Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students' scores by using proto-military methods of instruction -- scripted texts and hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.

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. There are more remarkable young teachers like this coming into inner-city education than at any time I've seen in more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep them. But 50 percent of the glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from the nation's most respected colleges and universities are throwing up their hands and giving up their jobs within three years.

When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it's the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses -- "in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems."

At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of division between children of minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In good suburban classrooms, children master the essential skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in itself. They're also given critical capacities that they will need if they're to succeed in college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power to interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.

In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June that prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of school integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly divided sectors of American society. This, then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only small amounts of mostly liquid foods each day, and, when I have stomach pains, other forms of nourishment at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted on in order to avert the risk of doing longterm damage to my heart. Twenty-nine pounds lighter than I was when I began, I've been dreaming about big delicious dinners.

Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who have told me, not as an accusation but respectfully, that it was one of my books that diverted them from easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into teaching in the first place. Some call me in the evenings, on the verge of tears, to tell me of the maddening frustration that they feel at being forced to teach in ways that make them hate themselves.

I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them whatever good survival strategies I can. I tell them that the best defense is to be extremely good at what they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom grow chaotic! A teacher who can keep a reasonable sense of calm within her room, particularly in a school in which disorder has been common, renders herself almost inexpendable.

At the same time, I always recommend a healthy dose of sly irreverence and a sense of playful and ironical detachment from the criticisms of those clipboard bureaucrats who come around to check on them. (Teachers call them "the curriculum cops" or "NCLB overseers.") I urge them to develop mischievous and inventive ways to convince these gloomy-looking people that whatever they are teaching at that moment, no matter how delectably subversive it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to one of those little chunks of amputated knowledge, known as "state proficiencies," they are supposed to be "delivering" at that specific minute of the day.

But I've also felt the obligation to bring this battle to its source in Washington. I've tried very hard to convince a number of the more enlightened Democrats who serve on the Senate education panel to introduce amendments that will drastically reduce our government's reliance upon standardized exams in judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and attribute greater weight to factors that are not so simple-mindedly reducible to numbers.

Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of assessment would not only tell us whether little Oscar or Shaniqua started out their essays with "a topic sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote something with the slightest hint of authenticity and charm or simply stamped out insincere placebos. (A child gets no credit for originality or authenticity under No Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards. Endearing stylistic eccentricity, needless to say, is not rewarded either. That which can't be measured is not valued by the technocrats of uniformity who have designed this miserable piece of legislation.)

On a separate battlefront, I've also tried to win support for an amendment to the law that will take advantage of one of the loop-holes in the recent segregation ruling, an opening that Justice Kennedy has offered us by his insistence that criteria that are not race-specific may be used in order to advance diversity in public schools.

There is a provision in No Child Left Behind that permits a child in a chronically low-performing school to transfer to a more successful school. Up to now, it hasn't worked because there aren't enough successful schools in inner-city districts to which kids can transfer. The Democrats, I've argued, have the opportunity to make this option workable if they are sufficiently audacious to require states to authorize a child's right to transfer across district lines, and provide financial means to make this possible, so that children trapped in truly hopeless schools could, if their parents so desired, go to school in one of the high-spending suburbs that are often a mere 20-minute ride from their front door.

I was surprised that none of the senators with whom I spoke rejected this proposal as too controversial or politically unthinkable. More than one made clear that they enjoyed the notion of helping to "improve" a flawed provision that the White House had included in the law for reasons that most certainly were not intended to enable inner-city kids to go to beautiful suburban schools with 16 or 18 children in a room, instead of 29, or 35, or 40, as in many urban systems.

It was, however, on the testing issue that I received the most explicitly unqualified and positive response. Several of the senators made a lot of time available to think aloud about the ways in which to get rid of that sense of siege so many teachers had described and to be certain that we do not keep on driving out these talented young people from our schools.

The only member of the Democratic leadership I have been unable to get through to is the influential chairman of the education panel, Senator Ted Kennedy, who, one of his colleagues told me flatly, will ultimately "call the shots" on this decision. I've asked the senator three times if he'll talk with me. Each time, I have run into a cold stone wall. This has disappointed me, and startled me, because the senator has been a friend to me in years gone by and has asked for my ideas on education on a number of occasions in the decades since I was a youthful teacher and he was a youthful politician.

Senator Kennedy is, of course, a very busy man and has many other issues of importance he must deal with. But it's also possible, aides to other senators suggest, that he does not wish to contemplate dramatic changes in the law because he co-sponsored the initial bill in a deal with the Republicans. He is also renowned as a gifted builder of consensus in the legislative process. Lending his support to either of the two proposals I have made would almost surely guarantee a knockdown battle with conservative Republicans and, perhaps, with some of the Democratic neoliberals as well.

Still, Senator Kennedy has displayed a genuine nobility of vision in defense of elemental fair play for low-income children many times before. Is it possible that he may rise to the occasion once again? If he does, I may finally listen to the worries of my friends and decide it's time to bring this episode of fasting to an end. If not, I'll keep slogging on. It's a tiny price to pay compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through every single day.

Comments

[CLdeNeveu]

I recently learned of Jonathan Kozol's fast --losing him now, would be like losing any civil rights activist at a critical juncture, devastating and impossible. His work has inspired me.

Ten years in urban education makes clear why Kozol is fasting, our children and teachers are starving. His fast mirrors for me, the forced starvation children and teachers undergo in regard to critical thought, adequate materials, support, facilities, and services in our most ignored communities. Working in these conditions is dehumanizing and exhausting, but worse is working in these conditions, going home to relative comfort, while knowing the children you care so deeply for are left completely behind when the school door shuts.

In work with young and brilliant teacher recruits, I see the limitless possibility in their eyes as they trek out to make a difference. For many, the challenges that come while they work to make a difference takes a toll. Some pay the price with their health, some become disenfranchised with teaching altogether, and some "burn out." Others flee for suburban teaching. The "system" is brutal to both the teacher and the student, to work under such inhumane conditions is beyond the capacity of most people--yet we well know the children have no choice, and this makes many of us go on well past the first alarm of warning.

I wish Kozol would do another book from the perspective of the teachers who have fallen. How was NCLB the machine gun driving them out of the profession? How do they forget the children and the communities the invested in? And yet, how do they make a difference?

I believe the most talented teachers are used as the putty in the levy ready to burst of NCLB. Most new teachers who choose to teach in our urban school systems, are embarking on a partial fast. There is honor in that, and if they are strong enough there may be a potential for change, but in the end if their "heart" or mind is damaged and the system itself does not change, what good will come?

[Illolibro]

By playing the blame game and getting a lot of attention with his whining, Kozol is doubtlessly thrilling the radical leftists who believe that the Bush Adminsitration actually wants to close down the public schools, started the war in Iraq for personal profit or revenge, and is behind everything evil in the world (apparently) since the beginning of time. They remind me of the radical rightists who believe in the "Jewish" conspiracy to rule the world and that we should be watching the skies for those black helicopters piloted by United Nations fighting forces.

To listen to Mr. Kozol, one would believe that all those students in underperforming schools were doing just great until the Bush Adminstration came on the scene with its evil plan. In truth, NCLB was set up to try to solve long-standing problems in student achievement.

I have heard convincing arguements laying blame (for this problem) on everything from the so-called Progressive educational philosophy ascendant in schools of education since the 1920's, to changes in parenting norms and the culture around us. Ascribing fault and evil motivation to George Bush accomplishes nothing constructive, helps no one, and sounds awfully childish and foolish.

Student achievement in the United States has fallen steadily for decades. If Kozol actually has something constructive to say, let's hear it. Otherwise, I would hope that he and others like him would stop the inflammatory rhetoric and seek a dialogue with those in a position to make changes, rather than make ridiculous, self-aggrandizing gestures.

[DrFred]

I discovered this story late, but I hope this adds to the discussion.

I recommend reading "Tested: An American School Struggles to Make the Grade" by Washington Post education reporter Linda Perlstein. She spent a year in a "poster child" school for the NCLB law and uncovered the reasons for its results.

The picture she paints is very enlightening for anyone on either side of the issue.

My take on the book, as spelled out in a review at my Science Shelf website www.scienceshelf.com/Tested.htmm), is that the school would have been even more successful without the standardized testing.

If you have a senator or representative in Congress who reads--some of them actually do--please recommend that they spend time with Tested before they get involved in debating and voting on NCLB.

[UNCLEJOE]

Restrictions in length only allow mer to print the last three hours of a five hour test.
--------------------------
Subject: 8TH GRADE TEST, Kansas, 1895
What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895:
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in
Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original
document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical
Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by
the Salina Journal.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by
Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary
War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the
Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton,
Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:
1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic,
orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each:
Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters,
linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.'
Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling.
Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection
with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non,
inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the
following, and name the sign that indicates the sound:
card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare,
last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite,
site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein,
raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and
indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and
by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

Truncated...

[UNCLEJOE]

Restrictions allows me to print only 2 hours of this five hour test.
-----------------------------
8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have
no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give
principal parts of "lie," "play," and "run."
5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks
of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and
show therein that you understand the practical use of
the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of
Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft.
wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it
worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is
the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months
at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18
days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16
ft. long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace)
at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre,
the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a
Receipt

---------------------------------------------

President Wilson in 1914 made this revealing statement before a convention of CEO Industrialists, ...'we do not need more scientist, professors, artists, musicians, or engineers. What we need is a mass of laborers to run the machines in
the factories, so schools should be preparing students for the menial jobs instead =of training them for professional positrons'

[TheHandyman]

Continued from above:

I have done time as a substitute teacher and had 154 assignments in 6 months. I was terminated on the basis of 4 complaints by 3 teachers and one principal. The complaints came from 6 children under the age of 8. Yet I had had 39 teachers ask specifically for me to fill in for them because their students really liked me. I still have kids here in this small community who will come up and talk to me because they remember me from their classes. Anyone who has ever had this experience will tell you it is the greatest reward you can get anywhere on the planet short of saving someone's life, which this is very close to.

Teachers saved my life because they treated me as if I was worthy, something my parents did not do. My life has been one long search for knowledge and truth because some teachers along the way did more than just teach me what answers to give on a test. They taught me how to search for and find that which was valuable.

For those of you chastising teachers who have given up, wouldn't you give up if you realized the difference between what you could do and what you would be allowed or forced to do was so demeaning that you could not accept it? Too bad! It is our society's loss! When you get an undereducated non-thinking, language butchering oaf like we have for President and you let him set the standards for education, what you will get is a lot more people in the world like him!

[TheHandyman]

In 1988 I went back to school to finish up my BA after a tour in Viet Nam, a stint in the Peace Corps in Africa and having worked at various jobs, including the corporate world. I went back to get and education and I was interested in education so I took a lot of classes on education, most in the Sociology discipline. What I found out is that it isn't that we don't know the most effective ways of educating children, we do. The reasons we don't are varied. We would have to give up the system that we have built over the last 200 years. It would have to be based the accomplishment and ability of the children, not their age. It would require that adults be re-educated in order to keep up with their children and be able to engage them. It would require that education be more important than other things like football. It would require more money be devoted to education and those that actually do the educating, not to administrative. It would require teachers being trained to educate in ways that they do not do so now. And the resulting system would have to be fluid and change as the educational abilities of each community changes. This is something that goes against the way the corporations and the so-called experts who are nothing but mouth pieces for the Educational Industry want to do things. It would mean that we go back to teaching "how to think" rather than "what to think."

[UNCLEJOE]

Standardized testing as part of Bush's
'no child left behind' is a fascist technique used in Italy during Dictator Mussolini's reign. The dictator once bragged, "I can tell you what is being taught in our schools on any minute of any day".
Education is a creative process not a formal standardized proscribed method of learning. Each teacher must be allowed to use their own creative approaches to inspire and stimulate their students.
The Federal Government and especially the President have no legal right to control the educational system under the Constitution.
Article IV, sates that any rights not assigned to the Federal Government are left under the juridiction of the individual states. And Education is one of the many social and political areas that remain under the States jurisdiction.
The problem with public education is the gradual reduction in the classic curriculums. Give teachers the freedom to chose their own text books, their innovative methods of teaching unhampered by Bush's fascist restrictions, and we will get the best out of each teacher instead of teaching at the lowest denominator by teaching for standardized testing.
Mussolini would be proud of Bush's imitation of 'teaching to pass a standardized government prescribed test.
Isn't this in fact, controlling what citizens are forced to learn, government mind controlling? WTF is going on here?

[neejerk]

Kozol

for god's sake, eat.

save your strength for talking.

tell the teachers and the parents to just say no to the federal money.

that will send them a message like nothing else.

[bkztx]

I'm an experienced teacher in a major metropolitan school district. I teach high school English. I have decided to shelve The Crucible, Raisin in the Sun, and Night in order to drill for the state-mandated test upon which our jobs and pay is now based. I have seen some incredible new, young teachers leave the profession in the last few years. Everything Kozol says is true.

[Not Blind]

AYP according to the NCLB PL-107 states that 100% of students are to achieve proficiency by 2013-2014 regardless of their baseline levels. Each subgroup must meet the participation rates and proficiency levels. The system of AYP is “meets” or “does not meet” levels. AYP measures performance so that a school and every subgroup in it must meet performance levels, or be sanctioned for not having met targets for even one of them. The school where I teach showed significant improvement last year. Every subgroup, except one met AYP goals, yet our school is listed as having “failed to meet” AYP standards.
Public education had stringent standards of accountability imposed and mandated without funding. Schools are held accountable and sanctioned if they fail to meet standards and benchmarks imposed by the federal government, although funding for those mandates has never been adequately provided.
fully fund NCLB. Federal funds do not meet the costs of mandated testing, let alone needed improvements. Congress must insist the ESEA programs be fully funded at authorized levels. Enforce Sec. 9527(a) of NCLB, which prevents the federal government from requiring states and school districts to spend their own funds-beyond what they receive from the federal government-to implement federal mandates.
Allowing the military recruiters access to student information (115, Stat. 1983, Sec. 9528) is a violation of F.E.R.P.A. that schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record.
Retaining qualified teachers in urban school districts will become more difficult, as they, their students and the schools in which they serve will be deemed "failures" according to NCLB AYP standards. Can the Justice Dept. be forced to rehabilitate and cut recidivism 100%? How can schools be mandated 100% proficiency for ALL students when many are disabled, non-English speakers, economically disadvantaged or have other hardships (over which schools and educators have no control) which directly affect student performance?

[Boadicea]

Any Act that addresses using standardized testing to improve schools must be written by teachers, not bureaucrats. Across the country, the best and brightest teachers in each state should be mobilized, secconded to the state for two years to develop a new Education Act and the tests that go with it. Non-teaching "educators" cannot do this job.

Educational goals must be the only priority - once those priorities are made law, funding can be addressed, time lines created, new sources of revenue found. But using school funding as the basis for an Act that pretends to have the best interests of children as it's goal is to flat-out lie to the American people. And frankly, I'm tired of being lied to.

One of the great injustices in this country is the utter lack of respect for teachers. This lack of respect is manifest in poor working conditions, ridiculous class sizes, a shocking lack of materials, immoral wages and a national public attitude that is undermining every effort that these dedicated people make on behalf of every citizen in this country.

Only when teachers are respected as the heroes they are, out on the front lines shaping the future of this country, will education improve.

[KosmicKat]

Re-do, because of spelling mistake:

Looks like a case of robots begetting more robots, factory style, but using protoplasm instead of silicon and steel. Our Robot In Chief, Model GWB, who has no curiosity or any concept of true learning, has, instead, a medieval, crude, fear-based world view that he's layer-painting onto all of us.
Ironically, if we could instill a true sense of learning as an adventure in students of any age, we wouldn't need rote education.

[KosmicKat]

Looks like a case of robots begetting more robots, factory style, but using protoplasm instead of silocon and steel. Our Robot In Chief, Model GWB, who has no curiosity or any concept of true learning, has, instead, a medieval, crude, fear-based world view that he's layer-painting onto all of us.
Ironically, if we could instill a true sense of learning as an adventure in students of any age, we wouldn't need rote education.

[Boadicea]

I’ve hesitated to post on this thread, because I’ve taught in tough urban schools, and I don’t agree with the prevalent notion among teachers that standardized tests are inherently bad. In fact, I think they’re a necessary hurdle for teachers – yes, I said teachers – to get past, if we are to do something about the sorry, inexcusable state of public education in this country.

But NCLB is designed to punish, not challenge – and that’s what’s so terribly wrong.

I taught in Ontario for fifteen years and in the US for five years, in both tough urban schools and suburban ones. I went through the anti-testing fight in Ontario. We lost, testing won.

With their provincial unions as organizing tools, Ontario teachers immediately went to work to put a positive spin on testing, and to develop teaching systems to make meeting test criteria easy for teachers. The buzzwords were “positive change” and “moving forward.”

We formed grade level groups across the province and together created lesson plans that covered test criteria, available to anyone with internet. (THIS WAS PAID WORK.) This freed up prep time for teachers to flesh out their program in creative ways. Veteran teachers stuck in ruts were inspired again. New teachers got a leg up with the prepared lesson plans.

The opposite has happened here in the US. Unions continue to fight NCLB because it punishes schools and teachers. Teachers are in limbo. Children feel stressed.

Senator Kennedy, please ditch NCLB and start from scratch.

250.