A bet on No Child Left Behind
This was written by Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute,
a non-profit organization created in 1986 to broaden the discussion
about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income
workers. This appeared on the institute’s website.
By Richard Rothstein
Diane Ravitch
is a glass half-empty kind of gal, while I suffer from excessive
Panglossian tendencies. In the spring of 2007, we made a bet. The payoff
is dinner at the River Café, at the foot of Brooklyn Heights,
overlooking New York harbor and the Manhattan skyline, tucked neatly
under the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Four and a half years ago, we surveyed the damage being done to American education by NCLB, the No Child Left Behind iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:
* conversion of struggling elementary schools into test-prep factories;
* narrowing of curriculum so that disadvantaged children who most
need enrichment would be denied lessons in social studies, the sciences,
the arts and music, even recess and exercise, so that every available
minute of the school day could be devoted to drill for tests of basic
skills in math and reading;
* demoralization of the best teachers, now prohibited from engaging
children in discovery and instead required to follow pre-set
instructional scripts aligned with low-quality tests;
* and the boredom and terror of young children who no longer looked
forward to school but instead anticipated another day of rote exercises
and practice testing designed to increase scores by a point or two.
Diane morosely predicted
that, despite this evident disaster, NCLB would certainly be
reauthorized with its destructive testing and accountability provisions
intact. After all, she moaned, it had the support of elites
from both parties, the Washington think tanks, the big foundations, and
the editorial boards of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
other influential media outlets. No serious opposition was visible. How
could the law not be continued? Indeed, she worried, its supporters were
so removed from the reality of classrooms, so impervious to evidence, they could well decide to intensify requirements that schools chase phony test score gains to the exclusion of all else.
I smugly responded, “not a chance.” The NCLB accountability system is so self-evidently calamitous that
its principles will never survive congressional reauthorization. Don’t
pay attention to elite opinion, I said. The internal contradictions of a
law that orders all children nationwide to perform above-average are so
explosive that any attempts to “fix” them (as policymakers were then
vowing to do) would never be able to claim a congressional majority, no
matter how obstinate NCLB’s supporters might be.
For example, I said to Diane, consider the law’s absurd demand to
prohibit the normal variability of human ability so that all children,
from the unusually gifted to the mentally retarded, must achieve above
the same “challenging” level of proficiency by 2014. The only way states could fulfill this requirement would be to define “challenging
proficiency” at such a low level that even the least talented of
students could meet it. NCLB enthusiasts would then cry “foul” and
insist that a reauthorized law allow Congress to dictate a national
proficiency standard.
But this, in turn, would make the law unacceptable to supporters
who had gone along in 2002 only because they felt assured that federal
intrusion into state control of education would be limited. Or if,
instead, NCLB proponents attempted to mollify critics by giving schools
more flexibility — for example, by permitting them to escape
condemnation for not meeting impossible academic benchmarks by citing
other measures, like attendance rates or parent satisfaction — the NCLB
enthusiasts would balk at this backdoor way of “leaving children
behind.”
There is no way out of this impasse, I assured Diane. NCLB will
limp along past its 2007 expiration date, with no possible map for
reauthorization, with temporary annual continuing resolutions while
proponents fruitlessly attempt to conceive of ways to climb out of the
holes into which they had dug themselves.
Eventually, I told Diane, by 2016, we’ll still be requiring all
children to be proficient by 2014, and declaring virtually every school
in the country to be failing. At some point, I predicted, some secretary
of education would have no choice but to issue waivers from the law’s
requirements to every state in the country while the law itself remained
on the books, an embarrassing monument to policy foolishness.
Everything I predicted has now come to pass, and I should be able
to call Diane’s hand and collect my dinner at the River Café. But I’m
afraid I must concede. I won the bet on technical points, but Diane won
on the merits. The glass really is half-empty, maybe more so.
What I had not anticipated was that a secretary of education (Arne Duncan, it turned out to be) would use his authority to grant waivers to
states (now all of them) unable to meet NCLB’s requirements,
conditioning the waivers on states’ agreements to adopt accountability
conditions that are even more absurd, more unworkable, more fanciful
than those in the law itself. Mr. Duncan’s philosophy has been revealed:
if a policy fails, the solution should be to do more of it.
So the secretary is now kicking the ball down the road. States will
be excused from making all children proficient by 2014 if they agree
instead to make all children “college-ready” by 2020. If NCLB’s testing
obsession didn’t suffice to distinguish good schools from failing ones,
states can be excused from loss of funds if they instead use student test scores to distinguish good teachers from bad ones.
Without any reauthorization of NCLB, Mr. Duncan will now use his waiver
authority to demand, in effect, even more test-prep, more drill, more
unbalanced curricula, more misidentification of success and failure,
more demoralization of good teachers, and more needless stress for young
children.
The Obama administration is presenting its waiver proposal as the grant of new “flexibility” to states. Yes, perhaps. If states agree to implement
Mr. Duncan’s favored reforms of evaluating teachers by student test
scores and expanding charter schools, and if states promise to meet even
more impossible “college ready” standards established by the federal
government, the secretary will let them figure out on their own how to
do it.
Some Republicans have complained. The secretary, they say, cannot do an end run around Congress by implementing his own more
extreme version of No Child Left Behind, when he has been unsuccessful
in getting Congress to enact these very same proposals into the law
itself.
But these critics, most of whom supported NCLB in 2002, have only
themselves to blame. They initially wrote into the law the right of a
secretary to issue waivers based only on his or her own personal
fantasies about what constitutes a state pledge to increase (sic) the
quality of instruction and improve academic achievement – to be precise,
in NCLB’s Title IX, Part D, Sections 9401(b)(1)(i) and (ii).
And Arne Duncan has gotten away with this before. Here, Democrats should be ashamed. In February 2009, when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
(the ARRA, or “stimulus” bill) was enacted, Republicans charged that
the law had little to do with job creation or economic growth, but was
only a subterfuge for the Obama administration to make social policy
without congressional debate.
Mostly, the Republican charge had no merit but in the case of
education policy, it hits the mark. The secretary has been distributing
more than $4 billion in ARRA grants only to states that entered and won
his Race to the Top competition by promising to raise standards even higher than those unachievable under NCLB.
These so-called stimulus funds are not distributed to states with the highest unemployment rates but to those that outbid others
by promising to establish data systems to evaluate teachers based on
students’ math and reading scores, be most ruthless in firing teachers
and principals in schools with low scores, and replace them with the
most rapid expansion of charter schools.
The Duncan policies, like NCLB, will eventually implode. But the
damage being done to American public education has now gone on for so
long that it will have enduring effects. Schools will not soon be able
to implement a holistic education to disadvantaged children.
Disillusioned and demoralized teachers who have abandoned the profession
or have retired are now being rapidly replaced by a new generation of
drill sergeants, well-trained in the techniques of “data-driven
instruction.” This cannot easily be undone.
Some state education officials have murmured intents to refuse the
Duncan waiver conditions, and dare him then to withhold federal
education dollars. But there is little indication that these officials
will follow through, or that others will join the resistance. Most
states will meekly apply for the Duncan waivers. Courage is in short
supply among education and policy leaders.
So Diane, start perusing the menu. My victory on points is to no avail. I owe you dinner.
-0-
No comments:
Post a Comment