Deducation US

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I'm re-reading Shame of the Nation, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make by blood boil. Just in passing, I'd like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I'd be interested--really!--to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that's not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, "Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain...." (page 3). Now it's no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though "Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia" and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes "... during the past 30 years ... a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well." Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as "[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation." It should be clear that schools qualify as "caretakers," so the only point of dispute would seem to be the "emotional harm" specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the "restoration of apartheid schooling." And its results--tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music--seem to me to qualify as "serious emotional harm." You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I've noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.

There's a lot going on in our country today, and the Presidential candidates have a lot to think about and a lot to talk about. Ending the war is number one, as well it should be. But that's just a short term goal--in a year or two we will not have the war to kick around anymore, though we have decades of recovering from this abomination mentally and spiritually to get through. We haven't even gotten over the Vietnam war. Health care and Social Security, a looming recession/depression, pervasive racism, the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism, and (my other most pressing issue) energy independence: all these are getting at least some attention from the candidates.

Yet the one issue that has crucial long-term implications for this country--the repeal of the NCLB--seems to be sliding into the background. The NCLB is a ticking time bomb planted by the Bush Administration, and its ticks are beginning to be increasingly ignored by the Democratic candidates. Edweek, in its November 6 article "The Next Education President?", writes, "But with the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nominations in full swing, few of the current candidates have laid out detailed strategies for improving the quality of American schools and increasing the knowledge and skills of the nation’s elementary and secondary students." And "Many political analysts expect education issues to remain a low priority during the primaries and in the general-election campaign."

Over the summer, it seemed as focus on the renewal of the NCLB and especially during the NEA Convention, when the candidates were trying to curry some favor with educators, there was a certain amount of awareness and lip-service from the candidates. I just searched YouTube for some candidates' video from the NEA convention and found a couple of interesting ones: Senator Clinton: "The test is becoming the curriculum"; and Senator Obama: "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test." I confess that, for those few moments, at least, Hillary seemed to be more on top of what's wrong with the NCLB. But since then, in her public pronouncements and on her website, mostly silence on the matter. And the same with most of the other Democrats.

So what's the appeal of the NCLB for the voters or the constituencies or the financial backers that the major candidates are afraid to come out and say, with minor candidate Bill Richardson, "Scrap it!"?

When the Bush-NCLB timebomb goes off in 10 years or so, when today's sixth graders are beginning to enter the workforce, the voting ranks, major positions of power and authority and decision-making, we'll all look at each other, and say "how come everyone is so stupid? Why can't they think or imagine?" Because the NCLB has made us a nation of test takers, capable only of giving memorized answers that were correct ten years ago.

Wake up and speak up, Sens. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama.