the standards are unrealistic. The president who pushed it will be gone. It is an opportunity to do something better. NCLB was, technically, the seventh re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. An eighth ESEA might be crafted while a new secretary of education is left to modify NCLB through his waiver authority.

But politics aside, check the damaging if unintended consequences of this law:

• The standards came to mean standardization. Courses, classes, tests–as though all young people are wired identically. The law’s narrow focus on reading and math has re-aligned what high schools spend money and time on toward a standardized model.

• The virtue of expecting all young people to achieve has morphed into the expectation that they must all learn the same things–usually in the same place at the same pace. An almost delusional notion of achievement further contemplates that a standardized test is both a valid and sufficient means of assessing learning. “College ready” has become a mantra, despite the reality that most of the jobs for decades to come, while requiring some specialized preparation, do not require a baccalaureate degree.

• Worse yet is the law’s theory of action: that once we have standards–albeit 50 wildly varying sets, state by state–we can order achievement and when it fails to materialize, command its fulfillment with threats and sanctions. Students do not learn from standards; they learn from what they see, and hear, and do, in their interactions with each other and adults in a school situation. If they are motivated to learn, they will. If they are not, no one can force them. The traditional model of school, oriented around delivering instruction, fits some but hardly all students. Those who do not learn that way fall away. Some who fall away are running away, finding school boring, rigid, and totally disconnected from the real world and from the ways they learn.

• What some wrongly call a teacher shortage is a growing teacher-retention problem. Close to 40 percent of new teachers–especially the most promising–leave the profession within the first five years. Why? Because being a soldier in the NCLB army doesn’t lead to a very satisfying career. Unless we allow teaching to be a real profession, we should not expect this sad trend to change.

• NCLB’s obsession with testing has led to the almost silly assumption that we can judge a school by averaging all student test scores at a point-in-time. Imagine if the federal government ranked medical clinics by averaging the health status on a given day of all the people who regularly use that clinic?

• Finally, the law’s deadly drumbeat of repeated, standardized testing is steadily shrinking what high schoolers can study, as resources are concentrated on reading and math and other subjects are crowded out. So even science matters less. History matters less. Art and music–critical ways of learning for many young people–are out the window. Not to mention economics or foreign languages.

In stark contrast the nearly meteoric growth in on-line learning and next-generation education software reveals what happens when students get a chance to learn in different ways. For a peek at the potential for 21st century schooling, take a look at Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, based on a recent report sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. See what happens when schooling taps the motivation of students, starts with their interests and passions, when learning is designed for interaction, rather than one-way “instruction.” Getting every willing young person ready for the challenges of this century is neither impossible nor hopeless. NCLB, as it stands, is both.

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