POINT OF VIEW

No Child Left Behind: A Foolish Race Into the Past

By David Marshak

According to Mr. Marshak, the No Child Left Behind Act, rather than preparing all students for the future, reverts to the outmoded practices of the Industrial Age -- a narrow curriculum and the sorting of students through standardized testing.

GEORGE W. BUSH deserves significant credit for one policy achievement in education. No Child Left Behind, his stated goal, has become the title of the education bill he signed into law in January 2002. President Bush is the first American President who has affirmed so clearly that every single child deserves a high-quality education -- and that no child should be victimized by malignant or benign neglect.

The President has articulated a new goal for American public schools. But despite all the hype emanating from Washington, nothing else in schools has really changed, except for a lot more testing to come, a list of prospective penalties, and a sparse handful of dollars per student. And the intensification of standardized testing -- the key tool that President Bush and his Democratic allies (first and foremost Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who really should know better) will employ to achieve their goal -- comes not from the future but from the past.

The public school system that we have today was constructed during the first two decades of the 20th century. Industrial efficiency was the new, cutting-edge technology of the time, and public schools were shaped to fit industrial models of efficient production. One key function for schools was sorting children according to their perceived abilities and encouraging many to drop out and go to work as unskilled laborers. And let's be clear about this function: public schools built on this industrial model were designed to leave many children behind, so they would drop out and go to work in what we now call low-skill jobs.

These "industrial schools" were structured to maximize competition between students and to minimize the depth of relationships between students and their teachers. Children entered school and moved through the grades with their agemates. Even when research in developmental psychology described how children grow and develop at different and variable rates, we still kept age-grading as a key structural element of schooling. Age-grading encourages competition between students and rewards quicker development rather than supporting the value and potential of every child. Those who develop sooner are rewarded; those who develop more slowly or differently, even though they may have great abilities and gifts, are punished. Age-graded schools would label Albert Einstein learning disabled and consign him to a career in special education.

In elementary schools, children move from one teacher to the next every year. Every June, we trash a year's worth of relationships built between children and their teacher, and we throw away all the knowledge the teacher has gained about what each child needs and can do. Each year, we tell every child and teacher to start over again -- even though we know that the teacher's knowledge of and caring for the child is the single most important variable in determining the school success of many children, particularly those who are most vulnerable.

In our secondary schools, students move from one teacher to the next every 50 minutes or, with block periods, perhaps every 100 minutes. Students typically have five or six teachers at once; sometimes, they have five teachers in one semester and another five the next. A majority of high school students pass their high school years without developing an important relationship with even a single adult in their school. A decade ago, when hundreds of New York City high school students were asked if they knew anyone who had graduated from college, most of them said no -- although all of their teachers were college graduates. We dump teens into industrially configured high schools, and then we complain that they are disconnected and alienated from adults. But it is we who abandoned them first.

The Bush/Kennedy testing blitzkrieg won't change any of this. It doesn't address the key issue in moving from an industrial model of schooling to a postindustrial model that integrates personalization, academic and personal success for every child, and both common academic standards for all students and individualized standards for each student. Such a movement requires that we change the structure and culture of public schools simultaneously.

Ten years ago, I thought that we might be serious as a nation about beginning this work. In 1988 the U.S. Department of Labor and the American Society for Training and Development conducted a study in which they interviewed hundreds of employers from all shapes and sizes of companies and organizations. The study was published as the book Workplace Basics: The Essential Skills Employers Want. In 1991 the Labor Department published another report of the same kind, What Work Requires of Schools, a study by the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). Both studies acknowledged that basic academic skills, such as reading, writing, and mathematics, were central for student success in school and adult life. But both studies included additional categories of competence and knowledge as being equal in significance to traditional academics: speaking and listening skills, problem-solving skills, creative thinking skills, knowing-how-to-learn skills, collaboration and organizational-effectiveness skills, and personal-management skills.

Both of these reports looked from the present, around 1990, toward the future, specifically in terms of economic life but inevitably spreading out to include a wider array of human capacities, including citizenship, personal relationships, creativity, and self-expression. But during the last decade, as we moved from stating the need for standards, assessment, and accountability to implementing these objectives, politicians and other policy makers abandoned the needs of the present and the future and slithered back down into the comfortable, the known, the seemingly risk-free agenda and tools of the industrial paradigm -- the paradigm of the past. Bill Clinton, Louis Gerstner, Richard Riley, the governors of most states, and now George W. Bush and Rod Paige -- all have completely missed the opportunity to respond even to the needs of the present, let alone the future. Just look at the Bush/Kennedy curriculum: it consists of reading and math and then maybe science. And the only measure of accountability that is supposed to matter is standardized tests. This is a giant step backward toward the "new ideas" of 1940 or even 1920.

There may just be good news in all of this foolishness after all, although it will come only with enormous damage both to large numbers of children and teens and to great numbers of their teachers. The Bush/Kennedy testing regime -- and just to be accurate, let me note that the responsibility for the coming disaster belongs as well to the vast majority of senators (87) and representatives (381) who voted for NCLB -- takes an already simplistic idea of limited usefulness and amps it up to absurdity. It sets in stone the already strong but silly notion that standardized test scores are all that matter in schooling. It puts a standardized test gun to the head of every child, every educator, and every parent in the nation. It guarantees pain and suffering for millions of children and teens whose cognitive and learning styles don't readily fit the narrow structures of standardized testing. It places enormous new demands on most states to pay for the development and administration of new tests. Finally, it seems likely that the standard for yearly improvement set by the No Child Left Behind Act will be impossible for many schools to meet -- certainly many bad schools but also many schools that serve middle-class and upper-middle-class children and are currently held in high esteem by the parents whose children attend them.

Here's what may happen. First, test development may generate some significant chaos and anger throughout the states, as state budgets are distorted and stretched to pay for the new tests. Implementing tests in 2005-06 may add to this climate of anger, because actually giving and scoring tests is an even more expensive proposition. But the real response -- and the rebellion -- may come from middle-class and upper-middle-class parents, as they see the schools they judge to be at least adequate but more likely good or even excellent increasingly focus their efforts on test preparation and test scores. And the rebellion may deepen and spread, as these middle-class and upper-middle-class parents see the quality and richness of their children's schooling decline before their eyes. Less of the arts, less social studies, less physical education, fewer studies based on children's interests and curiosities, more drill, more drill, more test prep. More frustration, more boredom, more anger.

Within a few short years of the implementation of this obsession with standardized tests, enough parents may well have had enough to topple the entire Bush/Kennedy edifice -- and probably the whole standards and testing model with it.

Of course, another possible scenario is this: to get NCLB passed, the President had to allow each state to use its own tests. Since each state sets its own passing "cut" scores on its own tests, the states may just lower the bar for passing so much that only a few schools will fail -- at least for a number of years. And then the big scary stick of NCLB will become a light feather that changes nothing. Indeed, a few states have already begun to move toward this option.

In either case, the nation will have wasted an opportunity to change its schools so that every child will receive a good education.

The bulk of our culture is already in or racing toward postindustrial forms. For schools, this will mean personalization, small schools, strong relationships developed over several years, common goals for all students, individual goals for every student, and many and varied uses of new communication technologies in ways that are intensely student-centered.

Look at how the postindustrial energies have taken shape in the world of work. Postindustrial organizations, particularly effective and honest corporations and nonprofits, focus on motivating workers by giving them responsibility and authority and by valuing their knowledge and skills, that is, essentially by treating them as professionals. In contrast, standardized testing regimes, because they are simplistic industrial forms, treat teachers as assembly-line workers and rely on simplistic rewards and punishments. And they treat students not as individuals, as unique human beings, but as interchangeable parts, almost automatons. It's not that standardized testing has no role to play in the postindustrial school. Rather, the role of standardized testing is limited. It constitutes one kind of assessment tool among many that need to be employed to measure fairly and accurately the learning and capabilities of a diverse population of students.

The tragic irony of the 1990s and of the present moment is that we have the knowledge in our culture to create schools that will educate every child with respect and to good ends. Indeed, we have exemplary schools all over the nation that are doing so right now. None of them rely on the Bush/Kennedy testing model. These good schools all have high standards, and they have accountability. But they also respect and value the inevitable diversity of the human population. And everything that happens in them starts with personal long-term relationships between adults and children.

As a culture, we also know what the agenda for schooling for the future should be. David Thornburg, in The New Basics: Education and the Future of Work in the Telematic Age, includes the following categories of understandings and skills: digital-age literacy (scientific, mathematical, technological, visual, information, cultural, and global), inventive thinking (ability to manage complexity, creativity, risk-taking, higher-order thinking), effective communication (teaming, personal and social responsibility, communication skills), and high productivity (skills for prioritizing, planning and managing for results, effective use of real-world tools). The Tahoma Public School District in Maple Valley, Washington, near Seattle, is a district with particularly wise leadership. It offers this list of understandings and skills: self-directed learning, collaboration, effective communication, contributors to the community, quality production, and complex thinking.

You don't have to agree with every item on either of these lists to understand that both would lead us toward more effective schools for the future -- and not only in terms of the workplace and the economy, but also in preparing responsible, competent citizens. Both Workplace Basics and What Work Requires of Schools, now more than a decade old, offer a similar kind of agenda for schools. In contrast, the Bush/Kennedy NCLB races foolishly into the past of industrial social forms. It will surely be a disaster, though we can hope that it will so discredit the industrial paradigm of schooling that we can finally let it go -- and begin to move ahead. Unfortunately, a lot of children and teens and teachers and parents will get hurt in the process.

PDK Home | Site Map

Last modified 28 January 2004
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0311ma2.htm
PDK International respects your privacy
© 2003 David Marshak