No Child Left Behind looks headed for the scrap heap. The Democratic candidates for president vow not to renew it, and the Republicans aren't exactly singing its praises. Despite the best of intentions, and they were the best of intentions, No Child Left Behind has been a failure. It created unclear standards, warped incentives for students and teachers alike, and provided inadequate fallback plans once schools failed. Add to that the teachers' unions strong opposition and the act's quick death seems a sure thing.
Political rhetoric aside, don't expect any of the candidates if elected to give back the federal power grab implicit in No Child Left Behind. The people may want change, but ceding power is one change that no President is likely to enact. So, even though No Child Left Behind looks like its heading in the same direction as Tom Cruise's career, don't expect the next President to abandon the increase in federal involvement in education. Instead, expect a repackaging, expect No Child Left Behind to be replaced by a new, positive initiative, perhaps the All Children Moving Ahead Act.
But what should the All Children Moving Ahead Act look like? First, like New York City's new plan, it must focus at the level of individual children and not at the level of schools or classrooms. If the federal government is going to assume responsibility for guaranteeing that children make progress then it must do its accounting at the level of the child. If not, administrators will continue to shuttle low performers between and out of schools. This keeps schools' scores up, but leaves children out of the equation.
Second, the All Children Moving Ahead Act must abandon the idea of a single metric for all children. Children differ in how they learn and in what they recall. A single, timed standardized test forces all children to regurgitate the same basic information quickly. As a result, school rankings hinge on the speed and accuracy with which young fertile minds can spit out memorized answers. The result: my sons spend most of their math time at school practicing for a test to be given one afternoon in the spring. For that test, their responsibility is to know that seven plus four equals eleven and to know it fast. They don't have to know what eleven means or that it's larger than seven or four. They just need to know 7+4 = 11. Their school's ranking depends on it. Soon, their teacher's salary might.
Yes, of course, minimum standards must be met. But, those minimum standards can be exhibited in multiple ways. A child who can double a recipe or play backgammon probably meets most people's minimal threshold for basic addition. Whether that same child can work through sheets of numbers disconnected from any context seems beside the point. Why not let the child and his teacher together decide how best to express his talents? Why not have multiple tests that capture the multiple ways of knowing?
By the way, one might ask how we ended up with these ridiculous tests in the first place. The answer is data. Substantial empirical evidence shows that the ability to rip off the multiples of thirteen at breakneck speed correlates with future success, i.e. educational attainment and job performance. That evidence isn't the issue. The point is that the evidence has been misinterpreted. The fact that children that can do math faster, ultimately prove to make more money does not imply that improving any given child's speed will make her a better doctor, ecologist, or writer. The children who were faster without the training will still be faster with the training and they'll still earn the most coin. In the meantime, rather than learning anything useful, students have been working on speed.
As an analogy, consider that height correlates pretty darn well with economic success too, by some measures as well as IQ. Having our children devote hours each day to timed math tests won't be any more a boon to their future success than would be having them devote the same amount of time to improving their posture. And, the latter activity has the added advantage that down the road it might reduce health care costs.
Finally, the All Children Moving Ahead Act must promote innovative, creative thinking and collaboration rather than individual test taking skills. No one that I know of, whether they work in business, government, or a non profit, whether they run an assembly line for a manufacturing firm, write operas, or try to cure diabetes spends any part of the day taking timed standardized tests. Why then create all of these pressures for students to perform well at a task that has almost no relevance to their later, loftier pursuits?
The truth is that the ability of the next generation of Americans to meet the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the day won't rest on how well they individually did on their SATs. It will rest on the diversity of their collective intellectual skills and on their ability to leverage their skills for the betterment of all.