Published: March 31, 2008 11:20 am            

Column: Leave behind No Child Left Behind

ANDERSON, Ind. — As a newspaper editor, I only have to deal with adequate yearly progress (AYP), well, yearly. The figures are released and we in the media call our local educators and ask them why their schools are failing and what they plan to do about it. The educators play up the positives, if any are found, and offer a stiff upper lip to what is essentially a losing situation.

They know the game is rigged from the beginning and emphasizes (I would argue thrives on) failure. But they have to put their heart into it because the consequences are dire.

AYP is the accountability arm of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the crown jewel of George W. Bush’s eight years of mismanagement. The act uses standardized testing for Title 1 schools (those receiving federal dollars for low-income students, i.e. most) to give schools a pass/fail in a myriad of ways.

Students are channeled into subsections, such as black, white, Hispanic, low-income (based on school lunch assistance) and special education to name a few. If a single subsection of students fails the standardized test (in Indiana, it’s the ISTEP) the whole school fails.

If you’ve noticed that special education children are expected to learn at the same pace as other students, you’ve grasped the idiotic essence of NCLB. Children who are having a tough enough time in school are now looked at like losers by other students and administrators. Since the AYP figures are made public, everyone gets to see that black students failed at one school, Hispanics at another, which gives racists ammunition to reinforce their stereotypes.

Educators know that all children learning at the same level is ludicrous and will never happen. But if they don’t work toward that goal, NCLB mandates that states take over underperforming schools, which really means nothing but the school system looks bad, as if it can’t manage its own house, and that’s another byproduct of NCLB: It exacerbates education problems by motivating with punishment instead of help.

To reach the testing goals, educators must stress math and reading at the expense of other worthy subjects: social studies, science, art and music. The concept of well-rounded education falls by the wayside as more and more precious teaching time goes to cramming for the test.

Some educators will even go the extreme. According to a New York Times article, John Burks, a principal at New Braunfels Middle School in Texas, threatened to kill his science teachers and himself if scores didn’t improve on the state standardized test called TAKS. Burks denies it, but police are investigating the matter as a terrorist threat.

Like all the other ills that plague America in the 21st century, this assault on common sense education can be traced to conservatism. Conservatives have never liked public education because, like Social Security, it removes a lot of money from the hands of the profit class.

NCLB was a declaration of war on public education, and Democrats such as Sen. Edward Kennedy have plenty of blood on their hands by backing it up. If public schools are declared a failure over and over, parents will turn to private schools and raise such an outcry that public money will follow students to those “better” schools. That’s the theory anyway. In extreme cases, schools will be sold out to private groups like Edison, which took over the Philadelphia schools and turned a profit on tax money while keeping test scores the same.

When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was here, she told a cheering crowd that NCLB should not be renewed by Congress. Indeed, whether Democrats or Republicans take over the White House and Congress this fall, NCLB seems doomed, according to an article in The American Prospect. Even Republicans see that the act stresses the worst in education.

What is missing in NCLB is addressing the extreme inequality among school systems. Until the gap in rich and poor school systems is closed, poorer students are going to underperform and lack the opportunities richer schools have.

States are also straining school systems by slashing education budgets, which means fewer underpaid teachers for more students and less money for books and other teaching tools.

NCLB, with its emphasis on segregating and polarizing the education process, needs to be deep-sixed. A public education is available for all children. Now we have to find a way to universalize educational opportunities and place emphasis on real learning and not the rote memorization required for tests.



Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.

        

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