The Road Less Traveled

The federal journey into public education has been a long and winding road.  The federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) is actually just the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which dates all the way back to 1965.   In the years since its initial passage, the ESEA road has taken a number of turns, being reauthorized many times, in various forms, under various names.  For example, the 1994 reauthorization was called the “Improving America’s Schools Act.”

In the past, ESEA had been seen as a positive, supportive law, designed to help local school districts provide equitable and adequate education to children who face challenging and expensive hurdles to learning.  This included students with disabilities, poor children, and children whose first language is not English.  About five years ago, ESEA reached a fork in the road, and the decision was made to go down the very different NCLB path.

The driving element that shaped this new path was high-stakes accountability based on inexpensive standardized tests and with it came an extremely narrow focus on low-level knowledge and skills.  In addition, NCLB replaces decision-making by those closest to the students in the school community (such as teachers, parents, school boards, and site-based councils) with rigid federal government control.

The NCLB path has been fraught with numerous unintended consequences.  Most fundamentally, NCLB does not address the needs of the whole child and reduces the guiding purpose of public education from developing effective and contributing citizens to an unending quest to increase scores on tests which do not assess what we value most in a democratic society – things like critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, effective and persuasive communication, cooperation, perseverance, caring, respect, and appreciation for diversity.  

These qualities empower citizens to thrive in a democratic society and in our complex, ever-changing world, and they cannot be measured on the easy-to-score paper-pencil tests that are the centerpiece of NCLB policy.  The good news, however, is that they can be demonstrated with 21st century authentic, real-world, performance assessments, and our schools can be encouraged to foster them through rich, meaningful, empowering learning experiences in caring, high-participation learning environments.  The bad news is that NCLB’s focus on once-a-year, multiple-choice tests primarily in only two subjects actually works against this kind of learner-empowering approach.  

In other words, the aspirations of Senator Kennedy and NCLB’s other architects for our public schools “to guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class education” have, on the ground, deteriorated into one reading score and one math score per year on low-level paper-pencil tests, what NCLB’s advocates call “student achievement” – as if there were no other indicators of student learning and performance.  In reality, then, NCLB has reduced “world class education” to mean a once-per-year score on a low-level reading and math test.  

Why this profound reduction?  Because NCLB’s accountability provisions mean that the test scores themselves have become the motivators and driving force of the system, and because educators, students, and their schools face stiff consequences if these predetermined test-score standards are not met every year.    Hence, “education for life” has been reduced to “preparation for tests” in too many U.S. schools, and the teachers in those schools are witnessing the serious de-motivation of their students and colleagues as a result.  The more they are compelled to focus on “producing” scores, the less time they have to focus on the learning that they feel will most benefit their students in the long run.

And, tragically, because the pressure to teach to the test is the greatest in low-income schools that depend on federal Title 1 funding, NCLB has the effect of actually widening the gap between the students at these schools and their more affluent counterparts at schools that are not dependent on NCLB’s Title 1 funding.  As Professors Dennis Shirley and Andrew Hargreaves at Boston College’s School of Education put it, “the achievement gap in tested performance co-exists with a widening learning gap between functional basics for the poor and working class and an enriched and enlarged set of learning experiences for the privileged in the suburbs—where schools are free of many testing constraints and can (and do) fly far beyond the standards.”  And while testing and publishing companies have seen their profits soar based on repackaging standardized tests (that have changed little since the 1950’s) and creating a multitude of test prep materials for these tests, the children whose education has been narrowed and lowered have not similarly benefited.

Upon passage of the law, some educators immediately expressed concern regarding the potential for NCLB to create this sort of curricular segregation, but many chose to be characteristically optimistic, hoping the law’s focus on educating all students might bring the attention, and thereby resources, needed to improve educational equity and adequacy.  However, rather than promoting equity and closing gaps, we can now see that NCLB is actually making the disparities worse.  We should all be very troubled that the very youth who most need a rich, deep, meaningful, empowering education are the ones most likely to receive a narrow, rote, dumbed-down curriculum.  In effect, then, by focusing on basic skills student achievement test scores rather than the whole child, the law actually works against what we know from research to be best practices for teaching and learning. 

That’s why, as NCLB comes up for reauthorization this year, its inherent flaws cannot be fixed by minor adjustments to the law.  To address these problems, we must go back to that fork in the ESEA road where we started down the NCLB path and create a federal education policy path that actually promotes good instructional practices that empower the whole child.  We cannot afford to take the easy way out and reauthorize this act with only minor changes.  

This time, we must take the road less traveled and learn from those committed educators across the world who’ve managed to blaze a different trail of learning and school improvement for their students.  For example:  the State of Nebraska’s STARS model;  the New York Performance Standards Consortium;  the work of the Natural Learning Institute in California; the Coalition of Essential Schools;  the New Basics Project in Queensland, Australia;  and Finland’s student-centered democracy project, to name just a few.  

Clearly the federal government can play a key role in helping all students succeed if we place our public policy on the right path.  Let us use the models, talents, and research available to us and commit ourselves to finding that supportive, empowering path that addresses the whole child.  If we take this road less traveled, it will make all the difference.