NCLB and Education Today: Fighting an Uphill Battle
Working in education today is a little like trying to push an elephant up a hill. The elephant, as it turns out, is accountability and the overwhelming reliance on standardized testing. The elephant isn’t going to go anywhere without help. Students aren’t going to be able to push him up that hill much longer even if they are endowed with exceptional strength.
Unfortunately, with the current focus on meeting higher and higher levels of proficiency, as measured on the NECAP test, we have become enamored with the notion that all children should perform in the same way under the same conditions. The result is a focus on the technical aspects of teaching, including highly structured instruction and scripted programming that largely ignores the individual differences of the children we want to serve. As schools continue to look for a publisher program or a specific approach that will raise test scores, they forget the human nature of students.
In my mind No Child Left Behind has done more to harm education than any other attempt to reform schooling in the nearly 40 years I have been in education. Instead of pushing us forward to address the concerns of the 21st century, NCLB has created a battlefield mentality in our schools. When nearly 40 percent of the schools in Vermont are labeled as “failing” because they did not meet the benchmarks set by the federal government, almost everyone involved in education takes up a defensive stance and tries to protect their territory.
The April 29 Burlington Free Press quotes a principal who said his first step will be to research what other schools are doing with low-income students. Another principal complains about the way test results are analyzed with a view of education that uses a very narrow lens. Placing blame on one small group of students creates an atmosphere of discrimination and recrimination that is biased and misleading.
The problem isn’t that schools aren’t improving test scores and meeting their annual yearly improvement as defined by NCLB. The bigger concern should be that schools have been reduced to institutions where children are viewed as objects and instruction is relegated to a production-line state of mind. The result is that schools, teachers and children are becoming more and more stressed out as the testing demands increase. Instead of motivating a more humanistic approach to instruction, which would actually encourage learning, schools are forced to teach to improve test scores. This has a boomerang effect of creating an environment where learning is more difficult and students are less successful.
When schooling dehumanizes students, it creates a war zone that often places children at cross-purposes with teachers and learning. A child enters school looking for approval and acceptance but instead faces depersonalized instruction. The child feels unloved and confused. This results in an inability to learn at his or her highest potential which decreases achievement and lessens the chance that test scores will increase.
Even when achievement is increased, the demands under NCLB for higher and higher test scores place children at odds with tests that require each succeeding class to be better than the pervious one. According to the Rutland Herald on April 29, Education Commissioner Richard Cate admits that he expected more schools not to make the goal this year, but he also said, “For any school to turn these numbers around in a year is a very, very difficult struggle … We certainly hope that they do, but we’ll have to wait and see.”
We should no longer “wait and see.” Schools and children should not have to suffer the inevitable consequences of being labeled failures. It is time for Vermont to step up to the plate and refuse to accept the NCLB labeling. Instead we need to address the humanistic issues that have been placed on the back burner in lieu of testing mandates. Vermont has a progressive history in education. In 1968 the Department of Education produced a document reflecting a humanistic approach to learning called the Vermont Design. We could use this document as an entry point to move us out of the destructive NCLB era into a brighter future. We don’t need to wait for the federal government to finally wake up to the fiasco it has created. We need to act now for the good of our children.
Schools, teachers and children are fighting an uphill battle. They can’t move the elephant because the incline keeps increasing and the hill keeps getting taller and taller. More and more schools are finding the climb to be too much. By 2014 it is predicted that there won’t be any schools in the entire nation, let alone Vermont, that will be able to make it to the top of the hill. The elephant will block the path completely. I wouldn’t like to be behind that elephant when he finally loses his footing and begins to slide backward.
Alis Headlam of Rutland is a senior fellow with the Vermont Society for the Study of Education.
© 2008 Rutland Herald
Well, Duh!
I am as disgusted with the very large and politically powerful National Teacher’s Unions - almost as much as I am of My Congress.
NCLB clearly violates every principle of education theory that has been proven to be operant in children (Piaget).
The Unions - and State Boards could have “Just Said NO!!!”
No, we won’t do it. What some Politically appointed Hack(s) in the Education Dept. say - NCLB et. al. - doesn’t mean diddly squat. What do they know, are they Master Teachers? or PhD’s in Educational Theory or Childhood Development?
C’mon, Teachers - you who are way more educated than the general populace - Stand Up - get some spine - follow your own Educational Theories that you supposedly learned back in College as part of your Certification - Just say No - refuse, en mass, to implement this absolute Travesty labeled NCLB, and return some semblence of sanity to our Educational System.
Guess why my son goes to a private montessori school? !!!!!!!!!!
Dovetails with the creed of uniformity mentioned in another article posted on CD today. What is more terrifying to authoritarians and their beloved unitary executive than original people who think unique thoughts? This intellectual base is of course the ilk that brings forth the long-lasting contributions that are gifts to humanity. What would we do without our artists, visionaries and inventors? As if children reduced to Pavlov’s dogs trained to salivate a specific way for a certain test could in any way INVITE the type of mental dexterity that allows for genius, invention and serendipitous discovery? I am awaiting the reawakening of wonder. Ferlinghetti had it right!
Teachers and their unions hold no credibility for politicians of both corporate parties. Until parents revolt, NCLB will be the law of the land. If you are a parent AND a teacher, contact your representative and protest NCLB as a concerned parent.
Well Home School, you are wrong. I’d like to point out that in my classroom for the last three days we have been conducting debates on controversial issues in psychology. For the entire period teams of four students each exchanged views with an opposing side. Well written statements were presented and then challenged with probing questions by the other side. Research facts were then presented with another round of Q and A for each group. Finally teams presented their closing arguments. They then fielded probing questions from the student audience and voted on which position they felt had the best merit. All in all a fine exhibit of higher level thinking, all student led and deeply engaging. Out of many voices, many ideas, many claims, comes truth. We learn to consider opposing views, challenge them, defend our own, shine light on the subject, rather than heat and learn to understand our differences while tolerating—responsibly—others’ points of view.
A microcosm of what America could be. If the business community that runs our schools on the business model would let it.
What public school should be.
What home schooling can never be. You can’t have a debate on controversial issues with many voices, ideas, and viewpoints, live and in the flesh—how it has to be—in your own home.
And there is the potential in this country for every public school teacher to run their classroom like I do. If we let them. Just think of it: classrooms where the kids are deeply engaged in issues and ideas that they feel passionately about, and want to learn more, and continue to talk about ideas after the bell rings, civily, responsibly, fairly. Classrooms where the teacher is the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. Classrooms where the students are creating things rather than regurgitating things. Classrooms where the mind is active rather than passive. Classrooms where the thinking is divergent rather than converging on one fact to memorize for a fill in the bubble corporate manufactured standardized test.
It can happen. But you have to know that it is possible, believe in it and fight for it.
Otherwise when NCLB comes up in 2009, President Obama is just going to re authorize all these ridiculous tests and jam discredited merit pay down our throats as well.
FormerNaderVoter: Right on! From your first word to your last! Home Schooling supporters SOMETIMES come from a good place but just because public schooling was created to provide industry-ready uniformity, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
Hard life and drudgery used to be what killed wonder and imagination in children, and they still do in many places. No Child Left Behind VOLUNTARILY brings that crushing drudgery into public schools. Well-off people can opt out.
There is no knowledge of, or interest in, how to do education informing NCLB. It is a punitive Dickensian vision aimed at making public schools look bad and poor children fail.
A test is an assessment of a program. A test is not a program.