In her confirmation hearings, Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings expressed her desire to fix the No Child Left Behind law, but also stated, ‘We must stay true to the sound principles of leaving no child behind.’ This will be difficult because the ‘sound principles’ are nowhere to be found. Consider the following seven deadly absurdities of the law currently.
1. The No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) uses the phrase ‘scientifically based research’ 111 times and demands such research from educational researchers, but no scientifically based research-or any research–supports the law’s mandates. There is no research that supports NCLB’s contention that the way to improve schools is to test every child every year and to fail schools and districts that do no make the required Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). In fact, research argues against the use of high-stakes testing as an instrument of school reform.
2. NCLB lacks research support because NCLB depends solely on punishment. As schools fail to make arbitrary AYP the law imposes punitive, increasingly harsh sanctions. The law is in the tradition of ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves.’
3. Even those who think punishment can motivate people would never use it as NCLB does. It punishes the entire school for the failures of the few, often the very few. If a school’s special education students fail to make AYP, the whole school fails. If a school’s English language learners fail to make AYP the whole school fails. If 95% of any group fails to show up on test day, the whole school fails. NCLB requires schools to report test score data by various student categories— gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc. Most schools have 37 such categories (California has 46). Schools thus have 37 opportunities to fail, only one way to succeed.
4. All students must be proficient in reading, math, and science by 2014. In his 2003 presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, Robert Linn, projected it would take 61 years, 66 years, and 166 years, respectively, to get fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders to the proficient level in math. Alas, Linn’s projections are wildly optimistic because he reported national data, not data disaggregated by ethnicity. In the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 5 percent of African-American eighth graders and 7 percent of Hispanics were proficient in math. Only 37 percent of whites, 43 percent of Asians, and 15 percent of Native Americans reached this plateau. At least one author has written that the 100% proficient requirement is so irrational that it might be unconstitutional.
5. As a consequence of #3 and #4 above, California projects that by the deadline year of 2014, NCLB will label 99 percent of its schools ‘failing.’ California students don’t do all that well on tests, but Minnesota is one of the nation’s highest scoring states. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, only 6 of the 41 participating countries outscored it in mathematics and only one of 41 attained a higher science score. Yet Minnesota projects that 2014 will find 80 percent of its schools wanting. Most states have been afraid to see what their projections look like.
6. Any school that fails to make AYP for two consecutive years must offer all students the option to transfer to a ‘successful’ school. Thus, if a school’s special education students fail to make AYP one year and its English language learners fail the next year, the school must offer all students the ‘choice option’ in spite of the fact that the school worked for the other 36 student categories. In cities, the choice option is a farce. This year, Chicago had 200,000 students eligible, but only 500 spaces for them. In 2003-2004, 8,000 New York City students chose to transfer. After taking flak from principals whose schools received these students, the city deliberately flouted the law, permitting only 1,000 transfers. Thus far, the Department of Education has not responded. It has also happened that children leaving a ‘failing’ school were actually enrolling in a lower scoring ‘successful’ school. If a school’s special education students or English Language Learner students fail to make AYP, the school fails even if it is doing a wonderful job with all remaining categories.
7. Schools alone cannot accomplish what NCLB requires. This seventh absurdity is the big one. Many observers have noted that American schools are always failing because so much is expected of them. NCLB expects even more-it expects schools, all by themselves, to close the achievement gap between affluent and poor, majority and minority. This is ridiculous. The gap appears before school-one study found that the three-year-olds of professional mothers used more words when interacting with their mothers than mothers on welfare used in interacting with their three-year-olds. That’s right, three year old kids in one group used more words than adults in another group. After all, if one assumes a six hour school day and a 180 day school years, then between birth and age 18 children spend only 9 percent of their lives in schools. Family and community factors such as poverty affect achievement. Poor children enter school well behind their middle class peers, and while research finds they learn the same amount during the school year, they lose that learning over the summer and they fall farther and farther behind. Critics, of course, blame the schools for what happens in the months the schools are closed.
There are other absurdities–for instance, the contention that students not ‘proficient’ are ‘left behind’ presents a false dichotomy. If the threshold for ‘proficient’ is, say, a test score of 80, then a child who scores 79 is ‘left behind’-but the reader can no doubt get the picture, from just the seven sillinesses above.
Some of us have always seen NCLB as yet another Bush administration Orwellian Double Speak program, right up there with Clear Skies, Clean Waters, and Healthy Forests. It aims to increase the use of vouchers, increase the privatization of public schools, transfer large sums of public funds to the private section, reduce the size of the public sector, and weaken or destroy the teachers unions (two Democratic power bases). It is certainly true that the primary beneficiaries of the law to date are the testing companies, the test preparation companies, and companies that provide tutoring. In Virginia where I live, supplemental educational services are being provided by 34 companies based not only in Virginia, but New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Louisiana, California, Massachusetts, Texas, and the District of Columbia. No Child Left Behind is the educational equivalent of the Iraq war. Bush now wants to extend it into the high school grades, a process analogous to invading Iran.
Gerald W. Bracey is an associate professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia and an Associate of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan. His most recent book is Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U. S.: Second Edition (Heinemann, September 2004).
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