NCLB: Bad for teachers, bad for kids

Miller’s reauthorization proposal makes a bad law even worse.
By Jack Gerson

Suppose that you lived in a country where social inequality was growing at a staggering rate—a rate so great that corporate executives’ compensation packages were now routinely hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of times their employees’ average pay. Suppose, further, that in this land the quality of students’ schools and, accordingly, the level of student achievement was highly correlated with average income level in each school’s attendance area. Next, suppose that this nation’s low achieving schools (i.e., overwhelmingly those in low-income areas) were resource starved, overcrowded, dirty, unsafe, and in disrepair. And, finally, suppose that the extreme overload and consequent burnout in these low achieving schools was so great that most urban school districts were spending vast sums to find and recruit new teachers, most of whom would be gone in less than five years, increasing the instability of already unstable schools and neighborhoods.

What would you do to turn this situation around? To ask the question is to answer it. You’d provide:

• Increased funding to the lowachieving schools that really need it.

• Clean, safe, adequately staffed facilities.

• Intimate, individualized learning in small classes.

• Multicultural curricula: teacherdeveloped with parent/student/community involvement.

• Authentic learning, authentic assessment.

• Schools as full-service community centers: on-site child care, health clinics, early childhood centers, and adult education at every site.

• Incentives to make teaching a career, such as new teacher mentoring, team teaching, adequate preparation time for all teachers (and especially for new teachers), and adequate compensation packages for teachers.

• More freedom for teachers to teach broadly and deeply and for students to express and develop their full, creative potentials.

• And, perhaps most of all, emphasize the need to narrow the social inequality and income gaps. But right here, in our country, the situation is every bit what I described in the opening paragraph. But the remedy prescribed by our business “philanthropeneurs” and our political leaders is exactly the opposite of what’s needed. They’ve imposed a program that:

• Transfers a massive amount of funds from cash-strapped schools and districts to for-profit companies.

• Forces schools to focus narrowly on two subjects—remedial math and remedial reading. Consequently, innercity schools around the country are eliminating electives, closing libraries, and abandoning enrichment programs.

• Forces teachers to narrow their teaching to squeeze in the boatload of subject matter “standards” tested by their subject’s standardized test. Teachers universally complain that there’s no time provided for developing concepts and authentic learning—just time to cram in mountains of disconnected facts and skills.

• Encourages “teaching to the test”—strategies for guessing the right multiple choice answer, rather than encouraging true thinking and learning— and encourages scripted teaching.

• Destabilizes already battered inner-city areas by closing down schools and reopening new schools, only to have the new schools also be punished and then closed by NCLB. This merrygo- round leads nowhere but down.

• Further destabilizes inner-city schools and neighborhoods by accelerating teacher burnout and, consequently, teacher turnover. Teachers whose kids don’t do well on standardized tests are punished—bigger classes, less preparation time, more mind-numbing “professional development.”

• Treats teaching like an entry-level job into the business of education. Force out veteran teachers and hire an army of new teachers from elite schools, the majority of who will tell you in advance that they will be out of the classroom in two years.

This destructive program is imposed and enforced by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which has made federal funding for public education contingent on the states holding teachers and schools accountable for “achievement” as measured by student performance on standardized math and reading tests, with the putative intention of narrowing and eventually (by 2014) totally eliminating the “achievement gap” between students in affluent suburban schools and students in innercity schools. The law stipulates punitive measures for schools that don’t measure up. These schools, invariably already cash and resource starved, must use some of their federal Title I funding to pay for private after-school tutoring programs (usually a waste of students’ time, but a big source of profits for tutoring giants like Kaplan and Sylvan), while teachers at these schools must put in extra time for “professional development” (usually a waste of teachers’ time, but a big profit source for educational consulting companies). Schools that fail to measure up for five years can be closed down, put under direct state control, or converted to charter schools or to traditional private schools.

The NCLB legislation is up for reauthorization. The House Labor and Education Committee, chaired by California Democrat George Miller, proposes revising NCLB in ways that could make it even worse than the current legislation. Worst of all, Miller’s draft calls for merit pay based on high stakes testing: basing teachers’ pay on their students’ achievement on standardized tests. This would deepen the harm already done by the NCLB-led fetish on high-stakes testing.

Fortunately, NCLB’s harmful effects are beginning to get the attention they warrant. For example, two of the forces behind the move for national standards, New York University education professor Diane Ravitch and Fordham Foundation President Chester Finn, have in recent months done an about face. Ravitch and Finn now blame NCLB and high-stakes testing for the erosion of liberal arts education and for emphasizing rote learning over creativity. Their reversal of course has been very public: They’ve announced their new views in a recently published book, in Education Week columns, and in nationally distributed op-ed pieces.

Perhaps the most disturbing accounts of the effects of high-stakes testing are chronicled in Linda Perlstein’s book Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Perlstein spent a full year at Tyler Elementary, a low-income school in the mainly affluent Anne Arundel (Maryland) County school district, and she saw a lot:

That children from well-off families and children from poor ones have divergent school experiences is nothing new. What is significant is that the disparity continues in spite of (and in some ways because of) a movement designed to stop it. The practice of focusing on the tested subjects of reading and math at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum is far more prevalent where children are poor and minority. “You’re not going to be a scientist if you can’t read,” a superintendent once told me in defense of a school’s pared-down curriculum. Well, you can’t be a scientist—one of the most common career goals of Tyler Heights’ graduating fifth-graders—if you never learn science either. You can’t be a lawyer if you never learn to think critically, you can’t be a computer programmer if you never learn to solve problems, you can’t be a professor if you never learn to research, and you can’t be an author if you don’t learn how to write.

There’s no doubt that inner-city public schools need to do a much better job. But that’s not the fault of the kids, and it’s not the fault of their teachers, and it’s only made worse by punishing kids, teachers, and schools via the NCLB accountability and privatization Frankenstein. California teachers have launched a major initiative to defeat the Miller committee’s draft NCLB reauthorization legislation. It’s in all our interests to promote this to the fullest.

Published in United Teacher Volume XXXVII, Number 2, October 12, 2007