Deducation US

Technorati Profile

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I’m re-reading Shame of the Nation, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make my blood boil. Just in passing, I’d like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I’d be interested–really!–to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, “Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain….” (page 3). Now it’s no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though “Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia” and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes “… during the past 30 years … a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well.” Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as “[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation.” It should be clear that schools qualify as “caretakers,” so the only point of dispute would seem to be the “emotional harm” specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the “restoration of apartheid schooling.” And its results–tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music–seem to me to qualify as “serious emotional harm.” You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I’ve noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.

There’s a lot going on in our country today, and the Presidential candidates have a lot to think about and a lot to talk about. Ending the war is number one, as well it should be. But that’s just a short term goal–in a year or two we will not have the war to kick around anymore, though we have decades of recovering from this abomination mentally and spiritually to get through. We haven’t even gotten over the Vietnam war. Health care and Social Security, a looming recession/depression, pervasive racism, the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism, and (my other most pressing issue) energy independence: all these are getting at least some attention from the candidates.

Yet the one issue that has crucial long-term implications for this country–the repeal of the NCLB–seems to be sliding into the background. The NCLB is a ticking time bomb planted by the Bush Administration, and its ticks are beginning to be increasingly ignored by the Democratic candidates. Edweek, in its November 6 article “The Next Education President?“, writes, “But with the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nominations in full swing, few of the current candidates have laid out detailed strategies for improving the quality of American schools and increasing the knowledge and skills of the nation’s elementary and secondary students.” And “Many political analysts expect education issues to remain a low priority during the primaries and in the general-election campaign.”

Over the summer, it seemed as focus on the renewal of the NCLB and especially during the NEA Convention, when the candidates were trying to curry some favor with educators, there was a certain amount of awareness and lip-service from the candidates. I just searched YouTube for some candidates’ video from the NEA convention and found a couple of interesting ones: Senator Clinton: “The test is becoming the curriculum”; and Senator Obama: “Don’t tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test.” I confess that, for those few moments, at least, Hillary seemed to be more on top of what’s wrong with the NCLB. But since then, in her public pronouncements and on her website, mostly silence on the matter. And the same with most of the other Democrats.

So what’s the appeal of the NCLB for the voters or the constituencies or the financial backers that the major candidates are afraid to come out and say, with minor candidate Bill Richardson, “Scrap it!”?

When the Bush-NCLB timebomb goes off in 10 years or so, when today’s sixth graders are beginning to enter the workforce, the voting ranks, major positions of power and authority and decision-making, we’ll all look at each other, and say “how come everyone is so stupid? Why can’t they think or imagine?” Because the NCLB has made us a nation of test takers, capable only of giving memorized answers that were correct ten years ago.

Wake up and speak up, Sens. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama.

I’ve been away from the blog for a few weeks. Seems like nothing’s happening on the NCLB front, with the exception of Jonathan Kozol’s Hunger Strike. (By the way, the most distressing development in this is that Senator Ted Kennedy, a longtime friend of Kozol, is refusing to even return Kozol’s calls now.)

But a colleague recently sent me a link to a YouTube clip of John Edwards speaking on the NCLB, saying that this video had swung him over to the Edwards camp. It’s powerful stuff, and Edwards is saying most of the right things. He’s not saying repeal the NCLB, which he should be, but he seems to understand the immense problems the Act has occasioned and he’s got a lot of good, if still rather vague, ideas about what to do.

He calls the NCLB “intrusive,” and speaks of the absurdity of rewarding good schools that fall in their results but stay above the minimal competencies while punishing the underfunded and underperforming schools that make huge gains in their performances. Of the technocrats’ mania for testing, he says, “the parameters of what we are measuring need to be more diverse.”

So I decided to do a quick investigation of the other major candidates’ positions on the NCLB.

First, Hillary Clinton does not explicitly mention it on her website. A summary by Margaret Paynich in the January 22, 2007, EdWeek says, “doesn’t support school vouchers, supports types of performance pay, one-time testing for teachers – but no word yet on National Standards. My advice – don’t hold your breath.” In Clinton’s publicly-released statement, she says, “While I firmly believe in the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, the under-funding of this crucial law makes it impossible for teachers and schools to reach these goals.” As I’ve noted previously, the only good thing about the NCLB is that it’s underfunded, thus slowing down its rampage through American schools. So it seems that she’s firmly behind the NCLB, not only its stated goals, which are indeed laudable, but its methods, which are dangerous. But in reality she is mostly vague, having chosen health care as the cornerstone of her candidacy.

Most disappointing to me is Barack Obama, whom I’ve supported from day 1 without, I guess, clearly seeing his position on the NCLB. Susan Ohanian’s website (which, I should note in passing, is an excellent and thorough critique of NCLB–she has, I believe, coined the word “standardista” for people who maniacally preach standards). In her depressingly full section entitled “Outrages,” she includes an article by Obama, “created by the Center for American Progress,” which plays into the hands of the corporate technocrats who see the only function of education as enabling students to more fully participate in the “competition” for “global jobs.” “Countries who are out-educating us today out-compete our workers tomorrow,” he (or rather the Center for American Progress) writes. This is disappointing in two ways: first, that Senator Obama, as intelligent and articulate as he is (the two qualities I have admired in him), either isn’t bold enough or wise enough to stand up to the corporate types who want to take over our educational system. Perhaps, it’s just politicking, fence-sitting so as not to offend any powerful donors. Second, why is he allowing the Center for American Progress to write his position statements? Granted, the Center for American Progress is often progressive, and certainly sees itself as such, but its agenda is clearly economically-based–making good little workers out of our students. Its “State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness” is jointly written by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and contains troubling conclusions like “too many of our nation’s schools and students are unprepared for the demands of the 21st century’s knowledge-based economy” and “These shortcomings are unacceptable and spell trouble for the economic prospects of individual Americans and for the competitiveness of the country as a whole.”

Then there’s Governor Bill Richardson, who doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance of getting nominated. He writes, “I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it.” Hooray for a voice of sanity.

And Dennis Kucinich, an original supporter of NCLB, who has seen the damage it’s doing and has changed his position: “Yes, I would [throw it out now]. I would replace it with [...] a new educational structure where the focus would be on helping to bring forth the creativity of our children in stressing arts and language, music; to invite the participation of educational philosophers and psychologists and administrators and teachers and parents and children; to take a new focus on our education, to stop this incessant direction of trying to make us a nation of test-takers, of putting the pressure on teachers to teach to the test, and then school districts depending on the results of those tests for their funding.”

It’s trendy for the leading candidates to support the NCLB in general and bemoan the fact that the Bush administration’s major failing is underfunding it. Only the second-tier candidates, who presumably can speak their minds without fear of losing the support of the wealthy corporate donors, can speak the truth about the NCLB’s emperor and his garb.

Can either Clinton or Obama be shown the light before it’s too late? Or can John Edwards actually win the nomination?

One of the issues bound up with the conservatives’ view of education is “commoditization, ” the belief that something has become so commonplace and unremarkable that it can be mass-produced, packaged and sold, like potato chips or ten-penny nails or Windows computers. Originally the person who invented potato chips had something new and remarkable; over time the process for making them became so refined and streamlined and advanced that almost anyone could make them, and the only difference between potato chips became price. The item in question thus became a commodity. As Thomas Friedman has shown in The World is Flat, when an item becomes commoditized, it can be outsourced to Asian workers who will do it more cheaply or it can be computerized, mass-produced by algorithms that can be programmed, measured, and assessed.

In some ways it seems that education is in danger of becoming commoditized. And I’m not sure if it’s a cause or an effect. Probably some of each. You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it’s only going to get worse. The forces of rampant capitalism are closing in on American education.

Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, “critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures” (page 54). Anyone who knows the first thing about probability and bell curves knows that in any group of people, by any measure there will be gaps. Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be “failures” which opens the door for “market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization” to move in and “reform” public education (58). It’s either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. But the door is open.

Item: Blogger TeacherJay has noted that some schools are beginning to pay their students for attendance and achievement, thus making good little consumers of all their students. Get an A and earn a hundred bucks! Can there be anything that makes a clearer link between education and commoditization?

Item: Educational corporations are jumping into the NCLB game with both feet. It’s getting to be big business–there’s lots of money (LOTS of money) to be made by declaring some children, teachers, and schools to be failures. Special privatized schools, charter schools, commercial after-school programs–veritable cash cows.

But even worse, I think, are the pre-packaged “Pass state-mandated tests” programs, sold over the Internet and also increasingly hawked by large publishing houses. These are often the worst kinds of education imaginable, flash-cards, rote drill and kill memorization, phonics (don’t get me started on the futility of phonics!). Often these are computerized, the CD version of flash cards. Mass-produced, pre-packaged education. Reading as a salable, measurable commodity: a thing.

Real education–the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers–can’t be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia. For they can be commoditized. And sold at Walmart.

A new study co-sponsored by “Education Next” from Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the “Program on Education Policy and Governance” at Harvard reveals some interesting insight into the turmoil surrounding the re-authorization of NCLB. The study, a survey entitled The 2007 Education Next—PEPG Survey, shows that a slim majority of surveyed Americans favor re-authorizing the NCLB with few or no changes, with the strongest support registered for “accountability” in the abstract, whatever that means. Most interesting to me, however, was the disparity in respondents’ view of their own school vs. other schools: nearly all respondents graded their own school much more highly than other schools. My school is fine; all those others out there are failing. This suggests to me a kind of lurking NIMBYism.

A NIMBY, you might remember, is one who is in favor of such and such social or political reform, but Not In My Back Yard. Yes, I favor nuclear power to help solve the energy crisis, but I don’t want a nuclear reactor in My Back Yard (i.e., my town). Build it, but build it somewhere else. Yes, we need to lock up more criminals, but build those prisons somewhere else. In New England right now, we are seeing the same attitude regarding the “wind farms” proposed off the coast of Cape Cod, a large collection of huge wind-powered turbines that would make a dent in our region’s energy crisis. Yes, we want renewable energy sources, but Not In Our Back Yard. Build those windmills, but build them somewhere else.

I remember in the energy crisis of the 70s, when the national speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. Surveys showed that the nation was overwhelmingly in favor of the mandate (in the abstract), yet studies showed that the lower speed limit was being overwhelmingly ignored. Yes, I want all you other people to drive 55, but I don’t have to. Those surveys were poorly worded: they should have asked, “Are you in favor of a national law whereby YOU will receive a speeding ticket the minute you drive over 55 mph?” Then we would see how much support there was for a national 55 mph speed limit.

But I digress, sort of.

One of the interesting tangential conclusions of the survey was that support for the NCLB’s “if it breathes, test it” accountability policy rises if the phrase “NCLB” is not mentioned, just referred to generically as “federal accountability legislation.” Which shows that “No Child Left Behind” is for whatever reasons beginning to lose its conservative-manufactured halo (this is good) but that “accountability” in the abstract is still a god-word. I want to make all those other schools toe the line that I set–that’s the meaning of “accountability,” in more concrete and understandable terms.

Another tangential finding from the survey is the disparity of results between educators and non-educators. The professionals and the competents in the field of education, those who know and understand the challenges of modern education, oppose the reauthorization of the NCLB. Those who don’t know favor its re-authorization. A telling finding, I think.

But cut through the abstractions, the words with an aura around them that allows you to interpret them any way you desire, the mother-apple-pie words that mask the realities. What if the survey had asked concrete and specific questions which clearly highlighted in personal terms the impact of the NCLB? I’d like to see the Education Next-PEPG survey re-done, asking the question, “Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that requires that your child fail the entire grade if he or she doesn’t pass a specific multiple-choice test at the end of the school year?”

Or how about, “Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that allows wealthier parents to remove their children from the public schools and send them to private charter schools with support from your tax dollars?” Or maybe “Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that may identify your school as not good enough and then withdraw federal support from your school as punishment?” Or perhaps, “Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that has the effect of forcing your school to lower its standards in order to keep its funding?”

Or, given that 68% of African-Americans support vouchers, ask, “Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that would allow students from poor black school districts to attend your child’s school instead at taxpayer expense?”

Hey, wait a minute….I’d support that.

I’m rereading Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, and though it’s not a book about education, it’s a book about the future, in fact the future that is already so close as to be tangible. I think that A Whole New Mind is one of the two most important books of the first decade of this century (the other is Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat). Both give pretty clear portraits of the world of the 1990s and the early part of this century, and both are able to clearly extrapolate what the coming world will be like and, mostly by implication (since they are not education books), what education for American citizens must be right now. And of course No Child Left Behind and what Pink calls “test-happy America” have it all wrong.

Pink’s general thesis is that, because of what he calls “Abundance, Asia, and Automation,” the old jobs associated with the Information Age are going, going, almost gone. Those jobs–the ones that can be automated by computers or outsourced to Asian workforces who are skilled, educated, and willing to work for 20 cents on the dollar–cannot be reclaimed by American workers. And they are characterized by mostly left-brained skills–logic, repetition, programmability. And, for our purposes here, they are comprised of mostly testable skills: right or wrong, black or white.

Though left-brained skills will not disappear from the new society, right brained skills will be of equal or greater value. Pink calls this new age the “Conceptual Age,” and he makes a strong case that the Industrial Age and the Information Age have been left in its wake. The conceptual age is here.

And what specifically are the skills, the knowledge, needed to succeed in the 
Conceptual Age? Pink lists what he calls the “six senses”: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. It’s not my purpose here to go into any of these six in detail, but suffice it to say none of them are testable. These are all right brain, high-concept qualities and they are the skills that will be needed by American citizens in the future. None of these can be tested; none of these can be objectively assessed, and adequate yearly progress can not be unambiguously documented. “More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify,” Pink writes. Tougher to quantify: quantification is exactly what the NCLB is trying to do, and because of this it’s missing the more important qualities of a 21st centruy education.

One of the impetuses that drives the conservative support for the NCLB is the need to ward off ambiguity and change, to reduce the world to neat tests of correct answers. But, as Pink shows, the word will have none of it. Regardless of Bush and Spellings and the rest of the NCLB supporters, the world is changing.

The NCLB, giving in to this outdated urge for correct answers and left-brained algorithms, is doing a great job of preparing American children and future citizens with all the skills they will need to compete for 19th and 20th century jobs. We are testing our children back into the cotton mills and auto assembly lines.

However, someone should tell test-happy and obsessed-with-punishment Congress, as it debates the re-authorization of the NCLB, that it’s unfortunately now the 21st century.

An entry, pretty insightful in many ways, by Erin Richards in the July 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel School Zone Blog brings up a couple of interesting points, but I believe that she has misunderstood the value of her observations and misinterpreted the results. After attending a session at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, she writes, “In [Tony] Wagner’s opinion, one problem is that nobody agrees on what constitutes ‘effective education.’” Yes, of course that’s true. Nobody agrees on what makes great music, beautiful figure skating, or excellent marinara sauce, either. (I know that in all cases here–including Wagner’s–the “nobody” part is an exaggeration: of course there are groups of people who agree that Beethoven is great. Let’s let that slide for the sake of discussion.)

For the most part, this lack of agreement is not a problem: it’s a reality and in fact a strength. It’s called “many ideas,” “two heads are better than one, ” or even the “D” word that so many conservatives loathe, “diversity.” The current trend in education to test everything that breathes, best exemplified by the NCLB, runs directly counter to this, however. It’s an attempt to remove this wonderful multiplicity of ideas and substitute for it a hegemony of ideas (actually, one idea). And to further exacerbate this, it’s a hegemony of bad, even dangerous, ideas.

A few days later, in the same blog in the same newspaper, Alan J. Borsuk makes a very telling point: “What gets tested gets taught.” He concludes from this, rightly, that “[s]chools are spending more time on reading and math [the two areas required to be tested by the NCLB]and less time on other subjects such as science, social studies and various kinds of arts, as a general trend.” The intersection of these two ideas reveals the danger: if we all agree with Bush and Spellings and swallow the NCLB’s wrong assumptions and bad policies, we damage American education.

For the NCLB assumes that the only things that matter are those that can be tested by mindless tests. Even the report from the Center on Education Policy, which occasions Borsuk’s article, falls into the trap: The press release, kind of an executive summary, states, “[t]he weight of evidence indicates that state test scores in reading and mathematics have increased overall since No Child Left Behind was enacted.” Of course they have increased! That’s all that’s being taught–how to pass these tests. What is happening here is that “proficiency” and “education” are being re-defined as “passing tests.” It forces schools to concentrate on the meaningless–passing tests–rather than education, whatever it is. In fact, decrying the demise of other subjects such as social studies and science, the Center on Education Policy’s report calls for more testing in these subjects. They just don’t get it.

The impetus behind this reduction of education to tests of testable trivia comes from the belief in the value of objectification. It’s akin to the difference in the Olympics between swimming and diving, or between speed skating and figure skating: swimming and speed skating are races, and excellence is determined by who wins, an assessment that can be objectively determined (and with modern technology, there can’t even be any arguments in the case of races that are decided by .001 second and cannot be assessed by the eyes of observers).

But diving and figure skating are more iffy. While there are rubrics for the judges to follow and clear scales of performance to be applied, it comes down to the judges: experienced experts carefully who apply all their knowledge and skill and experience to determine a “winner.” It’s to some extent a subjective matter: identical performances by skaters or divers on different days with different judges very easily will give different results. And this is what drives the testers like Spellings crazy, this is what they can’t handle: diversity.

Richards writes, “an 8-year-old knows that the only way she gets better at gymnastics is by watching videotapes of herself and listening to her coach’s evaluation.” Her use of a gymnastics example is felicitous: gymnastics is one of those judged sporting events, where proficiency cannot be unambiguously measured. This is a great model of education, a sort of No Gymnast Left Behind (Really!), if you will: you have experienced coaches [teachers]; you have an almost one-to-one educational situation, not 8 classes a day of 35 students each; you have the necessary equipment and supplies; you have careful and constant feedback [not one-time, high stakes tests] from the coach [teacher]; and the result of a poorly executed move is positive advice and feedback designed to help, not punish; the penalty for a mistake [such as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress] is not immediate termination. Yet, in the Bushy education model we are supposed to agree on, what are these evaluations, tests, and assessments; and who are the coaches? Multiple choice tests of grammar and memorized word definitions pass for measures of writing proficiency. What is the value of this?

You have to be very careful of “education” reports that profess to show increases in “proficiency” when what they really show is that force-feeding our children a steady diet of test-taking strategies produces higher scores on a limited number of trivial tests. We don’t all agree on what education is, but whatever education is, it’s not this. NCLB stinks like rotten fish in a marinara sauce.

One major focus of all the criticism directed against No Child Left Behind is the fact that it makes excessive demands on students, teachers, and schools, without providing the necessary federal funding to implement all its directives and achieve its goals. To that, I say, hooray for lack of funding. That’s the best part of the whole NCLB package. It’s such destructive legislation we can only hope it will never be funded enough to achieve its ends.

Typical criticism (I could quote many many more): “No Child Left Behind attempted to curtail the problem [narrowing the achievement gap], but simply continued the administrative trend of over-mandating and under-funding initiatives.” Narrowing the achievement gap is, of course, what we all want. (Actually, I want the achievement gap eliminated, but that’s another story for another day.) And of course, as a teacher I’m all for increased pay for teachers, which presumably would trickle down from increased funding for NCLB in general.

But let’s imagine for a moment what a fully-funded NCLB means: as more resources are poured into the tested subjects (“math” and “reading”), funds will be pulled out of non-tested subjects. We have already seen that time is being taken away from non-tested subjects–everything from kindergarten naps and elementary school recesses to music, art, and social studies is being cut to the bone to make time for teaching to the math and reading tests. Now, as money for these programs continues to dry up, more time and resources will be spent on testable stuff, such as reading and math.

Of course, it’s not testable–it just gives the vote-grabbing illusion of being testable. A score on invalid current tests of reading and math is meaningless, but it seems to mean something, and the politicians currently hawking NCLB use these meaningless scores to create votes for themselves, giving the illusion that they are doing something. “Accountability,” they call it, and it’s a “god-word” that masks the control over curriculum and education Washington is trying to establish.

The illusion of testability, the reliance on test scores as if they meant something, is one of the most dangerous aspects of NCLB that threatens to spread beyond education and into society in general. Of course, the American public is already overly-enamored of test scores (look at the almost unquestioned trust in SAT scores today, and the previously unquestioned trust in now discredited IQ scores. SAT scores are well on their way to becoming discredited as well.). The reduction of American education to that which can be simple-mindedly measured will only be furthered if NCLB is fully funded.

Much of Daniel Pink’s recent work deals with the skills that future citizens will need to have. In A Whole New Mind he shows that left-brained abilities (the kinds of tasks which can be reduced to rote or automation or algorithm) were valuable in the Industrial Age and even the early parts of the Information Age, but that right-brained abilities are crucial to success in the 21st century. He notes “Six Senses” of right-brained thinking:

• Design (by which he means the holistic and emotional apprehension and manipulation of space and objects),
• Story,
• Symphony (synthesis not analysis),
• Empathy,
• Play,
• Meaning (“not just accumulation”).

Check out CNN’s Business 2.0 for examples of new careers in the new century; note the synthesizing of skills which cannot be tested. (Thanks to Daniel Pink’s blog for highlighting this article).

Not one of these can be tested, nor can “mastery” of any one of these be demonstrated by tests. Yet these are exactly the skills and types of thinking and activities that are being dumped by NCLB. Fully fund the NCLB, and you relegate our children to a nineteenth-century skillset in the 21st century.

On the home page of his Eduwonk blog, Andrew Rotherham quotes someone who has praised it for “separat[ing] the demagogic attacks on NCLB from the serious criticism.” In his July 5 entry, Rotherham, who, among his numerous books on education counts a book he has co-edited with Chester Finn (remember him?), notes “I’d still really like to see someone make the true and courageous point that while hardly perfect, No Child Left Behind isn’t nearly as horrific as it’s made out to be.”

In serious rhetorical criticism, we call this “begging the question.” The question to be asked is not, “why is no one of courage and truth standing up for NCLB?” as Rotherham would have it; it’s “is the NCLB ‘horrific’?” (to use Rotherham’s word). Let’s determine the answer to that first, before we attribute courage and love of truth to supporters of the NCLB.

The context of Rotherham’s statement was the appearance of the major Democratic presidential hopefuls before the National Education Association Convention. In his blog, Rotherham waxes ecstatic over Senator Obama’s supposed support for merit pay and Senator Clinton’s supposed support for charter schools. Also commenting on Rotherham’s observation is blogger TeacherJay, who offers caution about jumping on the NCLB-bashing bandwagon because, “When you get right down to it though isn’t NCLB’s goal to help children and reform schools?”

To TeacherJay, I answer, no, at least not as I understand “helping children” and “reforming schools.” I agree that education is in trouble and I assert that children are not being helped by it as much as they deserve to be. I also agree that it needs to be reformed. But the NCLB’s “reforms” are analogous to reforming the tax code to increase Exxon-Mobil’s profits: it’s not the way the country needs to go.

Merit pay and charter schools have been two cornerstones of the conservative attempt to “reform” American education for a long time. But what’s behind these two principles?

Merit Pay

Merit pay sounds like a good idea: in true capitalist fashion, meritorious teachers get rewarded by receiving more money. Non-meritorious teachers don’t get more money. The dirty little secret of merit pay, however, is who determines merit? And how do they do it? (For a grimly humorous but oh-so-telling look at this issue, see “No Dentist Left Behind.”) For the sake of illustration, let me hypothesize an exaggerated example: suppose in an advanced algebra course, the final “assessment” consisted entirely of questions on plumbing. (This is what we call an “invalid test,” by the way–a test that doesn’t really measure what it says it’s measuring.) And further let’s assume that teachers’ merit pay is based on their students’ scores on this invalid assessment.

You can see where I’m going: unless the means of evaluating “merit” are valid, i.e., give accurate results about the items being evaluated, the awarding of merit pay becomes very problematic. But what if the assessment (evaluation) is manipulated, controlled by forces with political agendas? Can you imagine a biology teacher’s merit being based on his students’ score on a Creationism assessment? A geography teacher’s merit being based on his students’ scores on multiple choice tests that include questions such as, “The capital of Yugoslavia is (A, B, C, or D)…?” Or an English teacher’s merit determined by her students’ ability to parrot back pre-determined and un-thought-about interpretations of great works of literature?

By the way, Elizabeth Kantor has come very near to advocating this in her speech before the Conservative Women’s Network, reprinted on the Heritage Foundation’s site: ranting about “politically correct” liberal English teachers, as one example, she laments the loss of “…the ‘permanent things’ that conservatives are supposed to be defending. Some of those things—like the chivalrous attitude toward women that you find in Chaucer’s poetry—are wonderful inventions for which we can thank Western civilization.” Imagine a teacher’s merit being determined by whether she can get her students to accept, unquestioningly, the permanent value of chivalry. If you can think imaginatively and creatively about a work of literature, she seems to be saying, you fail. And, under merit pay guidelines, your teacher fails.

In short, “assessment” underlies “merit pay,” and assessment equals control. Teach what we tell you to teach or you lose your merit pay.

This is not educational reform; this is educational hijacking. And the metaphor is not that strained: Paul D. Houston has written of the NCLB: “For example, pilots, while subject to rules and regulations, are still presumed to know better how to fly the plane than their passengers.” Or those who try to hijack their planes.

Charter Schools

The concept of charter schools is part of the larger goal of privatizing education, based on the theory that anything people like parents and teachers and local school boards can do, private corporations can do better, or at least make money from it. (A number of observers–see Stan Karp’s chapter in Many Children Left Behind–have asserted that, underneath, this is the real goal of the NCLB–to manipulate the tests so public schools will be deemed failing, and then re-channel the money into private for-profit schools.) Under the much-hyped voucher system, charter schools get to take money from the public coffers intended for public education and spend it on their own students, whom they have taken out of the public school systems.

Now, who do you suppose will get the vouchers to go to those for-profit and charter schools? The same ones whose parents shop at Bloomingdale’s and Hammacher Schlemmer. And who will get what little is left of the educational money? The ones who shop, if they can afford to shop at all, at Walmart. This ever growing split in the education afforded the haves vs. the education afforded the have-nots in our society is devastatingly documented by Jonathan Kozol in his most recent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. It is not courageous to support this.

When charter schools and private for-profit schools are supported with public educational funds, the result is the Walmartization of public education. When teachers’ pay is based partly on how well they teach their students to be little more than mindless test-takers, the search for truth suffers.

Horrific indeed.