Guest Post: NCLB's Faith-Based Reforms, a Post Mortem

By John Thompson

No Child Left Behind, like the War in Iraq and "Voo Doo" economics is a part of the American tradition of "the Power of Positive Thinking." If teachers really believed that "every child can learn," said the law's authors, revitalized schools would undo the legacies of Jim Crow and poverty. It is thus fitting that we celebrate NCLB's tenth anniversary with the words of Adlai Stevenson, "I find Saint Paul appealing and Saint Peale appalling."

Educationally, NCLB was a faith-based law that attributed schools' problems to "the benign bigotry of low expectations." It proclaimed that "No Excuses!," "High Expectations!," and an attitude of "Whatever It Takes!" could undo concentrations of poverty. An unholy coalition (or should I say an overly holy coalition?) of the left and the right agreed that the horrific conditions of the educational "status quo" were "no accident." Schools were failing in precisely the way they were designed to fail. Unions, because they defended teachers with the wrong mindset, were "courthouse sitters," standing in the way of the civil rights movement of the 21th century.

Politically, NCLB was presented with a bipartisan happy face. It did not need huge investments, such as the costs of refighting the War on Poverty in order to get kids ready and able to learn. NCLB was essentially based on the hypothesis that the way to make a hog bigger is to repeatedly weigh it. Economist Eric Hanushek, for instance, has estimated that great gains could be achieved by tests that cost as little as $50 per child, per year. And Hanushek subsequently estimated that testing's minor investments, that were only modestly sucessful, data-driven accountability produced gains worth $14 trillion.

Hanushek acknowledged that we do not know how to systemically overcome the educational legacy of generational poverty. The economist supported NCLB, however, because it created, "a new attitude along the lines of 'we might not know what to do, but we've got to do something.'"

As educators predicted, however, some experiments worked while others resulted in the narrowing of the curriculum, rote instruction, nonstop test prep, fabricating test score gains, and pushing out difficult-to-educate students. Those unintended consequences, said liberal NCLB supporter Dianne Piche, should not be blamed on NCLB because, "The law is not a person ... it's a piece of paper."

And that led to another paradox. Education bureaucrats who designed NCLB worked with pieces of paper. Because of their disconnect with actual schools, they can claim innocence. But, a decade ago, educators predicted precisely how and why NCLB would backfire. Actual practitioners should have explained that the phenomenon that Piche et. el calls "student performance" is not necessarily something real. It is just bits of electrical bursts in computer systems. That data may or may not reflect actual learning. What gets measured, however, gets done, meaning that, predictably, teaching and learning took a back seat to gaming the numbers.

On the other hand, a retrospective by the economist Mark Schneider, claimed that NCLB actually worked, even though improvements on the most reliable assessment, the federal NAEP, slowed after its enactment. Schneider postulated the force known as the era of "consequential accountability." So, he argued the 2002 law deserves credit for performance gains in 1998!?!?

But now, Schneider has agreed that, "overall gains in performance during the NCLB era are not large." Schneider has thus reclaimed his inner materialist, and has distanced himself from the idealistic roots of NCLB. which said that all it takes to transform schools is to really believe. He has now spilled the beans on what other "reformers" really believe is the key to improving schools. "We had the screws on the states," he said, but politics interfered.

So, retrospectives on NCLB bring to mind other idealists like Billy Sunday, who served a loving God who sometimes was very, very ANGRY. To improve schools, we must first proclaim, "something good is going to happen to you TODAY!" But more vengeful "reformers" know that faith alone has not been transformational. Perhaps they should have reminded their allies that it is not enough to proclaim, "Heal!" Hands also need to be placed on the radio, before we can expect the faith healer to do his work.

Consequently, retrospectives defending give a glimpse of the two sides of the contemporary "reform" movement, that embraces both the liberating power of choice, but also command and control micromanaging of school systems. Some "reformers" are the good cops who love poor kids, and their paradigm is, "I think uplifting thoughts, therefore an educational reformer I am." The bad cops are the social engineers who impose data-driven dictates and litmus tests on educators. Their NCLB was a crusade to wipe out "the status quo."

These postmortems also recall the theories of Thomas Berkeley and Samuel Johnson's counter-argument. Berkeley's positivism denied the existence of material reality. Johnson replied by striking a table ad proclaiming, "I refute it thus!"

For the last decade, teachers have demonstrated Johnson's realism and passed on actual examples of how the spirit of NCLB has backfired. I was one of the naive educators who hoped that our stories might convince the true believers that reality is more than the old paradigm. I never recognized the power of the simpler explanation. Teachers' experiences might be the result of a mass hallucination, so it is understandable that they have not dampened "reformers" faith in data and NCLB.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Georgia Superintendent Acknowledgement Signals Imminent End of NCLB Nightmare

The students, parent, teachers, principals, and now the superintendents are coming after you, Eli, Bill, and Arne, and the self-serving fools, charlatans, delusional racists, and edu-pirates of Wall Street.  There will be no spider hole you can hide in from the judgment of history.

Posted by Maureen Downey at Get Schooled, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution education blog.  ht to Bob Schaeffer:

By Jim Arnold

We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now we – and our students – are paying the price. We could have been prophets but failed the test.

We allowed the proponents of NCLB to control the discussion from the beginning. They wrote the language, sent out the media notices and explanations, wrote the definitions of AYP, Highly Qualified and leaned heavily on the fact that none of us would dare protest anything to do with a name that implies we would be providing a high quality education for every single child in America. They were right. We chose not to speak out, not to fight against a system we knew from the beginning would set us all up for failure, and instead, in our best Dudley DoRight impersonations we set about to change the way we taught and measured and tested and graded and thought.

We knew from the outset that NCLB and its goal of 100 percent  – every child proficient in every area as determined by a single test on a single day each year – was patently, blatantly and insidiously absurd, but we took no concerted action. We knew Adequate Yearly Progress was a sham, and we literally and figuratively rolled over and tried our best to meet whatever impossible goals they set for us and our students. We knew that Federal law in NCLB was a violation of Federal law in IDEA but we went along with the insanity of testing Students with Disabilities based on chronological age rather than by IEP.

We learned very quickly and much to our chagrin that some student scores – usually the lowest ones – were counted not once, not twice, but often as many as three times, but we went along to get along. All of us were aware that Highly Qualified, for all the high rhetoric that went along with it, only served to make certification as much of a barrier as humanly possible for Special Education teachers regardless of degree or experience. It seems the teachers we needed most were subjected to the greatest roadblocks to reaching the nirvana of HiQ certification.

We tried our best to play the game but the game was rigged from the start. When the AMO’s were low it was pretty easy for most schools. When the AMO’s went up and more and more schools were labeled “failing” we looked around in a panic for help. Surely nobody believed a school deserved the failing label because two or three kids in a subgroup didn’t pass a test? Yes they did. Yes they still do.

We let them make the definitions and apply the labels, even when we realized the absurdity of it all.
We actually pretended to believe that it was important for us to make sure that every child was tested on those all important test days so none could escape the trauma we inflicted upon them. We even learned in some places to game the system and hold back those kids we feared might not pass the test or might raise those student numbers to create a subgroup in areas we really didn’t want to see a subgroup or, God help us, to cheat or to make sure that we could hold out two or three or four  of “those kids” on test days so their poor scores wouldn’t have a negative effect.

Oh sure, some of you stuck your necks out and said something to the effect of “NCLB forced us to take a closer look at ourselves, and we are better off for that” in spite of the fact that it was our students that were suffering the consequences. What balderdash. What hubris. Our kids were the ones whose education was stilted by our submission to the belief that one test could effectively distill and determine the depth and extent of an entire year of a child’s education. They are the ones whose time was wasted by “academic pep rallies” and “test prep” and by the subtle and insidious ways we told them the test was “important” and put pressure on them to “do their best because our school is counting on you.”

They were the ones that did without art and music and chorus and drama because we increased the amount of time they spent in ELA and Math. They were the ones that had time in their Social Studies and Science classes cut back more and more so schools could focus on the “really important areas” of ELA and Math. They were the ELL’s that couldn’t speak English but still had to take the test. Their teachers were the ones that were told “your grading of the children in your classes doesn’t count any more because standardization is more important to us that the individual grades you provide.” This told them in effect that their efforts at teaching were important but only if they taught using “this” methodology or “this” curriculum, then, when things started to go badly, they were the first to be blamed for the failure of public education. They were told to teach every child the same way with the same material but make sure to individualize while you’re at it. Hogwash.

After a couple of years of this insanity, the “NI” status began to take its toll. Someone somewhere invented the term “failing schools” and, unsurprisingly, the label stuck. Students were given the opportunity to transfer to more test-successful schools, but at a price. Schools that did not meet AYP standards, oddly enough, were often those with high minority populations and high poverty. Nobody seemed to notice the zip code effect that left predominantly white schools meeting AYP standards and minority schools caught by the “failing” label. Oh surely, we reasoned, our government would not want to put public education in a situation it could not win………..or would they?

I struggled with the rest of you as to why NCLB would go to such great lengths to make public education appear to be such a failure, to set up a system that would guarantee failure for practically every public school as we advanced toward that magical 100 percent level and provide no tangible rewards for success and such punitive actions for not meeting arbitrary goals. On top of all of that, I failed to recognize why our nation’s legislators so nimbly avoided even the discussion of reauthorization to change what everyone knew was a failed policy. One day it finally hit me.
They didn’t want to change the policy, because the policy was designed in theory and in fact not to aid education but to create an image of a failed public school system in order to further the implementation of vouchers and the diversion of public education funds to private schools

I am not usually a conspiracy theory guy, but this was no theory. These were cold hard facts slapping me in the face. We failed in our obligations to protect our students from one of the most destructive educational policies since “separate but equal.”  We did not educate the public on the myth and misdirection of Adequate Yearly Progress, and we allowed closet segregationists to direct the implementation of policies that we knew would result in our being the guys in the black hats responsible for “the failure of public education.”

Now we are paying the price. AYP is here to stay in one form or another, and the vast majority of our parents and public really believe the propaganda that it actually measures a school’s educational progress. If we try to convince them otherwise we are “making excuses.”

Vouchers – especially for private and charter schools exempt from the same restrictive, destructive policies we are forced to endure – are a part of every legislative session in almost every state. High stakes testing for all public education students is considered a necessary reality and teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Student test scores will soon determine teacher pay in some places even with no data to support the correlation. Students that do not graduate high school in four years are labeled as dropouts, even if they graduate in nine or 10 semesters.

Only first-time test takers are considered in the grading system for schools regardless of how many students ultimately pass the test. It will take years to undo the damage done to science, social studies, fine arts, foreign languages and other academic electives. Generations will not be enough to rid ourselves and our students of the testing mania neuroses created by our attempts to quantify the unquantifiable.

I hope the generation of teachers and administrators that follows has learned something from the failure of our generation to ward off those determined to destroy public education. We didn’t stand up to be counted, we didn’t stand in the schoolhouse door and tell them they couldn’t do that to our kids, and we didn’t educate the public about what a gigantic failure another one size fits all education policy would be. In the words of that great educator and philosopher Jimmy Buffet: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

We have all been left behind.

Seize the Initiative: Put the Heat on the White House and Your Congressman

From Beyond Chron:

Federal education policy is on the brink of change. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known in its current form as “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) is overdue for reauthorization. In response, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently released his Blueprint for the vision he and President Barak Obama share for our children’s education. Sadly the Blueprint carries on much of NCLB’s most destructive tactics and adds a few of its own.

High stakes testing, a narrowing of curriculum and a further imposition of a market-based framework are just a sampling of what is literally being sold to us. All this, despite the fact that none of these strategies have produced any of their promised results and that they are fundamentally in opposition to the human-centered project of nurturing our children to fully develop into engaged members of our society.

As disturbing as this vision is, time still remains to intervene, and intervene we must. With the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives still separately debating over what the specifics in the policy should look like, and with a political balance of power between Democrats and Republicans creating something of a stalemate, nothing is happening fast. This lack of alignment presents an opportunity for parents, teachers, students and others involved in working for strong public schools for all children. We can attempt to hold our policy makers accountable for the problems they have generated over the last many years of NCLB, and present the alternatives that would provide students with the type of education we know they deserve and that our society needs them to have.

On her recent tour of the Bay Area and in her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch made a specific appeal to Bay Area parents to go directly to one of the seats of power around education policy – the offices of Bay Area Congressman George Miller, Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Representative Miller was a major champion of NCLB and has enthusiastically embraced the Duncan/Obama Blueprint, which will likely influence many others in Washington. We therefore have a very precious window of opportunity to provide him with some apparently much needed re-education about exactly why this Blueprint is the wrong way to go.

Below is an open letter to Congressman Miller that addresses some of the many reasons why NCLB and the Administration’s Blueprint are simply unacceptable for our kids and what we could do instead. If public education supporters throughout the Bay Area similarly contacted Miller using this letter or better yet their own stories not only of what has gone wrong with NCLB, but with their visions of the educational programs they want to see for their kids and all kids, we would be sending him a strong clear message.

Dear Representative Miller,

My name is Lisa Schiff and I am the parent of twin sixth-graders in a public middle school in San Francisco. My children’s entire education has taken place under the shadow of No Child Left Behind, a shadow that I am hoping you can clear as you work with President Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other officials to craft new federal education policy. Parents throughout the Bay Area and the country are counting on you in your role as Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor to listen to our voices as we tell you about what hasn’t worked for our children these past eight years and what our vision of education is for all of our children.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been a damaging force for our children and their schools. As I have observed directly with my own kids and have heard from many other families, teachers and principals have had to work hard to ensure that my children and all of the children in their school were able to jump through the rote, testing frameworks required by the law and developed the required variety of test-taking strategies. All of this was a tremendous waste of time and resources, but was especially a loss of precious educational moments.

But because educators and parents understood that a well educated person is exposed to more than simply standardized tests, reading, writing and mathematics, we worked together to find creative ways to bring in history, science, art, music, physical education and language. Communities accomplished all of this without the support of our federal education policy, which deemed these areas not worthy of time resources and attention.

We know now without a doubt that the high-stakes standardized teaching and testing strategy that was supposed to help all children, especially those struggling the most, has failed. This is demonstrated most clearly by the results from the independent, authoritative data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have not changed with the implementation of NCLB, and in some cases have shown declines and increased gaps in academic achievement. Even New York University Professor of Education History Diane Ravitch, who was an ardent, optimistic supporter of NCLB, has now come to reject the entire approach of NCLB for a multiplicity of reasons she clearly elucidates in her most recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

I raise the above issues only to underscore how dramatic a change we need from you and other policy makers. Secretary Duncan has referred to the present economic crisis in our society as an opportunity to make radical change in education, but the Blueprint he’s given us will not provide that. In contrast to the testing, narrow-focus, competitive model the Blueprint offers, a truly transformed educational system would include:

• Sufficient funding for all schools, so that access to a complete education does not depend upon parents raising private funds;

• Complete staffing in all schools, including nurses, librarians, physical education teachers, counselors, teachers assistants, and yard and hall monitors;

• Multiple adults in every classroom, so that we could truly act on the knowledge that people learn in different ways and at different speeds;

• Enough adults in each school to form personal relationships with students and provide an environment of mentoring and apprenticeship;

• A rich curriculum covering literature, science, history, language, art, music, physical education and more, that provides students a broad but solid foundation for understanding the world;

• Promotion of critical thinking, analytical and communication skills, so that our children are able to address complex problems and can effectively express their ideas to others.

• Support for teachers, so that they receive the required training in their subjects, in educational theory and practice, and ongoing quality professional development throughout their teaching career.

• An expansion and diversification of the pool of teachers, so that more teachers have strong connections to the communities in which they are teaching.

• Assessments tools and practices that are meaningfully tied to what a student is learning and that can help teachers adjust their teaching to the needs of that student.

• Prioritization of parent involvement, not just in supporting children at home, but in shaping the school environment and partnering with teachers and principals to create productive learning environments for their kids.

• Understanding that schools are not the same as businesses and that economic imperatives are irrelevant in evaluating students, teachers, schools or educational systems.

The good news is that we already know how to do much of this. FairTest, for instance, has been offering resources and guidance about authentic assessments for years. Long-time educator Deborah Meier, has developed and been in charge of model schools that provide the kind of challenging curriculum and close-knit communities that all children need. Educators, psychologists, and other social scientists from a variety of fields have a deep understanding of how people naturally and most effectively acquire and retain knowledge and information.

These are just some of the ingredients that we need in order to provide our children with the education they deserve and that our society needs them to have. As you consider these suggestions and compare them to the plan outlined in the Blueprint, I ask you to imagine which type of school you would want your own child to be in--that should be the school you give our children too.

Sincerely,
Lisa Schiff
Public school parent
San Francisco, California

Write a letter, send email, make a phone call and even ask for a meeting to tell Representative Miller how you feel and what you want. Now is the time to do it.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.

Please Share This with Your Congressman, Senator, and Even Mitch Daniels

Professor Wong is a naturalized American citizen who teaches at Michigan State. It may be downloaded here.

CRP Report: NCLB Increasing Segregation and Damaging Learning

Press Release from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA:

Contact:
Heinrich Mintrop: (415) 250-0156
Gail L. Sunderman: (571) 217-7004

Los Angeles—April 22, 2009—A new report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, a non-partisan research center which has been systematically studying the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) since its inception, finds that some of the basic assumptions of the law are not working and may well be making things worse. In this study, Why High Stakes Accountability Sounds Good but Doesn't Work-- And Why We Keep on Doing It Anyway, commissioned by the Civil Rights Project, Researchers Gail Sunderman and Heinrich Mintrop evaluate whether the accountability system endorsed by NCLB is likely to succeed or fail, and whether it is compatible with what researchers across the country have learned about the conditions needed for lasting school reforms.

The report finds that NCLB is failing on three fronts. First, there is little evidence that high stakes accountability under NCLB works. It has not improved student achievement and the sanctions have had limited effects in producing real improvement. The law also is not very good at accurately identifying schools needing improvement and far outstrips the ability of states to intervene effectively in the schools it sanctions. Third, the law has failed to connect in a meaningful way to the educators who must implement it -- they do not see the accountability goals as realistic and consider the sanctions to be misguided and counterproductive for improving schools.

The most important finding is the damage the NCLB is doing to our educational system. Under NCLB, the system "works" when education systems operate within only a basic skills framework and with low test rigor. The cost to our nation is revealed in an educational system stuck in low-level intellectual work.

Civil Rights Project Co-Director, Gary Orfield, concludes, "The new administration has a unique opportunity to address the serious structural problems of NCLB and to forge a more constructive and effective federal role. To persist in sound-bite educational politics that sound tough but have failed for a generation would be a tragic mistake. To claim that it would further the civil rights of children increasingly segregated in schools that have been officially branded and sanctioned as failures -- but not provided help that makes a real difference -- would be a blunder."

Even though the law is failing in some critical respects, the authors argue that we may maintain NCLB anyway because many derive secondary benefits from the system, specifically those who are politically and ideologically committed to NCLB and those deriving economic or political benefits from the law.

A copy of the full report can be found at the link below.

The Executive Summary and Foreword (by Gary Orfield) follow at the end of this press advisory. Copies of CRP's previously released NCLB reports may also be found on our Web site.

About the Authors:

Heinrich Mintrop, Ph.D. taught middle school and high school for over a decade in both the United States and Germany. He received a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University in 1996. He is currently an associate professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. As a researcher, he explores issues of school improvement and accountability in both their academic and civic dimensions. He has recently published the book Schools on Probation: How Accountability Works (and Doesn't Work) at Teachers College Press. At UC Berkeley, he is involved in programs that prepare strong leaders for high-need urban schools.

Gail Sunderman, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at the George Washington University Center on Equity and Excellence in Education where she directs the Mid Atlantic Equity Center (MAEC). Prior to that, she directed a five-year study examining the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 for the CRP. She is co-author of the book, NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field (with James S. Kim and Gary Orfield, 2005) and editor of Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform, published in 2008. She is a former Fulbright Scholar to Afghanistan and received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.

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Download the Report: Why High Stakes Accountability Sounds Good but Doesn't Work-- And Why We Keep on Doing It Anyway (in PDF Format)

Download the Press Release: New Study by UCLA's Civil Rights Project: NCLB Ignores What We Know about School Change and Is Motivated by Politics (in PDF Format)

NCLB: Mind-Boggling and Absurd

From the Boonville Standard in the heartland of Indiana:

Warrick County Superintendent Brad Schneider criticized the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act last night at the school board’s regular meeting, going as far as calling it “mind-boggling” and “absurd.”

Schneider railed on the federal accountability law saying that it isn’t right that if a school meets 20 of the 21 required standards that they are labeled as a failing school.

These standards include things such as the categorization of certain student groups — free/reduced lunch, special education, race, etc.

“I don’t think people understand that,” he said. “If you’re below that cut score of the percentage of students passing (in one subsection), you are considered a failing school. That’s about like telling GM or Ford that if they have one lemon car, they are failing and we are going to put you under sanctions.”

Schneider added, “But that is No Child Left Behind.”

. . . .

The provisions set within NCLB state a goal of 100 percent proficiency by all students by 2013-14.

“Hopefully, we can get some changes to that law,” he said. “Trust me, I’m not sitting up here trying to put down any accountability because I am one that believes in accountability. We as educators need to be held to a high standard, but I think that we ask to be measured in a fair manner. Let’s be judged on what we teach our children and what our children achieve, not some number that somebody came up with in some ridiculous rule that we have to abide by.”

Sir Ken Weighs In On NCLB

From HuffPo:

. . . . President-elect Obama has said that NCLB was well intentioned, and it was. He's said too that one of the major problems in implementing it has been the lack of federal funding, and it has. But he knows too that the problems with NCLB are much deeper than money. The whole premise of the act is deeply flawed. It's based on the fatal idea that to face the future schools just have to do better what they did in the past: they simply have to get back to basics and raise standards. Schools, and policy makers, should get back to basics. They should aim to raise standards too. Why would you lower them? But what are the basics now, and which standards should apply?

I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay. All of this is holding America back in a world that's moving faster than ever.

To face the future, America needs to celebrate and develop the diverse talents of all of its people -- young and old alike. It needs to cultivate creativity and innovation, systematically and with confidence, in business, in culture and in rebuilding its post industrial communities. It needs to provide leadership at home and abroad in promoting deeper forms of cultural understanding and cooperation. These are the real basics. Basic to all of them is a different view of human talent and ability, and of the real conditions in which people flourish. . . . .

Unsalvageable

From Pantagraph.com:

This is in response to discussion of No Child Left Behind. As a District 87 teacher who recently moved to Bloomington from St. Paul, Minn., I saw how NCLB destroyed good urban schools with dedicated teaching staff.

The school where I worked in St. Paul had many disadvantaged students: 94 percent were classified as living in poverty and 65 percent were English language learners.

I taught English to junior-high-level Hmong refugees from Thailand who were just beginning to learn English and had never attended school before coming to the United States. Under NCLB, my students were expected to pass a grade-level reading test intended for native speakers. If, due to their scores, the Asian or ELL subcategory failed to meet the standard, the whole school would be labeled a failure.

From pressure under NCLB, the district reprogrammed the school, brought in an incompetent principal and pushed out a talented principal and many dedicated teachers. The beginning ELLs were also pushed out and moved to other schools so as not to bring down the test scores of the new school.

Did NCLB help this school? I doubt it. In the end, people were just shuffled around. It didn't matter that the old school was considered by the district administration to have one of the best ELL departments among junior highs in St. Paul. Only test scores mattered.

From this experience, I believe that the goal of NCLB has nothing to do with school improvement. Rather, NCLB is designed to stigmatize urban public schools as failures, so as to open up the terrain for private and charter schools, which often are not subject to the same testing standards.

When NCLB comes up for reauthorization in 2009, we should push for its elimination. Despite Barack Obama's intention of reforming it, NCLB is unsalvageable.

Corey Mattson

Bloomington

Why Susan Hobart Hates NCLB

From The Progressive (ht to Bob Schaeffer):

By Susan J. Hobart, August 2008 Issue

I’m a teacher. I’ve taught elementary school for eleven years. I’ve always told people, “I have the best job in the world.” I crafted curriculum that made students think, and they had fun while learning. At the end of the day, I felt energized. Today, more often than not, I feel demoralized.

While I still connect my lesson plans to students’ lives and work to make it real, this no longer is my sole focus. Today I have a new nickname: testbuster. Singing to the tune of “Ghostbusters,” I teach test-taking strategies similar to those taught in Stanley Kaplan prep courses for the SAT. I spend an inordinate amount of time showing students how to “bubble up,” the term for darkening those little circles that accompany multiple choice questions on standardized tests.

I am told these are invaluable skills to have.

I am told if we do a good job, our students will do well.

I am told that our district does not teach to the test.

I am told that the time we are spending preparing for and administering the tests, analyzing the results, and attending in-services to help our children become proficient on this annual measure of success will pay off by reducing the academic achievement gap between our white children and our children of color.

I am told a lot of things.

But what I know is that I’m not the teacher I used to be. And it takes a toll. I used to be the one who raved about my classroom, even after a long week. Pollyanna, people called me. Today, when I speak with former colleagues, they are amazed at the cynicism creeping into my voice.

What has changed?

No Child Left Behind is certainly a big part of the problem. The children I test are from a wide variety of abilities and backgrounds. Whether they have a cognitive disability, speak entry-level English, or have speech or language delays, everyone takes the same test and the results are posted. Special education students may have some accommodations, but they take the same test and are expected to perform at the same level as general education students. Students new to this country or with a native language other than English must also take the same test and are expected to perform at the same level as children whose native language is English. Picture yourself taking a five-day test in French after moving to Paris last year.

No Child Left Behind is one size fits all. But any experienced teacher knows how warped a yardstick that is.

I spent yesterday in a meeting discussing this year’s standardized test results. Our team was feeling less than optimistic in spite of additional targeted funds made available to our students who are low income or who perform poorly on such tests.
As an educator, I know these tests are only one measure, one snapshot, of student achievement. Unfortunately, they are the make-or-break assessment that determines our status with the Department of Education.

They are the numbers that are published in the paper.

They are the scores that homebuyers look at when deciding if they should move into a neighborhood.

They are the numbers that are pulled out and held over us, as more and greater rigidity enters the curriculum.

I was recently told we cannot buddy up with a first-grade class during our core literacy time. It does not fit the definition of core literacy, I was told. Reading with younger children has been a boon to literacy improvement for my struggling readers and my new English-speaking students. Now I must throw this tool away?

In an increasingly diverse public school setting, there is not one educational pedagogy that fits all students. We study and discuss differentiated curriculum, modify teaching strategies, and set “just right reading levels” to scaffold student learning. But No Child Left Behind doesn’t care about that. It takes no note of where they started or how much they may have progressed.

As a teacher, I measure progress and achievement for my students on a daily basis. I set the bar high, expecting a lot.

I don’t argue with the importance of assessment; it informs my instruction for each child.

I don’t argue with the importance of accountability; I believe in it strongly—for myself and my students.

I have empathy for our administrators who have to stand up and be told that we are “challenged schools.” And I have empathy for our administrators who have to turn around and drill it into our teacher heads, telling us we must do things “this” way to get results. I feel for them. They are judged on the numbers, as well.

No Child Left Behind is a symptom of a larger problem: the attack on public education itself. Like the school choice effort, which uses public funds to finance private schools and cherry-pick the best students, No Child Left Behind is designed to punish public schools and to demonstrate that private is best.

But I don’t think we’ve turned a corner that we can’t come back from. Public education has been a dynamic vehicle in our country since its inception. We must grapple with maintaining this progressive institution. Policymakers and educators know that education holds out hope as the great equalizer in this country. It can inspire and propel a student, a family, a community.

The state where I teach has a large academic achievement gap for African American and low income children. That is unacceptable. Spending time, money, energy on testing everyone with a “one size fits all test” will not eliminate or reduce that gap.
Instead, we need teacher-led professional development and more local control of school budgets and policymaking. Beyond that, we need to address the economic and social issues many children face, instead of punishing the schools that are trying to do right by these students.

We’ve got things backwards today. Children should be in the front seat, not the testing companies. And teachers should be rewarded for teaching, not for being Stanley Kaplan tutors.

Ten years ago, I taught a student named Cayla. A couple of months ago, I got a note from her, one of those things that teachers thrive on.
“Ms. Hobart was different than other teachers, in a good way,” she wrote. “We didn’t learn just from a textbook; we experienced the topics by ‘jumping into the textbook.’ We got to construct a rainforest in our classroom, have a fancy lunch on the Queen Elizabeth II, and go on a safari through Africa. What I learned ten years ago still sticks with me today. When I become a teacher, I hope to inspire my students as much as she inspired hers.”

Last week, I received a call from Niecy, another student from that class ten years ago. She was calling from southern Illinois to tell me she was graduating from high school this month and had just found out that she has won a scholarship to a college in Indiana. I was ecstatic in my happiness for her. We laughed, and I told her I was looking at a photo of her on my wall, building a pyramid out of paper bricks with her classmates.

I also had a recent conversation with Manuel in a grocery parking lot. He reminded me of my promise eight years ago to attend his high school graduation. I plan to be there.
Cayla and Niecy and Manuel are three of the reasons I teach. They are the reasons that some days this still feels like a passion and not a job.
When I pick up the broom at the end of the day to sweep my class due to budget cuts, I remember Cayla.

When I drive home demoralized after another meeting where our success is dissected with a knife manufactured in Texas, I remember Niecy.

When another new program that is going to solve the reading disparity, resulting in higher test scores, is introduced on top of another new program that was supposed to result in the same thing, I remember Manuel.

They are the fires that fuel my passion. They are the lifeboats that help me ride this current wave in education.

Eight or ten years from now, I want other former students to contact me and tell me a success story from their lives. I don’t want to be remembered as the teacher who taught them how to sing “Testbusters” or to “bubble up.” I want to be remembered as a teacher who inspired them to learn.

Susan J. Hobart, M.S. Ed., is a National Board Certified Teacher living in the Midwest.

Choice Editorial from Jacksonville, NC

Too bad the NY Times or the Washington Post don't have the guts or insight of Jacksonville, NC's JD News:

It’s time to leave‘No Child’ behind
July 26, 2008 - 12:16AM

No Child Left Behind, the massive education program enacted by U.S. Congress in 2001, is one of those well-intended initiatives that has turned into a train wreck. It is time to admit that it simply doesn't work.

Onslow County Schools, like many other educational systems, have struggled with the stringent goals set by NCLB since its inception. In addition to what, on paper, appears an admirable objective - to improve the performance of the nation's public schools - NCLB has probably done less to foster actual learning and more to tie teachers' hands than any program before it.

Once criticized for "teaching to the tests," educators have now been saddled with goals that are next to impossible to reach and draconian sanctions that are supposed to raise the quality of instruction. Instead, NCLB has sent many excellent teachers scrambling for the door.

At a time when educators' salaries are losing ground along with the rest of America, why would anyone want to enforce a provision that does little but drive good teachers from the profession? It makes no sense, but that is what is happening.

The rural, lower-wealth counties and inner-city schools can barely keep enough teachers on staff to meet their needs, yet NCLB, which purports to raise the qualifications of those who teach, discourages the ones they do have, forcing many fine teachers to rethink their personal career objectives.

Although NCLB is designed to raise the reading and writing levels of America's children and provide measurable means of testing those abilities, what it is really doing is forcing teachers to "teach to the test" with a whole new desperation. The Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, goals that schools are required to meet are often impossible, turning the process into a shell game played between school and program administrators.

Recently, Onslow County's latest AYP report card revealed Onslow did not do very well in its latest assessment. Overall, the number of schools meeting their AYP goals in the county declined.

What does that mean in terms of students actually learning something useful? How do parents make any sense of these numbers? They are the forgotten component of the NCLB Act.

In truth, the only provision of NCLB designed to benefit parents and students allows those at low-performing schools to move to other schools in the district.

No matter which candidate carries the day in November, it is hoped he will take seriously the business of teaching, limit Congress' input into education and, finally, kick the NCLB Act to the curb.

It's an expensive, complicated program that delivers little but red tape and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, something the American people already have in abundance.

Holding NCLB Accountable

Press Release from the Civil Rights Project:

NEW BOOK PROVIDES EXAMINATION AND EVALUTION OF THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT

Los Angeles—January 9, 2008—A new book from The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies evaluates and accesses the efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) test-based accountability in today’s schools. The book, Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform (Corwin Press, 2008), is edited by CRP/PDC senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman.
The pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act has generated a spirited debate among educators. In this book, a team of noted education scholars assess NCLB’s performance-based system and discuss options for improving the law. With contributions from Gary Orfield, Linda Darling Hammond, Catherine Snow, Robert Linn, and Daniel Koretz, among others, Holding NCLB Accountable examines themes
of capacity, accountablity, school reform, and the law’s impact on educating all students, especially those from low-income and diverse backgrounds. It responds to critical questions such as the following:

• How do we develop assessments and accountabilty systems that assist rather than interfere with educational progress?

• How do we press for change without being counterproductive?

• How do we create a viable educational agenda that is mindful of state and local capacity?

Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz argues that the entire NCLB accountabiltiy system is not based on hard evidence. Koretz says, “We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance.”

Jaekyung Lee, associate professor of education at the State University of New York in Buffalo, compares the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to state assessment results and shows that the federal accountability hasn’t improved reading and mathematical achievement or reduced achievement gaps. “Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB,” says Lee. Other contributors suggest that the nation has not focused on the kinds of serious long-term reforms that can actually produce gains and narrow the huge gaps in opportunity and achievement for minority students.

Throughout the book, contributors provide information on what we know and don’t know about educational accountability and what types of accountalbity systems will most improve opportunties for low-performing students while minimizing the negative effects. They provide the groundwork for developing a system of multiple measures, for obtaining evidence on whether NCLB is achieving its aim to increase student achievement and close the racial achievement gap, and tackling the very important issue of whether states have the financial and administrative capacity to meet the law’s requirements and turn around low-performing schools. Finally, contributors examine whether NCLB maximizes its potential for fostering reform in low-performing schools. Taken together, these discussions raise important questions about the law’s effects and offer strong recommendations for designing workable accountablity systems that will lead to coherent efforts to improve schools.

Among the authors’ findings are the following:

• We know too little about what types of accountability systems will most improve opportunities for low-performing students.

• The current NCLB accountability system does not provide the information we need to know how students are performing or what to do to advance students’ learning and improve instruction.

• Evidence that NCLB is working to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps is not promising.

• State education agencies’ capacity to meet the law’s requirements and intervene in low-performing schools on the scale demanded by NCLB is limited.

• Many of the NCLB provisions, including the definition of highly qualified teachers, the design of the testing and accountability regulations, and the reliance on mandates impede school reform and make it more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to do their work.

• Only about 40% of the nation’s high schools that have high dropout rates are identified as needing improvement by NCLB’s core accountability measure (AYP).

The editor and authors of Holding NCLB Accountable recommend:

• More needs to be done to develop an accountability system that is fair, yields information that informs and advances student learning goals, and contributes to improving instruction. This includes, but is not limited to, adopting performance goals that are ambitious but realistic and obtainable, multiple indicators of performance, and realistic timetables for school improvement.

• The high expectations of NCLB must be paired with adequate support and greater investment in capacity building in low-performing schools and districts.

• To offset the disadvantages faced by historically lower performing groups of students, in-school programs and reforms need to be complemented with out-of-school interventions and programs that address nonschool conditions such as housing, poverty, health care, and safety.

• An independent, federally funded analysis of what it takes in administrative and financial resources for states to have a reasonable chance of turning around low-performing schools needs to be conducted. . . .

Federal Court of Appeals Rules NCLB Unconstitutional

While the withering Decider was in Chicago threatening to veto any changes in NCLB that would interrupt the sanctions, shutdowns, and charterizing of public schools, a federal appeals court was ruling 2-1 that NCLB is unconstitutional. Will Spellings and her lawyers eventually appeal? More likely that ED will use this year to invent new ways to push all the public money it can toward the ed industry, which is sure to take a hit after November. Goodbye, yellow brick road.

From the NY Times:

. . . . In the ruling Monday, the appeals court sent the suit back to the lower court, arguing that a passage of the Constitution known as the spending clause requires Congress to give states clear notice of their financial liabilities when they accept federal financing that may fall short of the full costs of complying with requirements from Washington.

“Because we conclude that N.C.L.B. fails to provide clear notice as to who bears the additional costs of compliance, we reverse the judgment of the district court,” the ruling said. It also noted that because the states had been required to spend state and local money to meet requirements of the federal law, their “injury has already occurred and is ongoing.”

David B. Cruz, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said the ruling could leave the district court judge little choice but to rule in favor of the districts and the union.

But the Bush administration could also appeal to the Supreme Court, and Ms. Spellings left open that possibility.

“The federal government is exploring all legal options available,” Ms. Spellings said in a statement Monday. “This decision could undermine efforts to improve the education of our nation’s children, in particular those students most in need.”

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said the ruling “indicates that if the federal government hands down programs, it’s their responsibility to pay for them, so that’s a victory for the students of America.”

What Is Left Behind

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Let us give thanks for an improved chance now of killing NCLB in the coming year. It is still important to let your Congress know that we are eager for them to stop the educational genocide in the new year.

I am taking a week off from blogging to get some things done and some other things not overdone. In the meantime, my extended mantra:

What Is Left Behind

As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.

While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working—despite of all the empirical evidence indicating otherwise—and as politicians boast that no child is being left behind, let us pause to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in the school day.

Now if your school still has some of these things, I say congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware, because the unattainable goal of 100% proficiency that is the bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years, your school will join the 30% of schools today where these crucial elements of school have already been left behind.

As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states, social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.

The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how public decisions are made or where their community fits into state, national, and global contexts—or even that there is a context beyond their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their voices heard in ways that make the world listen.

History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the test, either.

And economics? While children in wealthy communities, the ones without AYP worries yet, play stock market games and learn about hedge funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose significance remains a mystery to them.

Health and physical education have been left behind, too, leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of a never-ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds—because that's not on the test, either.

Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an aesthetic gap, a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement gap that parallels a widening economic gap – despite years and years of increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic gaps are at their deepest points.

Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.

Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct experiments, and make good decisions.

Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension responses that the children who utter them do not understand.

Recess has been left behind in a third of all American elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases, we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?

Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice time for a future of testing.

Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.

The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.

Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary straightjackets.

Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of what it means to be the teacher of children. With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to a success that is increasingly elusive.

Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach. When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability, poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher can never compensate for.

Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus, school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.

So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington, please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book, Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in the thirty percent of American schools that are now labeled failures.

Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant today: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Call and write and visit your school boards and your Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know that now and finally must to be left behind.

Jim Horn
Monmouth University
September 2007

The Op-Ed NYT Doesn't Want

This piece by Lois Meyer was posted to ARN by George Sheridan.

Hungering for Educational Justice
Lois M. Meyer
University of New Mexico
lsmeyer@unm.edu

National Book Award-winning author and educator Jonathan Kozol recently explained to an almost overflow audience at the University of New Mexico (UNM) why he appeared thin and weak. For three months he has been on a hunger fast for educational justice. Why? Because he can no longer stomach the gross injustices he witnesses in classrooms and schools across the nation. Last July 1, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brown vs. Board of Education, the historic 1954 decision that outlawed segregated schools and mandated school integration, Kozol began his hunger fast against “the racist agenda inherent in the federal education reform act [No Child Left Behind} signed into law by President Bush in 2001”. His hunger strike is partial – he supplements a liquid diet with some solid nourishment at his doctor’s request to sustain life. But, he added, “I'm old now so I'm not afraid to do or say what I believe is right.”

We don't hear much about hunger strikes these days. Obesity, sure, bulimia, maybe, but not hunger strikes. Our appetite for the likes of American Idol and Desperate Housewives seems insatiable, while the idea of self-inflicted hunger as a principled act of political protest and personal conviction causes us intellectual if not gastric distress. Fasting for justice seems way more extreme than Extreme Makeover. Non-violent hunger fasts may have helped Gandhi and Cesar Chavez tumble colonial empires and unionize California lettuce fields, but that was decades ago. Today both nonviolence and hunger fasting seem to have been deleted from our consciousness and from our menu of possible political actions.

And fasting for educational justice? How would that improve the test scores of low achieving children, or help failing schools meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)? In this age of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), even our concept of educational justice is so shrunken and deformed by government spin that we act as though test scores - rather than children’s creativity and excitement about learning, or the priorities and cultural rights of parents and communities - are what matter.

Many in the UNM crowd of new and experienced teachers, school administrators, university students and professors, and concerned parents, were familiar with what Kozol has said and done in the past. He has worked in inner-city schools for more than 40 years, giving voice to children’s experiences of public schooling in disturbing books such as Death at an Early Age, The Shame of the Nation, and Savage Inequalities. His newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, recounts his year-long dialogue with an inexperienced first-grade teacher in a segregated Black school in his home town, Boston. In it he promises to describe “the joys and challenges and passionate rewards of a beautiful profession” – teaching.

Kozol made good on his promise, and in doing so, he fed a deep hunger in the audience that night. Public school teachers are hungry to hear a public figure of Kozol’s stature commend them with awe and pride and gratitude for their skills and commitment to teaching. NCLB lays the blame for children’s poor test scores on teachers and schools, and by implication, on parents and communities, especially poor communities of color. It ignores mounds of data that document the increasing inequalities among communities and social classes in family income, health supports, even basics like adequate food and housing, all factors that influence performance on achievement tests and students’ opportunities to learn. Instead, NCLB’s single-minded and simplistic solution to educational inequalities is to hold educators, children and parents “accountable”. In other words, they are blamed and shamed as the “cause” of the educational “failure” of the very children our society refuses to insure and opts instead to segregate, underfund, push out of school, and ignore.

In stark contrast, Kozol celebrated the contributions of education professionals as the strength and soul of public education. He encouraged especially young teachers and those who are preparing to teach: “Teachers I meet today are some of the most gifted and enthusiastic I have ever seen. Especially those who teach young children should not permit themselves to be drill sergeants of the State or trainers for corporate global capitalism.”

Children command most of Kozol’s attention, real children with names like Pineapple and Ariel and Shaniqua who populate the classrooms where he visits and volunteers time. He denounced the educational injustices these children endure in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth – resegregated schools; overcrowded classrooms; narrow, test-driven curricula; rote, drill-and-kill teaching methods. Though labeled by NCLB as “failures”, the spirit of these children is inspiring – most still hunger to learn.

The federal law’s misplaced, child-damaging priorities are masked in deceptive rhetoric about “standards” and “excellence” and “global competitiveness”. NCLB pretends to address quality education for children but its real concerns are different. “Why should kindergartners care about the global marketplace?” Kozol demands. “They care about bellybuttons and elbows and furry caterpillars.” Curiosity about their world and joy in discovery, not test scores or world markets, are what propel young children to learn.

Some words never appear in NCLB at all, “words like curiosity, creativity, laughter, and delight.” Some parents and communities, and undoubtedly legislators, can demand for their children the best education money can buy, an education that still challenges and delights. But too many Black and Hispanic andNative American kids, and those with special needs or those who are still learning English, are force-fed a stripped down, debased and test-driven curriculum. Kozol’s conclusion was unflinching: “It is deeply hypocritical to hold 8 or 9 year olds accountable for their academic achievement but not hold Congressional delegates and the president accountable for not providing poor kids with the same education they themselves insist on giving to their own kids.”

Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrete Jr.’s recent column (“Dismantle No Child Left Behind and Watch us Fail”, Oct. 1) is a stark example of the deceptive education talk fueled by NCLB. Navarrete claimed to speak in defense of the needs and wants of children “who don't vote, or give money, or twist arms, or pay union dues”. Yet Navarrete never talked about children at all, not about their feelings, their interests, their dreams, or their reaction to being labeled as “failures”. Instead, Navarette’s column berates teachers' unions, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and “certain Republicans” for seeking to eliminate the most punitive NCLB requirements. Navarrete applauded U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings as a “ferocious defender” of NCLB.

Ferociously defending NCLB is a far cry from defending children and quality instruction and educational justice for all. Kozol understands, as did Gandhi and Chavez before him, that hunger for educational justice demands principled political action if we are to dismantle federal education legislation that intellectually starves our neediest children.

Dan Brown Knows

Highly recommended (with Perlstein's Tested. . .), especially for teacher education students where faculty know nothing of or steer clear of the realities of NCLB implementation. Review by Jude Rabin:

I just finished reading The great expectations school: A rookie year in the new blackboard jungle by Dan Brown, a 26-year-old TFA dropout who spent 1 year in the Bronx and is now enrolled at Teachers College. Anyway, here's an excerpt from his conclusion and a ray of hope that the younger folks might perhaps get it right some day:

"A clear step in the right direction would be to scrap the No Child Left Behind legislation and to pass new, progressive education laws. NCLB was conceived to hold each school accountable for its students' academic proficiency, a noble aim. However, by using standardized testing as the sole tool to calibrate success, the government has created in the school system a Frankenstein monster of compliance, with its energies devoted in all the wrong directions."

What Brown astutely recognizes, and what most Americans still fail to recognize can be found in this paragraph:

"No single line graph or shortcut can close the social-class achievement gap in America. The idea that high stakes testing will motivate positive change has rationalized massive under funding and the ignoring of the complex needs of students (art, music, and physical education are just a few). Educating the youth of America is not an endeavor that can be performed simply, or on the cheap. As things stand, the primacy of the standardized test saps the most important human elements of education, a wholly human institution."

Brown places the responsibility for improving the lives of American youth at the feet of the voters, "who must use their power to force lawmakers to recognize this issue as a priority."

There's not much new in his book that hasn't been already documented, recorded or said before about poverty and education, but his call to action and outrage over NCLB should be a call to arms for the next generation --because this one doesn't seem to get it. Delaying the date for 100%proficiency, instituting a cheap mass produced version of growth models and more databases, national standards, blah, blah, blah, really isn't the issue - now is it?

The entire discussion must move in a whole new direction and be broadened to include the bigger issues, or we will continue to see the further balkanization and segregation of our society through apartheid education. The stakes are too high to settle for a few worthless crumbs to appease the teachers unions and just postpone the day of reckoning.

KUDOS TO DAN BROWN! He can be reached at danbrownteacher@gmail.com