There are many tragedies that have followed the War in Iraq. The 4,000+ dead American soldiers and the countless dead Iraqis are top on the list. Further down the list is the demise of education reform.
Before this war started, education reform was high on the political agenda in this country. Every political opinion poll showed that Americans cared about it. Education reform was on every politician’s todo list. The media carried countless stories about schools. The panels for education policy at the political science conferences were packed. NCLB was supported by a bipartisan group and its only critics were the teachers’ unions.
Now everybody has forgotten about education reform, and NCLB is considered, rightly or wrongly, as a failure. It will be decades before anything that ambitious is tried again.
Harry Brighouse writes that at least two positive outcomes have come out of NCLB — more data and slightly more equity.
Like Harry, I think that we have to go beyond the now tired criticisms of NCLB — teaching to the test, unfunded mandate — and think about a feasible replacement.
Apt. 11d 
I glanced at Harry’s post, but didn’t give it a read before, so thanks for the reminder and pointer. I have always been conflicted about NCLB; despite its massive problems (both in its basic conception as well as its execution), I’ve often wondered if ultimately it wasn’t a necessary step to get us to focus on those problems we can actually address–as Harry says, to think about dealing with (and within) our unjust system, besides just imagining the existence of a just one.
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Everyone I know has always been very upset about NCLB, but I never really figured out why. Mumbling about “teaching to the test,” which I guess is bad in general, but not bad if the way you were teaching before the kids couldn’t pass some minimum-standards test.
Meanwhile, I’ve never actually heard about a real school getting closed down by it, or kids who were harmed, or anything.
Is NCLB actually bad in the “it harms kids” kind of way, or just “bad” the way that highly politicized things get to be bad — like welfare queens or The Beauracracy or school vouchers.
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I left this comment at CT:
Harry, let me add one more added benefit of NCLB. Bad test scores are incredibly important politically for people who are interested in equity. If a school in an inner city really bombs some standardized test, the media picks up on it. It’s news. They aren’t going to report that Mrs. C’s third grade class had a very nice portfolio assessment. Reporters need a quick short hand story. Bad test scores, along with drop out rates, make headlines. I want there to be a lot of front page stories about how badly schools in inner areas are faring, especially compared to rich suburban districts. Then we can think about how to fix them. But without a constant stream of bad news in the media, nobody is going to care about inner city schools.
One thing I would like to see preserved in the next education reform is standardized testing.
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I suspect part of what is going on with NCLB demonization is an attempt to transfer blame for (at least in the public mind) all the long, accumulated failures of the public educational system to the hated Bush administration.
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“I suspect part of what is going on with NCLB demonization is an attempt to transfer blame for (at least in the public mind) all the long, accumulated failures of the public educational system to the hated Bush administration.”
No kidding. Have you ever noticed how everything undesirable is supposed to be a mandate of NCLB? It’s the educational equivalent of global warming–you can blame it for anything.
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Oh I totally disagree that we liberals are demonizing NCLB just so that we can find something else to blame on Bush. Frankly, there’s oh so much to blame on Bush, that it would be silly to find something new.
And, I totally agree that we need to have some kind of standardized testing. I don’t know what the test should be; I don’t know how it should be used. But, I think having this information is a good thing. There are progressives who wouldn’t be happy with my statement, but I do think that some of the resistance to testing is that people would just prefer not to know that they don’t understand something. Good tests are really hard to write, though, and I haven’t been particularly impressed with the NCLB ones.
bj
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BTW, we blame Bush for global warming, and global warming is responsible for all the ills of the world, so no need to add NCLB to the mix. 🙂
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BJ, I see your emoticon there, but I know plenty of people who blame GWB for pulling out of Kyoto despite the fact that not a single Senate Democrat would even vote against a bill asking President Clinton not to send the treaty to them.
As for NCLB, I sort of support it. I use the NEA’s as a sort of heuristic. If I don’t have time to understand something about education, I’ll support it is the NEA is opposed.
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There are no NCLB tests. The STATES are the villains — they negotiate with the Feds how to measure AYP, and get a lot of leeway (too much). They could devise their own bloody tests. The world is full of countries with diverse examples of how to do this, and the States have departments of education headed up by people who seem not to know where to look. Is that the fault of the people who devisded NCLB? Well, in a way, yes, because they knew that when they devised it. BUt the State-level officials and politicians and officials who complain about NCLB cannot blame others for their own shortcomings.
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“The world is full of countries with diverse examples of how to do this, and the States have departments of education headed up by people who seem not to know where to look”
Why do you think this is? I know about high stakes testing in other countries. Was the leeway given to the states because we are fundamentally unwilling to accept unitary/national standards of measurement in the US?
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Should the federal gov’t have just seized the reigns and made one national standardized test, instead of having each state figure out for themselves how to write a state test? So much duplication of efforts. Why have 50 state tests when just one good one would do the trick? I know. Congress would never have passed NCLB if that was the case. Politics interferes with efficiency.
I think that people mistakingly think that the tests are about measuring their particular kid’s progress. It’s about measuring a whole school, a community, or a state. I want to know if Alabama’s schools are doing a worse job than schools in PA, and I think that parents should want to know that information.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to remove each kid’s name from the test and only include a school name. The scores wouldn’t haunt the kid in a folder somewhere. Parents wouldn’t worry. And still we could have the real information about schools and states necessary to make changes.
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Was the leeway given to the states because we are fundamentally unwilling to accept unitary/national standards of measurement in the US?
NCLB was a really big change from the past. It gave enormous power to the federal government. Having a national standardized would have been too big. Each state has its own education bureaucracy and they would have flipped out if that power was taken away from them. Each Congressman would have people from their state yelling at them for taking away power and money from their home state.
So, it was a combination of America’s problems with huge change and with Congress’s dependence on local constituent demands. Damn that Madisonian model.
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