The great mystery of education policy today is why the Obama administration is embracing the Bush program. I recently wrote in Education Week (June 10) that it is time to kill the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. The overwhelming majority of teachers agree with me. Those who educate our kids know that NCLB is a failed program that is not improving our schools but rather turning them into test-prep factories and dumbing down our kids. Bush's main advisor Sandy Kress reacted with outrage on the website of Education Week, and Tom Vander Ark on Huffington Post called me an "edu-curmudgeon" for speaking plain truth.
Let me say it again: It is time to kill the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. This is a program in which the federal government requires every state to test every student from grade 3-8 in reading and math every year. If states do not make "adequate yearly progress" towards 100% proficiency by 2014, then the schools face a series of increasingly onerous sanctions, ending with their being closed down. Vander Ark thinks that this punitive approach to school improvement is swell. I don't.
If judged solely by test scores, the only coin that the NCLB crowd understands, the law has been a dud. Kids today are making less progress on national and international tests than they did during the Clinton administration years.
While our kids focus endlessly on preparing to take their state tests in reading and math, they are not learning science, history, geography, foreign language, the arts, or anything else but how to find the right bubble on a standardized test.
A California study in Science magazine predicted that by 2014, nearly 100% of all elementary schools would be deemed failures because of NCLB. This would unleash a flood of sanctions: closed schools, fired staffs, public schools handed over to private management (a remedy that has recently been proved ineffective in Philadelphia, among other places), and public schools handed over to state control (another ineffective remedy).
Now Secretary Arne Duncan promises to close 5,000 low-performing schools. The thought of closing 5,000 schools thrills today's so-called "reformers," although none of them has any idea how to make them better. Where will Duncan find 5,000 new principals? Is there an army of great teachers waiting to staff those 5,000 schools?
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965--which is the original law onto which No Child Left Behind was grafted--had none of these punitive features. It was premised on the belief that the federal government could help schools by sending more money. In fact, the federal government never sent much money, never more than 10% of overall spending, and often much less than that. No one today could visit a typical inner-city school and complain that its biggest problem was that it got too much federal money.
But with this leverage, the new mandarins of education want to control all of American education. For some reason, first the Bush people and now the Obama people believe they know exactly how to fix American education. (Chicago, their model, is one of the lowest-performing cities in the nation on national tests, and Texas was never a national model for academic excellence.) Their answer starts with testing and ends with data and more testing. If children were widgets, they might be right; but children are not widgets, they are individuals. If reading and math were all that mattered in school, they might be right, but basic skills are not the be-all and end-all of being educated.
A recent study by Common Core (Why We're Behind: What Top-Performing Nations Teach Their Students But We Don't) shows that the top-ranking nations do not spend endless hours preparing for tests of basic skills. Instead, in nations such as Finland and Japan, there is a balanced curriculum of science, history, geography, the arts, foreign languages, civics, and other studies. Meanwhile our children are learning to guess the right answer on a multiple-choice test!
The amazing thing about American education today is that the Obama people--who promised revolutionary change--have no ideas other than to tighten the grip of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind program on the teachers and children of the United States.
Many policy components of NCLB are recommended in 'The Bell Curve', a bunch of Social Darwinist nonsense.
This is what I look at, as a parent - it is a far more balanced assessment and obviously sees this issue as more serious than a "get rid of this right now!" three year old screeching that is becoming the only response I see lately on this site.
The author states the teachers are against this law. OF COURSE they are!!! Why would they want a light focused on their teaching skills? BTW my kids best teachers are not worried or concerned about the tests, neither are their students. The rotten teachers have a different response. My kids are tested weekly in spelling, history, math, etc., the standards of learning tests are just one more.
Obviously, throwing money at the problem, which is what the teachers want, has not worked (see the D.C. schools). I support NCLB, and will be very angry if Obama or the Congress eliminates it.
I have a cool idea: Why not assess their teaching of a well-rounded curriculum, instead of focusing so narrowly?
I teach at the university level. Believe me when I say that professors do not give one whit whether your children can fill in a test sheet. That "skill" has no bearing on whether they can "perform" at the college level.
You must be very exciting to go out with - "well, I know that we just got into the car, but it is going to turn out to be a disasterous date later...just because...."
Parents have no choice but to supplement public "education" with REAL education ever since this NCLB nonsense started. Pre-schoolers are taught how to fill in test sheet bubbles with #2 pencils ! I feel so sorry for my kids who come home drained and unhappy after weeks and weeks of learning trivia in preparation for standardized tests. Youth has become a factory job.
People are impatient. The McEducation generation. Education reform as fast as you can order a Big Mac.
Pleeze
Obama has had plenty of time to at least consider the program and prepare some sort of preliminary response to NCLB.
And I'm not in the McAnything generation.
Ravitch speaks the truth.
"If judged solely by test scores, the only coin that the NCLB crowd understands, the law has been a dud. Kids today are making less progress on national and international tests than they did during the Clinton administration years."
So on both national AND international tests, our kids are doing worse! Our system of public education has indeed gotten worse!
NCLB is the only good thing to come out of the Bush administration, and teachers are the LAST people Obama should look to for advice on education policy.
This test prep stuff does not educate, it drills. You seem to assume teachers didn't teach before, kids didn't take standardized tests before and kids didn't learn before. All false assumptions. I live in a school district where a new teacher is paid substantially less than a new sheriff deputy. The teacher must have a four year degree and some other requirements, the deputy has no educational requirement. How do you think that influences the quality of the teaching outcomes? Rich districts compete for the top 1/3 of each year's grads and the rest take what they can get. The US does not seem to want superior education while other countries demand it.
But even still there hasn't been enough time to overhaul the entire education system.
Bush could have never gotten away with a bank bailout AND a GM AND a Chrysler bailout. No, Obama is much better than Bush at sticking it to the rich. And by stick it I mean sticking billions at them.
Education is a huge expense and if done right would probably cost twice as much as what we have now. Fixing the education system would mean less corporate welfare. So Obama will have to tinker around the edges and give some great speeches to get us to ignore that he isn't really changing anything.