No Child Left Behind Waivers and Ed Reform's Failure
I read the headlines today that President Obama has granted NCLB waivers to several states, including my home state of Massachusetts. Nothing to get excited about, since the prez insists that the waived states have plans about "standards and accountability." In other words, more of the same.
One of my students summed up the failure of education reform, explaining why he left high school: "I felt I was being prepared to take orders rather than give them."
Now, one might write off the words of one high-school dropout (though I didn't), but I will tell you that I'm seeing variations of this sentiment from more and more students all the time.
They are, in my opinion, right. Here's why.
As I've said before, any education reform that doesn't start with giving everyone what private school students enjoy (including the top-notch tutoring, counseling, and rehab programs my private school classmates were able to afford) is fundamentally unserious. (Though it is fun to listen to the "no excuses" crowd come up with excuses for why small class size and individual attention are pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic goals. Funny, creating a national testing infrastructure was doable...)
The primacy of standardized testing in k-12 public education is particularly worrisome.
Why don't rich people want standardized tests determining everything from how teachers are paid to whether students will graduate? Because they know that teaching is as much art as science and that most of the content you learn in high school is ultimately trivia.
I intend no disrespect to anybody who teaches high school with that remark. I simply mean that the most important stuff you learn in high school has nothing to do with curriculum content and everything to do with ways of thinking.
And teachers are, ultimately, more than content-delivery systems. If all teachers do is deliver content, you don't need them--you can do everything with "software solutions." (This is where ed reform is headed, if you ask me. Imagine the cost savings!) For example: I had a teacher whose class was very rigorous. I have no doubt that I would have scored well on a standardized test at the end of his course. He was also a bully, tempermental and capricious, whose greatest lesson to his young charges was the futility of standing up against abuses of power. So was he a good teacher or not?
Ask anybody about the best teacher they ever had. I do this all the time, and almost to a one, students mention someone who saw their potential, who believed in them, who pushed them to be better than they thought they could be. In other words, for most of us, the biggest impact a teacher has is personal rather than curriculum-related. This stuff can't be measured by a standardized test.
As you might expect, the rich are not clamoring to have their children tested two weeks a year. Nor do they want their teachers evaluated via standardized tests. Presumably they trust that they are paying for administrators who will be able to evaluate both the art and science of teaching.
Ten percent of students in the US are in private schools. They are being taught to think critically. They enjoy rich extracurriculars. They have teachers who are not straightjacketed by standardized tests. They will be the bosses of tomorrow.
And the ninety percent in public schools will be taking their orders.
I really think it's time for a critical examination of education reform. It's been great for people who make tests. For students, though, not so much.
The Massachusetts Education Reform law passed in 1993. We are now living in the world that ed reform created. And yet they still insist it needs more reforming. Why is that? If nearly two decades of education reform have failed to achieve the desired results, why do we still accept the pronouncements of the reformers as fact? Who else gets to remake an entire system in their image, fail to make substantive positive changes, and remain a respected authority on what needs to be done?
The pendulum has swung far enough. Those of us with children in public schools, and those of us who work in public schools, and those of us who believe in education as a pathway to justice and class mobility have to speak up against the testing agenda. They've had two decades to try this crap. It's not working. Let's try something else.
