The facts are compelling. As a life-longer learner myself, with two bachelors, a degree from a foreign university, and a master's in science, I think I have some knowledge about learning. I do believe in learning the multiplication tables, by rote, i.e. continual memorization til you've got them down cold. Believe me, I've seen kids who don't know them these days. But that's pretty much where the rote ends, in my opinion. After that, it's another story. J. Kozol knows what he's talking about, I'm sure of that, and he's studied the issue thoroughly, I'm sure of that, too. So I want to listen to him and support him. But I just can't understand what the "fasting" is all about. It's sort of a masochist approach. Can it accomplish anything at all? I wonder.
There must be a more effective way...
My experience with the public schools opened my eyes to what I consider the fundamental problem with learning. Parents have to WANT their children to learn. Parents have to, and I do mean, HAVE TO, encourage and demand that their children NEED to learn. This I saw as the biggest problem to teaching in the classroom. Many of the kids there just didn't have any sense of the need to learn ...

Hi Daisy,

As a former teacher, I would add to your comment by saying that teachers must work with parents to get to what you suggest: "Parents have to WANT their children to learn." Often in the inner city and low-income suburbs, this is not parents but parent, and vastly complicates the whole education process. Further, there is also the "culture canyon" between homelife and school/mainstream culture that must be bridged that studies show can only be done when parents and teachers ally with each other in a genuine community effort. Do teachers get paid anything extra for this massive amount of additional outreach needing to be done to improve academic performance? NO! Was NCLB engineered to destroy public schools while favoring the private "education industry"? YES!

NCLB is just one of the many "laws" enacted by our illegitimate federal government that must be nullified by local governments/school boards. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see how NCLB contributes to more DEATH and societal dysfunction as it produces more fodder for the prison and military industrial complexes.

NCLB is the best reason around to simply eliminate the Dept of Education. It was obvious to many of us from the beginning that NCLB was designed to destroy public schools.

The idea that the Federal Gov't can fix education is one of the more ludicrous around. Remember Sputnik? 35 plus years since the big federal math and science "push" and Chinese and Indian students outnumber (or close) American students in our engineering schools. And a large percentage of Americans can't do percents or make change. A federalized system of education will soon resemble that of the USSR or the Third Reich.

We have got to cut gov't expenses beyond the military budget and the Dept of Education is my top candidate. (It's tough though. World Bank, IMF, NASA, War on Drugs are close competitors) In case you missed the news a few years ago, the data from Houston, on which NCLB was based, was unreliable and invalid (i.e., faked) because just as teachers teach to a test rather that educating, administrators fudged their data about drop outs and reclassified students as "special ed" so they wouldn't have to take the test and bring down scores. Amazing that neither Mr. Kozol or Mr. Kennedy seem to know this. I saw it on PBS, likely The News Hour or Frontline.

Schools have to be controlled locally, and parents, as Daisy said, have to be involved. Busing students actually defeated efforts to involve parents.

Please stop looking to the Federal Gov't to solve all our problems. In many cases, it has created them.

Most kids in the inner city read at below a third grade level and never read, except maybe sports headlines. If you can't read, how can you learn.

Criticism of the NCLB has to be coupled with some kind of perspective on public education as an institution. Things were far from idyllic before the passage and implementation of NCLB. Public schools have always had to be dragged to the table, kicking and screaming, and be forced with legislation, court cases, and public pressure to deal with things like persistent racism, sexism, religious intolerance, equal facilities for poor students, homophobia, bullying, lack of services for the handicapped and learning disabled, et cetera.

Kozol claims that NCLB has somehow prevented thousands of vibrant, highly-qualified teachers from entering the profession. Where is the data on that?

I do know that many of the nation's teacher's colleges haven't been teaching teachers how to teach reading. http://www.nctq.org/nctq/images/nctq_reading_study_exec_summ.pdf
Maybe that's a problem that only shows up with standardized test data.

I do know, as a parent of a learning disabled child, that NCLB has forced schools' treatment of the learning disabled into the realm of accountability. And that is a good thing. Now school districts can't smile sweetly and say everything's fine when their numbers don't look so good. It may not be convenient for the adults in the system to be forced to improve their students' outcomes, but an improved NCLB (don't gut the accountability part) will help a lot of people whose parents couldn't afford to supplement mediocre schooling with tutors, academic summer camps, and the like.

I'm sure that everyone who wrote here has lived in the inner city and is not considered white...

One more thing...I notice that a lot of people like to blame the low-performing students, their parents, and their culture. The implication is that, since they're not achieving at a high level, they must not want it enough.

I've noticed that some teachers are really successful teaching well-fed, highly-motivated students who already seem to know a lot, already know how to organize themselves, and don't need much extra help.

That's easy. I could probably teach those kids. What takes skill, training, intelligence, and problem-solving ability (and a well-organized and well-lead school) is being able to teach difficult students, students who have already had a string of highly-unqualified teachers, who haven't been taught to be organized, who are below grade level, who want to learn but have been discouraged year after year by an impenetrable bureaucracy.

that reading study is by the national council on teacher quality, which has one right-wing or neoliberal anti-union board member after another -- and their mission statement ends with:

"We are committed to lending transparency and increasing public awareness about the three sets of institutions that have the greatest impact on teacher quality: state departments of education, teacher preparation programs, and teachers unions."

anyway smart people don't blame the kids, parents, or culture, i don't think -- the difficulty lies in the pressures working on those three, and how best to provide a good education in the absence of the economic comfort kids in wealthy neighborhoods experience.

me personally, i don't want to give schools in poor areas impossible jobs OR low performance expectations. but honestly, i don't think a solid majority of kids in a community have a chance if all the other adults who affect their lives are mired in poverty and depression.

jdpst44, I have lived in the inner city, I have been homeless twice in my life, I have experienced deep institutionalized racism. I taught at the community college level because my politics are too radical for K-12 public schools, or at least most school boards to more specific.

susanh, "Kozol claims that NCLB has somehow prevented thousands of vibrant, highly-qualified teachers from entering the profession." This is incorrect. He actually said, "The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of thousands of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban districts struggle to attract into these schools." It has "drive[n] away" teachers, not "prevented" anyone from becoming a teacher. It appears someone else is in need of a reading lesson.

It usually takes a great deal of time to produce a good teacher.

However, because of the NCLB pressure cooker,
most teachers aren't given the time they need.

Parent(s) or caregivers want immediate improvements in test results. And when they compare a new teacher with an old hand, they usually fight to get their kid into the more experienced teacher's class.

While the above is going on, the new teacher has to learn (in Florida) and very complicated elementary school "balanced" reading program. This program requires a teacher to know, master and teach reading strategies for hundreds of different reading level basal readers.

Included with the above, inclusion means the teacher has to construct specialized reading, math, etc. programs for special needs kids (ESE)or kids who speak English as a second language (ESL).

All of the above requires tons of bureaucratic and legalistic paperwork which takes up the time one could give to improving teaching.

I taught at two inner-city schools for three years. The teachers that tended to perform best (especially with the more "independent" upper-graders) were those who looked most like them, spoke like them, and came from the same neighborhood or culture as did the kids' caregivers/parent(s).

At the same, many of these high-performing teachers were uncurious about other cultures, pursued non-intellectual interests, and they usually knew the minimum amount of (and sometimes incorrect )knowledge of their subject area(s)

Unfortunately, the U.S. is such a segmented and anti-intellectual culture, most teachers have a hard time no matter what the social class of the student. The pre-teen and teen entertainment industry and electronic visual media takes up most of their after/before school lives.

The written word-orientation, and reflective mentality needed for reading is increasingly obsolete...like learning Latin and Greek.

The iconic, visually-oriented mentality is taking is increasingly becoming predominate. This is a similar mentality to that possessed by Medieval Europeans.

They learned their religio-cultural lessons, visually, through church art. They learned their craftwork through observation.

However, because contemporary, industrial society destroys craftsmenship and cultural integrity, this mental regression probably won't produce the same level of expressive depth, and artistic authenticity as it did in Medieval Europe.

balakirev,

From what you describe, FL elementry teachers need the equivalent of an EdMA, with an emphasis on ESL and ESE (easilly 18 units of upperdivision coursework each) just to be competent. That makes the length of teacher-training coursework--including "student teaching"--stretch out to 8 years--along with the additional expense to finance such coursework. In contrast, my great-grandmother was put to work teaching at a Reservation school after one--1--year of training at a "normal" school. To become an effective teacher, she realized she needed to learn her charges' language to bridge the "culture canyon,"--something highly verbotten in those days. She was eventually fired for teaching the Reservation kids in their own language!

Does the state of Florida help fund the additional training it requires of its teachers?

"The idea that the Federal Gov't can fix education is one of the more ludicrous around. Remember Sputnik?"

Some of the most backwards reasoning I have seen. Wasn't sputnik launched by people with a federal department of education?

... mind you, as "Dr Strangelove" pointed out, both the american and the ussr efforts were mainly accomplished by german scientists.

Fasting is a novel way to protest the NCLB--but why not, when reason doesn't work ? Besides, fasting has historical antecedents as a form of protest.

The author does a good job describing the deleterious effects of "teaching to the test" on critical thinking, and, although I've seen no data, I don't find it surprising that test-o-mania is driving teachers out of the profession and students out of the schools (there's little more boring than constant drill in what you already know). And then there are the students who simply drop out, convinced by their test scores they can't make the grade.

To the concerns the author raises, I would also add a) are the test scores on which the students, teachers, and schools are judged even meaningful? Whether they are--or not--depends on the reliability and validity of the tests the individual states administer: do the tests measure these goals reliably (for example, will the different forms of a test yield the same results)?do the tests measure the individual state's performance standards, its articulated goals for its students should know by when?

And then there is b) the manner by which "adequate yearly progress" measures are formed, by subtracting this year's test score results from last year's (and then comparing the result to an "annual measureable objective"): since learning is something that happens within individual students--longitudinally--this cross-sectional approach--subtracting one pile of aggregated scores from another's--is ludicrous.

And then there is c) the question of who is making money off the NCLB (it's a fair question to ask about the Iraq invasion; it's a legitimate question to ask about the NCLB). Certainly, as more and more tests are required, more and more test publishers are making more and more money.

There is also, in my humble opinion, d) a more pernicious question that should be addressed: what does the U.S. Department of Education mean by "complete data harvesting" from the states? In days of yore, student scores existed only in a ledger in a teacher's desk; as times changed, the individual states formed their own repositories of student data (from all I've read, giving considerable thought to ways to protect student anonymity. Typically students were given ID numbers: there's an "A" in Alaska's OASIS system and there's an "M" somewhere in Minnesota's MMARS student ID nomenclature system). Currently, some states, on a voluntary basis, are turning over their individually identifiable data to USED (the given reason is to identify the needs of individual students).

Yet, under NCLB, the creation of a single nationwide database of individually identifiable student data is strictly prohibited (Sec. 9531, www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg112.html#sec9531), except for coordinating services for "migrant students" (SEC. 1308, www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg8.html#sec1308) .... after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' students were, by and large, dispersed throughout the country: current USED Secretary Spellings instructed the schools to enroll their new students under the "migrant" category so USED could reimburse the affected schools. Why? Could it be that the furor over standardized student achievement testing and "holding teachers and schools accountable" is like the cool-looking horse the seemingly departed Greeks left at the gates of Troy? As warrantless federal surveillance of ordinary citizens increases, is there any reason to expect the most vulnerable amongst us, public K-12 students, should be immune?

hi, hibiscus. you said "that reading study is by the national council on teacher quality, which has one right-wing or neoliberal anti-union board member after another..."

I started doing research on educational reform when my dyslexic kid wasn't getting appropriate services from his public school. I assumed that, like with many issues, people would fall on one side or the other based on predictable things like political party. It was interesting to me that many of the people who were opposing instructional methods that help my kid were the liberals. I found that there are actually many "sides" in this battle, and that most are championed by a weird collection of liberal/conservative/whatever. It's important to me to try to separate ideology from practical efforts to help children. For example, that study corroborates my experience that many teachers don't have much knowledge of how phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are all essential component parts of teaching reading. And in my county, everybody and their mother is a Democrat.

My take: rather than right-wing/left-wing alone, the major factions are:

People who want to dismantle the public school system. Mostly right-wing ideologues.

People who think that things are fine except not enough money. Also, tend to aver that nothing can be improved until poverty is eliminated. Mostly liberal ideologues. Some progressives think they are supposed to belong to this group, because of the left-right thing.

People who think that improvement is possible (there are many high-poverty schools that are performing well) and necessary (how ya gonna end poverty and strengthen democracy if poor people and people of color remain uneducated?). This is a mix of what I call "practical conservatives", "practical liberals", progressives, and people like me. (I'm a civil rights and community activist, person of color, left-leaning mother of two.)

You may also notice that both conservatives and liberals are busy attacking NCLB.

Me (I'm a civil rights and community activist, person of color, left-leaning mother of two,) while I think that NCLB needs lots of improvement, I also really love the the accountability...the fact that the smug, racist public school bureaucrats and the teachers who don't want to help kids are required to have their disaggregated data made public so that everyone can see that everything is NOT fine, like they've been telling us for years. NCLB didn't create this problem -- this is an old problem, in which some students and some schools don't get what they need and deserve. Now the light is shining on that discrepancy. The pressure is on, as it should be.

Some folks in this thread say 'we' can't blame the parents, the teachers, the kids or the culture. Some folks say the 'blame' lies with the parents, the teachers, the fed Dept/Ed, the kids, the culture. Er, um, maybe we can move beyond fingerpointing?

My sister has two masters degrees, one in education from an excellent Catholic university in the Midwest and one in communication/journalism from Stanford. Her undergraduate degree is in English. She became a teacher because she loves literature, she loves teaching, she loves opening the hearts and minds of teenagers with the power of great literature. She has taught on a Navajo reservation, in private prep schools in Asia and in the Middle East. She recently returned to the U.S. She is brilliant (she got the Stanford masters on a full, free ride), she loves her subject matter, she loves young people. She believes in the power of literature to inform and transform lives.

She returned to the states last summer and took a job in an American public high school. She got fired at the end of one year because she wasted class time, in her World Literature classes on things like poems and novels instead of vocabulary lists for the test. They didn't exactly fire her. They declined to rehire her, saying she was a poor fit. They couldn't find anything wrong with her because she complied with all the paperwork.

When she learned that she would not be retained, she decided to be open about her dismissal with her students and their parents. She still had several months of teaching to fulfill her contract and she had to find a way to show up in personal integrity during those months. As the word spread amongst the students that she had been fired, one of the gangsta kids in her behavioral problem classes said "You got fired cause you got too many students like me. They blaming you for me." Even the kids labeled learning disabled and placed in classes for behavioral problems could see that my sister was not the problem. The whole system is the problem.

NCLB is an insidious tragedy that is dumbing down the lower classes, trapping young people in a caste system that will, I guess, be expected to serve the rich in menial labor, able to read rudimentary instructions for mindless jobs in some creepy future.

If there is no room in America's public school system for someone with a masters degree from an Ivy, plus an additional masters in educaiton, we are all in a lot of trouble.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that for her one year of servitude in this public h.s., she got paid $31,000 and she had to spend $9,000 of that $31,000 to get her husband and children covered on her health care policy, which brought her real salary down to $23,000. A woman with two masters getting paid $23,000 and then being humiliated by the NCLB police because she taught poetry in her liteature class.

Our public schools are in a whole lot of trouble.

I don't quite understand how Mr. Kozol's fast is a part of any solution. I guess he hopes to draw attention to the problems? I don't quite understand how that is a useful tactic.

Very moving.

Bill Richardson is right: scrap NCLB. It is hurting kids and teachers. Chilren are being bored to death filling in bubbles on meaningless tests and teachers' professionalism is being driven from the classroom by control freaks bent on making schools boring places where drill and kill is king.

Wonderful article, Mr. Kozol !

How about reviewing the criteria for "highly qualified" teachers as well ? People with Master's Degrees and Ph.D.'s with expert knowledge of their fields and possibly teaching experience in educational contexts beyond public schools may be discouraged from entering public school teaching because of having to go through the costly and time-consuming process of becoming certified. Just to be admitted to a teacher-credentialing program, all candidates, regardless of professional and educational background, must pass some form of standardized exam testing math, reading and writing skills. For instance, although an expert in the humanities may earn a high level score on the standardized test in the subject s/he intends to teach, if s/he does not gain a passing score on the math test, s/he must must wait until s/he passes that test before s/he may teach.

In Washington, D.C., the mayor, Adrian Fenty, recently won the election, in no small part, because of a promise "to fix" a public school system in crisis. Yet, along with many local and national politicians, he sends his own children to private school, presumably because he believes they will receive a better education than in the public school system. Fenty's children will not be subjected to the tests inflicted on public school students by NCLB. Nor will his children's teachers be held "accountable" by NCLB standards. Moreover, it is possible that teachers in the private schools that many politicians' children attend do not meet "highly qualified" criteria but are, nevertheless, highly educated with Master's Degrees or Ph.D.'s. They are likely to be passionate about their fields of expertise and successful in inspiring passion for knowledge and learning in their pupils.

Why not grant all children access to a quality education ? We could begin by cancelling NCLB and the narrow criteria for "highly qualified" teachers.

By the way, Mr. Kozol, don't starve yourself ! We need your talent and strength in cultivating gardens of learning for all of our young people.

I would suggest that Kozol's fast is in solidarity with the immiserated children he's championed his whole career. Like Ghandi, he may be affluent, but he wishes to identify with those he wants to uplift--to liberate.

Hi! Me again.

I think the deepest problem with U.S. pubic education is that the general public doesn't value or respect education, knowledge, or the expressive fine arts.

In Sino-based societies, education, knowledge and knowledge of (at least your nation's) fine arts is considered important.

For example, the caligraphy of Chinese characters led to water colors. So, when you learn to write you also learn a form of art.

In many Sino-based societies, dance is considered part of education, as is music performance.

If you are interested in Western classical music, you can't but notice how many East Asians and Asian-Americans are presently the best performers of this intricate, widely varied, and very expressive art form.

The East Asian culture tends to respect high culture, education and teachers. Let's face it. teachers are little respected in the U.S.

If you are widely educated person who can also able to perform art music, or paint well, write poetry, stories, novels, etc...you are not respected until you can prove you are cool or someone to fear.

If you aren't cool and fashionable, then whatever accomplishments or abilities you have developed aren't worth squat.

The kids in the U.S. are unindated a commercial pop culture that acts as a bubble that stifles their curiousity of other cultures, cultural achievements of the past (or simply the cultural expressions of the past: popular, folk or classical), or the craftmenship of making interesting products with their own hands.

They have become consumers of corporate controlled, machine-made commodities: music industry, entertainment industry, fashion industry, food industry, etc.

Kids and young people don't see anyone developing skills to make products that express their abilities, or inner-selves. And if someone does develop such skills, there isn't much of an appreciative audience.

They don't even see people working in factories making material end products.

They do see many people yapping into cell phones, text messaging, plugged into Ipods, roaming the malls, or playing computer games.

How can people who don't make things to express themselves while attempting to reach a shared standard of excellence appreciate the products of those who do?

So, public and private education is not for self-enlightenment, aesthetic development, or shared and appreciative workmanship. What is it truly for?

The answer to the above question can also answer the question: "Why does U.S. educational system suck as a whole?"

Does it really "suck as a whole?" It's very inequitible, yes, and in that sense it really sucks for many people. But are they the whole? No. There is a lucky 60% that benefits from the inequity of the system, so it doesn't suck for them. Asian americans are usually within that 60%, in large measure because of the values illustrated. But there is a core in the system that's been rotten for decades from which the inequities spring. The cause of that core is structural in a longstanding political-economic sense due to the philosophy of white supremacy and associated chattel slavery.

Most importantly, the "educational system" doesn't consist of just schools. I would argue that media is the most pervasive form of education, with far more hours devoted to its various forms than spent in classrooms. It's a very powerful system for moulding perceptions, attitudes and tastes; teachers don't have the resources media has, and thus compete poorly with it in the task of trying to connect what's being taught to the contextual world of the student, which is when true learning occurs. The penetration of commercial activity into the schoolyard and lunchroom further exacerbates the problem, along with things like the Channel 1 propaganda programs. So, media comprises another educational system with which the brick and mortar system must compete. It helps the schools compete when families have a high ethos for education, a fact documented over and over in studies. But as more brain damaged kids enter school, their numbers are rapidly accelerating, overall quality of education will slide as there are not nearly enough specialist teachers to deal with the influx of students.

karlof1, you are probably considered white by society. You say that you've experienced institutional racism but that is not the same as racism based on skin color. You have to make a distinction between the two or you do a true disservice to people of color. think about it.

The deepest problem with education is that it is not about education. It's about learning how to be subserviant to power and beind indoctrinated by the state. When public education started most were against because they knew that it would brainwash their children. Public education has always been like that. They don't teach thinking skills its just repetition and being "good." Chomsky writes about in Understanding Power. It's a good book to read.

No teacher ever made a big fuss if you got a C but if you were five minutes late for class then you were in big trouble. Just like the working world.

Excellent insights, susanh, but I think you're mistaken about NCLB achieving "accountability." Lehrer News Hour did a series recently showing how the school adminstrators are "gaming" the system by various techniques, including encouraging underperforming students to drop out rather than taking the NCLB tests.

I think the main goal of NCLB was to punish teachers unions for having the temerity to vote consistantly Democratic.

I continue to believe the best use of NCLB tests would be to administer them to legislators and to post their scores on the internet.

I continue to believe that if the federal government were serious about poor and minority kids learning, they would issue vouchers. Not school vouchers, but housing vouchers that would allow poor and minority families to live in wealthy, white, Republican gated communities.

This is really simple people.

The conseratives are in power. And they have been in power since 1980. They do not believe in government programs. Public education is a government program. For conservatives to prove their point, government programs must be made to look impotent. Just look at FEMA during Katrina. This war against public education has been going on for some time. It is a self fulfilling prophecy.

I started writing yesterday and then gave up over the complexity of it.
While I hate to think it could be true, I tend to think what jdpst44 just stated might be. It boggles my mind how quality public education seems to be so far out of American children's reach. Why people have to agonize over where to live (when they have a choice) based on the school in that area? It should not matter. Our children should be able to receive a good education no matter where they live. I believe most people would agree that education is one of a child's basic rights (see also the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child).
I live in a city. My children attend public school. The school population is 87% non-white and 59% qualify for free lunch. Our Kindergarteners have to take standardized tests. Our Principal constantly struggles with how to balance meeting NCLB testing requirements and still give teachers the time and space (not literally) to teach. It worries me. My children are multi-racial, in case anyone needs to know.
I know a solution is not easy, but yet...I wonder if other problems might not resolve themselves (at least partially) if our government really made quality public education and healthcare (other topic, but not separate) for all its top priorities.

I've even read that the teachers unions have issued statements to dumb down education. I can't find it now. If anyone can help find those sources, that would be greatly appreciated.

It's too big a job to ask teachers to educate the parents as well as the children. Our national climate does not revere or even respect learning... this is not so in other countries which will soon stomp on us in economic matters relating to engineering, discovery, innovation. Our national climate is besotted with the stupid antics of the rich and famous whose major contribution seems to be to the alcohol industry. So every country has its heyday; I'm afraid ours is behind us.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said something like, "Education is the hallmark of a free society." Without education we will wallow in the lowest common denominator... witness the stupidities everyday on t.v. So be it. We cannot change the course of a giant ship led by a man whose only interest lies in increasing the wealth of the destructionists.

As a single parent of an inner-city student of color, it has been my experience that NCLB damages all students. My high achieving learner attended a "suburban" school identified by the state as "distinguished" with an API score approaching 900. There are few students of color or English as a second language learners in this district. My child completed middle school with a 4.0 GPA (on a 4.0 scale), tested in the 95 percentile or above, in all subject areas, on standardized exams and received the President's Award for Educational Execellence. And guess what? At the end of eighth grade, was not prepared to compete effectively against kids from around the world. Even at the best/better public schools, teachers teach for the test, and very little real education happens in the classroom. My kid now attends an East Coast boarding school and while her GPA has suffered (she no longer maintains a 4.0 average), I can assure you she is recieving an education that focuses on learning, exploring and comprehension and not simply test taking.

How many critical thinking classes are there? None.

They don't want you to question anything real.