There's a joke--a hoax,
really--circling about the Internet, codified in
countless professional-looking websites, about a
mysterious and dangerous chemical compound called
"dihydrogen
monoxide." It's described in the
most dire terms imaginable, "colorless, odorless,
tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people
every year," etc. One city in California almost
passed a city ordinance banning it until they
realized....dihydrogen monoxide is water!
It's all in how you describe something.
The latest dihydrogen monoxide-type scam has been
perpetrated by--who else?--ETS, the testing
mega-organization formerly known as the "Educational
Testing Service." ETS surveyed
a large
number of Americans about the NCLB and found a
roughly even split in favor of and opposed to renewal
of the program. Not satisfied, they reworded the
survey questions, throwing about vague terms like
"standards" and "accountability" and "flexibility,"
apparently apple-pie terms for the survey
respondents, and the second time around concluded
that a strong majority of Americans support the law's
renewal and also that most Americans don't really
understand the law. "Despite the American public’s
clear lack of knowledge about the federal
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the strong
misgivings of teachers and school administrators have
about the legislation [sic], the public and public
school teachers and administrators strongly support
reauthorization" ("Standards,
Accountability and Flexibility:
Americans
Speak on No Child Left Behind
Reauthorization"). The irony of a
majority of people supporting something they don't
understand is apparently lost on ETS.
Nowhere on the ETS site can I find the actual before
and after questions of the surveys, but let me
postulate another survey question:
"In 2002 Congress passed, and the President signed, a
major educational reform package. The effects of this
package have been:
1. the elimination of
naps for kindergartners in many schools
2. the elimination of recess for many elementary
school children
3. the exodus of many discouraged teachers
4. the imposition of simple-minded true-false and
multiple choice tests at almost every level of school
5. the elimination of teaching the arts, music,
social studies, and other subjects no longer tested
for
6. wholesale "teaching to the test" instead of
wide-ranging instruction in interesting subjects
7. logjams of students stuck in the ninth grade year
after year so they won't have to take the 10th grade
achievement tests and possibly embarrass the school
systems
8. students being forced out of school before they
can take--and possibly fail--the tests
9. schools lowering standards so more of their
students will pass the tests
10. students who have not yet learned to speak
English well (like every one of our ancestors) are
forced to take all their math, science, and other
courses in English, thus guaranteeing they will fail
11. opposition by over 3/4 of teachers and school
administrators--the trained professionals who know
more about education than any politician
12. schools which have the highest failure rates and
presumably need the most help are instead penalized
by having their federal aid funds drastically cut
Should this law be
renewed?"
How do you think a majority of Americans will feel
about the NCLB when they know these truths and see
the sugar-coated and highly-spun Washington-speak
selling of the NCLB for what it is?
"To Know
NCLB Is to Like It, ETS Poll
Finds," trumpets
Education Week. To know dihydrogen
monoxide is to ban it, they may as well have written.
What is it that's so attractive to the Republican right about getting "tough" with our children?
It comes down to a world view: the world is a mean place, it says, full of competitors and predators. (By the way, this view is much older than the 9/11 attacks, so it can't be blamed on a temporary world situation. It's endemic.) In order to survive, you have to be tough--do a lot of work, take tough exams, pass do-or-die high-stakes tests at every available opportunity. Eat or be eaten, no middle ground.
There are two ironies I see here. First, there is a certain amount of competition (in the Darwinian sense) and predation in the world. No one would deny that. Yet, there is a good deal of altruism, cooperation, and (dare I say it?) love in the world too. To the world of the high-stakes testings and the NCLB, this latter fact must be ignored. In fact, if the world not not such a mean place after all, the intent of high-stakes tests is to make it a mean world. Let me say that again, the intent of NCLB-type testing is to make the world a meaner place than it already is. In places where there is (or at least should be) no competition, no predation (such as, oh, say, first grade), the NCLB introduces it. Stories of first-graders throwing up out of nervousness over their make-or-break tests make me sick. To the proponents of the NCLB, it is a means of toughening up the students. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Get mean and nasty or die, weed out the weakest. School as war; first grade as Camp Lejeune.
Even more ironic is the model this is all based on: Darwinisn. Now I'm sure that not all the supporters of the NCLB are also supporters of Intelligent Design and anti-evolution and natural selection, but I'd guess there is a large overlap between the two. Yet the NCLB testing program is pure natural selection, educational Darwinism. We are in competition, so goes the reasoning, and either we are stronger than the [fill in the enemy du jour] or we will not survive. Even loonier is the fact that this kind of Darwinism subscribed to by the Right is a misunderstanding of Darwin anyway. It's best characterized as survival of the fittest culture. There is no survival of the fittest culture in Darwin, only survival of the fittest genes.
Tough exams do not make for better education, only a Hobbesian "solitary, poor, nasty, [and] brutish" life for Americans.
Let's look at this for a moment: by definition, at any given moment, by any criterion, half of any group is "below average." That's what "average" means: half are above, half are below. So the only interpretation of this statement that's possible is that in all cases, half of every student body should not pass. A guaranteed failure rate of 50%! Bush and Spellings would be in heaven if they heard this (assuming that you believe, as I do, along with Stan Karp that "the AYP [Adequate Yearly Progress] formulas and the 'Leave No Child Behind' rhetoric are transparent attempts to set up schools to fail.")
However, it would be really easy to pummel this writer for her thinking, or lack of skills in making a point clearly, or any number of other flaws. But I don't really want to do that. This woman is a great-grandmother, on a fixed Social Security income, and I have no wish whatsoever to embarrass her. I sympathize with her situation, and figure if I were in her shoes, betrayed and overwhelmed, I'd want to blame somebody, too. Why not the schools? On a very personal level, it's not her fault.
It's just that this kind of bizarre thinking is what's behind the NCLB: the way it's worded, the way it operates (if your school is in trouble and you need to fix things, your federal money will be withdrawn), the way it's promoted by the Bush marketeers. We need to get tougher on chldren.
W in Wonderland. Bushy logic makes truthiness and wikiality look downright factual.
Massachusetts Considers De-emphasizing High Stakes
Test
Massachusetts Governor
Deval Patrick, the first Democratic Governor of
Massachusetts in recent memory, has called for an
improvement of the state's MCAS (High-Stakes Tests)
scores and adding new assessments as well, according
to the June 6, 2007, Boston
Globe. This new
idea--expanding the ways in which high-school
students may prove they are worthy of graduation--has
led to a proposal and hearings before the state
legislature's Joint Committee on Education. Patrick
was criticized for this in an editorial in the
Boston
Herald, the city's conservative
inflammatory tabloid-style newspaper, who predictably
called it "backsliding" and, ironically, a
"concession to mediocrity."
The MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment
System, was passed in the mid-90's and became the
state's make or break testing system, as required by
the NCLB. In 2003, the MCAS became the state's
graduation requirement.
From my experience as an educator in Massachusetts
colleges for thirty years, I can testify that in the
past five years or so there has been a noticeable
shift in freshman students' writing skill: where once
there was a wide range of skills--ranging from a
percentage of students of extraordinary creativity
and imagination and writing abilities to, yes, a
percentage of extremely weak students. Now things are
much more level--the weak students aren't appearing
in the same frequencies as before, and that's good
(although it's been documented how weak students are
simply forced out of high schools before graduation
in order not to bring down aggregate test scores, and
thus never even get to apply to a college, so forced
attrition may be as much a cause as improved
educational practices). But the really exceptional
writers are also gone, for the most part, beaten down
by school systems teaching to the test and
promulgating a mindless essay format known as the
"five-paragraph-essay" which guarantees, if mastered,
passing the test and never having a creative or
useful thought to express. Thanks to the MCAS and
other high-stakes test, mediocrity is rampant.
Many critics of the NCLB have been asking for relief
from the mindlessness of high-stakes testing.
Educators know that all a child is and knows cannot
be summed up in a few true/false and multiple-choice
tests (to its credit, the MCAS does allow for a
student to actually write an essay as part of the
test). And requiring students to pass this one test
before graduating is harmful to the country. There is
no evidence, one way or the other, on how these tests
correlate with later success in life. Do those
students who pass these tests turn out to be better
citizens, better parents, better workers, better
soldiers, than those who don't pass them? "Unless we
can link scores to some measure of success after
leaving school," George Wood has written in
Many Children Left Behind, "they should not be
given."
Specifically, 1983's "A Nation at Risk," not in and of itself a particularly reactionary document, was followed by 1989's "A Nation Still at Risk," by Chester Finn, former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Education under William Bennett. (The title of the article has been recycled by Finn and his followers and collaborators numerous times since then, but as nearly as I can find, the article in the May, 1989, issue of Commentary magazine was the first to use that title.) Finn asserts that that nation is still at risk because despite the previous six years of spending and good intentions, the nation's educational system is as bad as ever and in need of serious reform. Out of these initial calls for reform has come the NCLB.
Like much ultra-conservative propaganda, the article is rife with fallacious reasoning and almost laughable assertions, but I'd like to examine the principles underlying the article as a way of getting a handle on what drives the insanity of the NCLB today.
Finn lists a litany of problems with current (i.e., 1989) education principles, and follows that with four "obstacles" to education "reform" (which is his term for what most educators see as a return to the dark ages of education.) I think his general complaints about education practices can be lumped into a few categories:
1. Modern education is not the way I remember it
2. Knowledge consists of unchanging lumps of fact and nothing more; modern education does not teach the facts
3. Modern education is not industrial-age capitalistic enough
4. Modern education is not mean enough
5. Modern education is too democratic
6. Teachers are lazy, overpaid and incompetent
Education is changing, which is always a frightening thing for conservatives (that is what the word "conservative" means, after all). In many ways, it has changed for the better, and mostly it's changing in ways to meet the new challenges of the 21st century: new communications media, a new globalization, new knowledge, new kinds of students. And no, it's not the way Finn remembers when he was going to school; it should not be. (Finn even recounts an embarrassing anecdote about his mother's education.) Jessica Stern's book Terror in the name of God, an in-depth study of violent religious fundamentalists, discovers that what drives fundamentalists (both Islamic and Christian) is "fear of modernity." I'm struck by how much a "fear of modernity" drives these conservative calls for a reform that is actually a regression.
"Our students know too little," writes Finn. But what does he mean by "know"? Time and time again he returns to the refrain which can be paraphrased as modern education does not teach facts. In hindsight, one of his examples tells all you need to know about his take on the facts: "Given a blank map of Europe and asked to identify particular countries,...just ten percent [spot] Yugoslavia." Yugoslavia no longer exists, of course, and all the students who got it wrong on the map-test are now exonerated. This blinkered view of "knowledge" and "learning" is characteristic of the Industrial Revolution, a 19th concept that has little applicability today. If you want to teach people how to work in mills and factories, how to mindlessly follow fixed procedures, teach these facts. But this is a bankrupt concept for today's world; it's no longer enough to teach supposed facts; they change, like it or not. The earth is not the center of the universe; the atom is not a series of concentric circles; Yugoslavia is not a country. (God did not create the universe and all species 6000 years ago, and man does indeed contribute to global warming, and because there is overwhelming irrefutable evidence for both, education has no business teaching otherwise, but I'm not going there in this blog.) Knowledge is not clumps of fact that never have changed and never will change, and for American education pretend otherwise is global suicide.
The implication of this for Finn is that our students should return to memorizing "facts" and stop thinking. He takes some breath-taking potshots at critical thinking: "'Thinking critically' avoids the relativist's agony of having to designate 'right' and 'wrong' answers," he writes. It's curious that an Assistant Secretary of Education would denigrate thinking, but there you are. For Finn, knowledge is clearly static, stuff to be memorized, all the while knowledge is changing and our students, under his proposals, will have no intellectual tools whatsoever to keep up with the world.
And finally we come to the real heart of Finn's (and the current crop of conservatives') principles: Educational Darwinism. It's a mean, tough, nasty, dog-eat -dog world out there, and education has to be mean and nasty to equip its "products" (Finn's word, not mine) to survive in this kind of world. Memorize facts as if they never changed; take one-chance-and-out tests on those facts (easy to do if there are clearly right and wrong answers) is the way to cull out the weak. "Tough standards" is the new watchword.
Imagine the students who did get the Yugoslavia question "right" in Finn's example: they are now creating and and trying to sell stuff to Yugoslavia, and probably wondering what happened. "Yugoslavia doesn't exist?? I never got the memo."