"Is our children learning?"
While exposing the future commander-in-chief's grammatical ingenuity, this infamous rhetorical question posed by George W. Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign provided a revealing reference to the problems plaguing the nation's education system. After being inducted into office, Mr. Bush immediately pushed for the answer, which he dramatically labeled the No Child Left Behind Act. In 2002, it received Congressional approval and became federal law — a popular bloc for those instituting the policy and a nightmare for those forced to practice under it.
Even before last week's Associated Press report revealed that a gaping legislative loophole has allowed several states, including Wisconsin, to betray the very premise of NCLB, the law has been under fire by everyone from state officials and local parents to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing and the American Federation of Teachers. Meanwhile, the federal government has failed to fully fund the initiative's provisions — a testament to how much Mr. Bush values his domestic policy gem — prompting Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and other state officials, to join a national lawsuit against the administration.
Putting an excessive emphasis on test scores, NCLB mandates an educational approach that cripples the academic foundations of universities and professional schools in America. Inspired by seeing their institution in the top ten rankings of U.S. News & World Report, college administrators obsess over specific diagnostics that provide limited information on an individual's intelligence, chances of success in school and overall value as a student.
At least it could be said that children in elementary and middle school were not such slaves to statistics. That is, until NCLB began forcing teachers to go from educators to coaches, employed to bolster numbers instead of students' minds. Now, instead of going to school to learn, children in between third and eighth grade spend their days being instructed on how to pass annual tests.
Because the examinations focus on reading and math, districts are pressured to prioritize these curricula, while sliding the sciences, social sciences and skill courses to the backburner. In a vicious self-perpetuating mechanism, schools lacking educational resources are sanctioned by the government for poor student performance, which in turn deprives them of the funds to obtain necessary teaching materials.
The nexus of NCLB is punishment. Its provisions require that schools report test scores categorically, breaking up students by race, income level, migrant status, English proficiency and special education needs. If it fails to meet specific scores in any single category, the entire school is lashed with penalties, sometimes to a crippling extent for poor institutions that serve low-income children.
Indeed, the policy once touted as a mechanism to extinguish educational inequality has instead perpetuated it, as we were reminded last week. The AP News investigation found that states are using a snaring loophole in NCLB that allows them to exclude minority test scores if certain categories' school-wide enrollment falls below a certain number. Desperate to achieve full student proficiency by 2014, as required by the law, state educators have had little choice but to request larger exception numbers to meet their marks. The federal government, which is eager to claim success, has permitted nearly two dozen states to change their standards. Wisconsin can currently leave out the scores of groups with up to 40 students.
That's enough to exclude every non-white racial group in my high school. I'm guessing that's not unique among many of our state's Caucasian-dominated small towns.
Therefore, under NCLB's stipulation, minorities are seven times more likely to be left out than whites. Hispanics and blacks have over ten percent of their scores eliminated. Nationally, more than 2 million children are not counted; compared with the 25 million who are regularly tested, that's eight percent of students who are excluded. So much for leaving no child behind.
If the purpose of NCLB is to gauge educational proficiency based on qualities that would measure a bridging of the achievement gap — such as race — then why would officials deliberately throw out scores, particularly of minorities?
The answer exposes the reality: NCLB is nothing but a political farce. It's excluding the very students that it's supposed to be helping, while chipping away at the educational quality of schools to an extent that all students, both white and non-white, are being affected. If the current law is replaced by legislation that focuses on developing, maintaining, and adequately paying teachers, providing quality educational resources and fully funding schools' budgetary needs, then perhaps we could claim not only that we're leaving no child behind, but we're helping each one move forward.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and African studies.
