Features » February 2, 2007

Education Reform: Pass or Fail? (cont’d)

Andrew Rotherham, co-director of the education policy think tank Education Sector and a former assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy, sees these disparities as fundamentally unjust. “What’s dehumanizing is that the odds of outcome are better off if you are rich and dumb than if you are poor and smart,” he says.

Upset with the lack of progress, citizens outside of Washington have leveled more systemic criticisms at the law. Many argue that high-stakes testing is poor motivation for struggling students. In her book In Defense of Education: When Politics, Profit, and Education Collide, Elaine Garan asks, “Can’t we reasonably assume that high-stakes, high-pressure testing, the threat of failure, and all the time wasted on test preparation are turnoffs rather than incentives?” Critics also contend that by elevating the importance of test results, teachers must narrow their curriculums and exclude crucial but non-tested subjects like history, art, foreign language, music and physical education.

The most damning criticism of the law is aimed at its crude and unrealistic proficiency goals. By using one annual test score as a measurement of attainment, AYP focuses on achievement to the exclusion of assessing student growth. “We’re placing the emphasis on the product of the educational process instead of the process [of learning] itself,” says Walker. In October 2004, a coalition of national educational, civil rights and religious groups produced a “Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB” that has since gathered more than 100 signatories. Their first recommendation was “to replace the law’s arbitrary proficient targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the most effective public schools.”

It is the unreasonable proficiency goals that have convinced many that the hidden agenda of NCLB is to sacrifice the public education system in the name of profit, either through the development of expensive and privately produced supplementary education materials or the eventual privatization of schools. “NCLB is a dollars game and it needs to be understood on that level,” says Walker. “It has nothing to do with the children–it has to do with making people rich.”

Private tutoring, for example, has witnessed explosive growth since the law’s inception. ThinkEquity Partners, a San Francisco-based investment bank, estimates that public schools will funnel more than $900 million dollars to private tutors in 2006-2007, up from $300 million in 2003-2004. Textbook publishers are exacting similarly huge profits. McGraw Hill, which publishes the materials for NCLB’s Reading First program, cited in its Quarterly Report that sales in the Elementary and High School market were critical to their frequent double-digit growth in earnings per share (17.6 percent in the second quarter of 2006).

The Bush administration has also provided the opposition plenty of ammunition. Ignite Learning, a company owned by the president’s brother Neil and backed financially by Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talai, developed a system last year named COW, or “curriculum on wheels.” COW is a high-tech instruction aide for teachers that expects to produce $5 million dollars in revenue in 2006, according to BusinessWeek. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, former First Lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with explicit directions that it be spent only on educational software produced by, you guessed it, Ignite Learning.

Perhaps most devastating, NCLB has had a chilling impact on discussions about alternative educational philosophies and techniques. To educate American children effectively, Walker says policymakers and educators alike must break from the long-accepted U.S. pedagogical framework and re-envision the role of education in the 21st century.

Lawmakers crafted NCLB using an outdated understanding of the economy. The industrial economy of the 20th century required obedience and rapid cognition, skills that tests cultivate sufficiently. Now, as semi-skilled labor disappears–the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 21.2 percent increase in professional occupations from 2004-2014 and a one percent decrease in production employment–command-and-control education methods are training students for non-existent jobs.

Instead, educators should focus on fostering the growth of critical thought in order to prepare students for a life of productive citizenship. “Because that struggling kid is going to be put into the world in six or seven years, we need to advocate education for citizenship if we really want any hope,” Walker says. Walker not only uses dialogue to encourage students’ independent-thinking skills, but also plans direct-action projects that link class material with the student’s immediate surroundings. For example, two years ago, after reading a story about segregation and the lack of quality educational resources black students receive, Walker’s students painted the lockers in their hallway to improve their physical environment. Though this was a relatively small act, advocates ranging from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs have long argued that such praxis-based projects encourage civic engagement by making children aware that they are social agents, capable of redefining and revitalizing their schools and neighborhoods.

The politics of renewal

The lack of progress under NCLB, coupled with the new political landscape of the 110th Congress, will likely complicate the reauthorization process. Many recently elected Democrats, who did not participate in the construction of the law, bemoaned NCLB throughout their campaigns.

Tim Walz, a high school geography teacher and the newly elected representative of Minnesota’s 1st District, called the bill “an uneven, bureaucratic nightmare [that] harms the students and schools who need it most.” Meanwhile, Republican legislators are increasingly voicing their displeasure about the greater federalism that NCLB mandates. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) recently told an audience at the Heritage Foundation, “You can’t have quality development with a top-down approach. It’s time to change the way we’re thinking about [NCLB] because it’s not working.”

“NCLB is not just a straight left-right, Republicans and Democrats issue,” says Rotherham. “There are real intra-party disagreements about the legislation, which means it is a less likely candidate to get done in this environment.”

On Jan. 24, the administration attempted to placate critics like DeMint when it released “Building on Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening NCLB,” which largely emphasized the need for increased school choice and local control. But Democrats, including Kennedy and Miller, immediately called it a non-starter.

Even with these divisions, complete repeal seems unlikely; the political will and the power of the authors will not allow for a comprehensive reinterpretation of the federal government’s role in education. For Bush, NCLB is the only substantial bipartisan domestic policy he has passed in six years, so it is important for both his legacy and his attempts to pass favored legislation through the new Congress.

Conversely, Kennedy and Miller, steadfast supporters of testing and accountability, believe that the law is well intentioned, just poorly executed. The two men will likely focus the debate in Washington on ways to fine-tune the bill. Measures should include increasing funding to reach the full amount initially promised during authorization and putting more qualified teachers in the classroom. With these political realities, Rotherham believes that full reauthorization–with only limited changes–will happen, but not until after the next presidential election.

In the meantime, legislators must take additional steps to fulfill the promises guaranteed by NCLB. Emphasis should be placed on the other major section of the bill, the Highly Qualified Teacher Provision (HQT). Authored primarily by Miller, HQT requires that all children be taught by a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and state-certification (among other requirements) in core academic subjects like English, reading, science and math. Initially, the provision wasn’t taken seriously in Washington–zero states passed the first deadline and no legitimate sanctions were ever crafted, so a one-year extension was granted. “The Bush Administration championed a $100 million dollar teacher incentive, but that’s like throwing a bucket of water into the ocean,” says Rotherman. To catch up, districts are now taking rash and ineffective steps. In Baltimore, classroom assistants deemed highly-qualified were forced to transfer to high-poverty schools in the middle of the year.

Even HQT is not without its opponents. Aaron Tang, co-director of Our Education, a youth organizing organization, believes HQT fails to differentiate between qualified and quality teachers. “Having a few extra pieces of paper doesn’t guarantee that a person can educate or inspire students,” Tang says. He would like to see the government explore modes of alternative certification, such as the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program, which awards mid-career professionals, recent college graduates and retirees fellowships to teach in New York City’s underperforming and understaffed schools. In just six years, the program has placed 7,500 fellows in the nation’s largest district, totaling almost 10 percent of the entire system.

By reducing the barriers to entry, NYCTF and similar programs allow eager college graduates or people in related fields, such as doctors or scientists, the chance to provide a welcome infusion of human capital. Walker himself was a sociology major who took advantage of alternative certification through the Teach for America program. Without the aid of alternatively certified teachers like Walker, it seems unlikely that Cerveny would have passed its reading tests in 2006.

But education reform can’t be viewed in a vacuum. Studies show that test-score discrepancies appear as early as kindergarten, proving that factors outside of schools largely contribute to gaps in achievement. If Congress is serious about leaving no child behind, it must implement measures to reduce family and youth poverty, such as eradicating gaps in health care coverage and raising stagnating wages for Americans who work long hours away from their children.

When Walker asked his students to produce supporting arguments about why Detroit schools had high truancy rates, the 20 seventh graders in his class didn’t hesitate: Kids aren’t taught anything of value; it can be embarrassing to try and catch up if a student is pegged as struggling; and students lack support from their parents, teachers and peers.

More support from legislators wouldn’t hurt either.