A single question cuts to the heart of America's education dilemma:
Is it better for kids to...
1. spend all of their class time on only reading and math test preparation?
2. study a balanced diet of subjects including reading, writing, math, science, social studies and civics, music, the arts, health, and physical education?
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and the legion of No Child Left Behind supporters pick Option A---for other people's children. I truly doubt they would choose narrowing the curriculum so radically for their own precious sons and daughters. Every kid is precious and deserves an engaging school experience. The radical narrowing is strangling America's classrooms, despite the Bush Administration's sweep-it-under-the-rug dismissals.
But the facts are in. The Washington-based Center on Education Policy released an illuminating report this week, Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era, imploring the country to choose Option B. Upon examining 349 districts across the country, the CEP found that a whopping 44% of schools reduce other topics in order to spend more time on reading and math. In many cases, you can be sure that "reduce" is putting it gently. The study finds a 31% decrease, since No Child Left Behind was passed in the 2001-2002 school year, in instructional time for subjects not tested.
Children's seven-hour school days have been hijacked into dry blocks of reading and math test preparation. The excitement and fun of creative learning are sepia-tone relics of the past, left for teachers across the country to squeeze in here and there against the oppressive No Child Left Behind grain.
The back-to-basics rhetoric of No Child Left Behind supporters--you need test- proficiency in reading and math before you can sample other intellectual endeavors--just does not hold water. A Virginia Board of Education member put it well, ""If you have just doughnuts for breakfast, you will be hungry again soon," he said. "But a balanced breakfast can carry you to lunch."
I'd go a step further to say the NCLB crowd advocates for a steady diet of Chinese water torture. Of course reading and math are essential, but it is a self-defeating methodology to strip away everything else. Aren't literacy and logic, not to mention critical thinking skills and building a broader worldview, embedded in all stimulating scholastic activities anyway?
This is a solvable problem. Unfortunately where we stand now, No Child Left Behind and its attendant logic of fixating on standardized test scores have sucked the marrow and quality time out of school days. Do you want that for your kid?
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