Stay the course. Don't give in to the naysayers and defeatists. Forge ahead with the same failed paradigms for improving schools, creating democracies, closing achievement gaps and winning the war against terrorism.
Indeed, the parallels between the Iraq War and George Bush's education centerpiece, No Child Left Behind, became even more pronounced recently. That's when the Education Trust, a highly influential educational advocacy organization that played an important role in the creation of NCLB, announced its plan for revising the 2001 education law.
Or, should I say, a plan for reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
"In the months ahead, many education groups will argue that the current law demands too much," says Education Trust founder and president Kati Haycock. "Giving in to that argument would be a terrible mistake and a huge step backward in America's uneven march toward educational opportunity for all. Instead of asking less, Congress should ask more of our schools."
From the beginning, the school accountability movement, embodied with tragic perfection in a bureaucratic and Orwellian nightmare called No Child Left Behind, has been full of such unassailable rhetoric. We've heard all the homilies: World-class standards. Leave no child behind. No Excuses. Bush and his allies painted critics of NCLB as virtually unpatriotic child abusers. Either you were for improving the educational achievements of minority and poor kids, or you were a bad person stuck in old days of educational neglect, willing to abandon poor, black and Hispanic students as being inherently incapable.
For too long, the teaching profession, teachers unions, school administrators and the rest of the education establishment caved to the political bullying from Washington. In effect, Bush upended a long tradition of locally based school systems operated by states and local school boards, replaced by a federal system of crimes and punishments, allotting federal Title I funds based upon the performance of children and schools on high-stakes standardized tests.
Unlike the political supporters of NCLB in the corporate world and testing and educational consulting industries, Haycock and her organization, I believe, do have the best interest of disadvantaged children at heart. The organization is an amazingly effective and vocal advocate, and Haycock is on the speed-dials of virtually every education reporter in the country.
If only Haycock would put that voice to better use.
Just as the Bush administration failed utterly to anticipate the consequences of invading Iraq, NCLB's advocates failed to understand what would happen on the ground when the consequences of failure for schools became so high that teaching and learning have become reduced to little more than prepping for the next round of testing.
I rarely meet an educator these days, especially those who've been in the field for years, who are not sickened by what is happening. Good teachers are turned into mediocre technicians whose job has been bureaucratized and de-professionalized. Great teachers leave the profession. Young teachers don't see teaching as a career, but as a first job that might lead to better things.
And, as always, the brunt of the damage falls hardest upon poor and minority children, because they attend schools that have the most ground to make up in the NCLB race to make 100 percent of students "proficient" in reading and math by 2014.
As for affluent schools in the suburbs, NCLB is a mere annoyance. Rich families with children in "gifted and talented" programs and other such havens of privilege for high achieving kids simply won't tolerate the intrusion. While poor kids are drilled for tests, rich kids are treated to the most enriching learning environments imaginable. They learn more than poor kids because they are taught more and in more interesting and engaging ways. They are blessed to attend schools that have little fear of federal agents looking over their shoulders.
If the intent of NCLB is to close the achievement gap between the rich and poor, it is a failed policy because it is a technocratic solution -- a politically expedient Band Aid -- to a much deeper economic and sociological malady. From the time of the landmark Coleman Report in the 1960's, sociologists have understood that the lion's share of the achievement differences among schools was attributable to vast socioeconomic class differences of families and individuals. What's more, most of the achievement gaps between white kids and black kids has been driven by social class differences -- the wealth, incomes and occupational status of parents and grandparents -- a gap that has narrowed over the years owing to greater relative wealth in the black community.
While the achievement a gap along race lines has improved, the class divide has remained stubbornly persistent. For instance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 34 percent of white high school graduates go on to complete a BA degree within eight years compared to 24 percent of black graduates. That's a troubling difference, to be sure. But consider the huge achievement gap by class: 46 percent of graduates from the highest socioeconomic quintile earn a BA within eight years compared to a mere 12 percent of the poorest students.
I'm sure Haycock is a smart woman. But the Education Trust's stance on NCLB suggests that the organization has underappreciated how America's vast economic disparities produce the gaping divide in the cultural and social capital that parents provide children from birth - the intergenerational transmission of human capital that can mean success or failure in the American school system. American schools were never designed to address such disparities. In fact, in our decidedly anti-egalitarian era, in this shameless new Gilded Age of ours, American schools have actually become very good at exacerbating inequality, playing the handmaiden's role in perpetuating the social and economic gaps between rich and poor.
For those genuine advocates like Haycock, NCLB is a failure of imagination, the failure of well-meaning people locked into the American style of thinking and policymaking that technological solutions can fix any problem. It ain't gonna happen.
Sure, Haycock will tell you that NCLB has "changed the conversation" -- or something like that -- about America doing something to help disadvantaged kids succeed. Yeah, it's hard to ignore the power of the federal government, which definitely has changed the conversation to include the end of public education, as we know it. NCLB is paving the ground for profiteers to seize control of public schools that fail its tests. By changing the conversation, NCLB has only made matters worse.
We need more than a change in the conversation. We need a revolution in imagination and leadership -- leadership of the heroic kind that we haven't seen since Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement. America has everything it needs to make futures brighter for the schools and children NCLB is supposed to help. We have the wealth -- were we to direct it to perpetual education and not perpetual war. We have great teachers. The question is, when will we, at long last, unleash that wealth and talent to make a real difference?