New Zealand’s (conservative) National government has spent the last year trying to implement “National Standards” here. Which is New Zealand’s answer to No Child Left Behind. Last week 240 schools released a statement refusing to administer the standardized tests. It has since come out that an unnamed official in the Ministry of Education has refused to initiate disciplinary action against them.  Somehow I can’t visualize similar mass rebellion occurring in the US.

Why Did Obama Continue Bush’s Education Policies?

It was a great disappointment to many of my American friends – parents, teachers, principals, child psychiatrist and psychologists, and everyone else concerned with the welfare of children and future society – when Obama decided earlier this year to continue Bush’s NCLB policy. The essence of NCLB is benchmark testing in academic skills for every child – with funding penalties for schools whose students fail to meet benchmarks and merit raises for teachers whose students do.

NCLB has been an unmitigated disaster in the US. Besides failing to increase reading scores, it has succeeded in driving hundreds of gifted teachers out of education into other careers and totally destroying the morale of those who remain. The bottom line is that any “system” that teaches reading has to acknowledge that children have all different learning styles – which makes individualized attention essential. Teacher time in a classroom of 35+ students is a precious commodity. And requiring teachers to teach all 35 to pass a standardized test (which in no way equates with teaching them to read) leaves virtually no time for individual attention.

The Real Agenda Behind NCLB

I, for one, don’t believe Bush and the Republicans ever intended to reform education. I think they made their real agenda – a major assault on public education and the teachers unions – pretty clear. A lot of Bush’s cronies are making big bucks off the major boost NCLB gives school privatization (i.e. taxpayer funded charter schools and school vouchers) – to say nothing of the millions of dollars of teaching materials geared towards the standardized tests. More corporate welfare, in other words. As with the prison industrial complex, more private business interests enriching themselves at the public trough at taxpayer expense.

Presumably the same corporate interests twisted Obama’s arm – in March he talked about doing away with NCLB. If he really wanted to reform education, surely some of his advisors would turn him onto a well-researched educational tool that’s been around for centuries. Which studies show is far more effective (and more economical) in improving academic achievement than computer based instruction, reduced class size, or extended school days.

In fact, I find the whole notion pretty fanciful that our government and corporate leaders really intend for education to instill academic skills. Everybody knows that the main purpose of American schools is to prepare young people for their assigned role in class society. Average and below average students are taught blind obedience to authority, along with a high tolerance of the deadly tedium of the factory floor. While high achievers and private school students are taught the capitalist virtues of ruthless competitiveness and rugged individualism. All this has to take place in an environment where as little real learning as possible takes place. An educated populace is simply too difficult to manage in a crypto-fascist oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. They simply wouldn’t buy the lies put out by the federal government and the mainstream media.

A Modest Proposal

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say we did want to revolutionize US schools to teach basic academic skills to the majority of American children. Exactly how would we go about this, given steadily declining education funding and atrocious pupil-to-teacher ratios?

Based on decades of outcome studies – and the wealth of standardized training manuals (both for teachers and the Peer Tutors themselves) – I myself would go for Peer Teaching or Peer Tutoring – a model in which students coach each other in academic skills.

I refer people to a very interesting 1999 study by Carey Olmstead, available free as a PDF file at http://tinyurl.com/29at4dz. As Olmstead’s research reveals, Peer Tutoring ensures students get immediate, non-threatening clarification of information they don’t understand. They also get daily individualized attention. Meanwhile the tutors reinforce their own knowledge and skills, build their self-confidence, and develop a sense of responsibility. Students of any age and at-risk students are as capable of serving as Peer Tutors as any other students. Moreover the benefits of serving as Peer Tutors can be phenomenal for learning and behavior disordered students.

Although studies show Peer Tutoring to be highly effective, it has proven extremely difficult – for mainly political reasons – for individual teachers to implement without the support of their principals and school boards. Thus my modest proposal: scrap mandatory benchmark testing and give the merit raises to teachers who implement Peer Tutoring – an approach that actually works.

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