As of press time, Congress is debating the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which was set to expire September 30, 2007. This political process has become very tangled between the Bush Administration, big business and congressional leadership. Education has started to slide even further out of the spotlight while the attention of our country shifts to the 2008 presidential election. NCLB, first introduced by President Bush in 2002, is called by many the reincarnate of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), an educational funding plan created in 1965 that targeted poor schools and has been reauthorized as recently as 1994.
Rhetorically, the No Child Left Behind Act looks pretty good: It gives a lot of lip-service to closing the achievement gap between rich and poor, white and racially oppressed; and opening up poor schools to “post-secondary opportunities” (Think that means college? Nope. This basically means increased access for the military). But in practice it is further hurting our public school systems by putting emphasis on standardized testing and setting unrealistic bench mark goals that schools are expected to achieve in a ridiculously short amount of time.
Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is the term used to describe a school’s progress on these goals and tests. When schools don’t meet their AYP they become one of many on the list of “failing schools” resulting in their funds being cut. Because they are then penalized, many failing schools are simply forced to close. Then their students and faculty must find a new place to learn and to work. Sitting at School Board meetings (as the youth representative) and listening to members of the school testify, I see how sad this whole process is. No matter how the students proclaim their love for their “second home” or how serious the teachers are about the amount of learning that they do every day, the school board is still required by NCLB to place the school on the failing school list.
Why are these tests and AYPs so important? Why don’t the teachers, schools and the School boards just stop administering them? Under No Child Left Behind, schools who don’t test their students in this way are denied funding. Schools and their boards are stuck between a rock and a hard place: if they are teaching to prepare students for the NCLB tests, then they usually aren’t preparing their students for life or for post secondary educational opportunities. Being able to answer multiple-choice questions, simple regurgitation of facts, does not teach decision-making or anything else necessary to function in society. (Its only my second week of college, but here we definitely are not participating in mass standardized testing for funding or for any other purpose.)
School Boards pressure schools, principles pressure teachers, and teachers must prepare students for these tests (remember: failing test scores = failing school=school is placed on the closing school list) Pressure is passed from one section of the school system to another creating more rifts and less unity. When the adults are not unified, the students are the ones to suffer. Huge class sizes (my advanced placement world history class had thirty seven students in one class period—and I went to one of the “best” public high schools in Milwaukee), insufficient benefits for the staff and the exhaustion that comes from day-to-day teaching are just a few of the most noticeable problems we have at school. In the classroom, teachers waste a lot of time testing, and waste even more time drilling, students with information (preparing them for the routine standardized testing that their students must endure) instead of teaching learning processes and helping the students develop critical thinking abilities.
Xioahoa Ching when asked about her educational experience, said that there was a feeling of hopelessness among her peers. “You could,” she said, “hear it in their speech, and see it in their demeanor, the bright light that burns in everyone ambition and desire to grow” was long gone. “We felt like failures because of a system and ideal that failed us.”
I had a teacher, Ms. Erin Walsh. She is an amazing teacher. On the first day of her class, she makes it known that she means business by assigning a “get back into the groove” project; although it is always said by teachers, Ms. Walsh is one of the few that enforce the idea that every child can learn at a high level.
“The heavy emphasis on standardized testing,” Ms. Walsh told me, “has dramatically changed the way I operate in the classroom. She added that her personal experience and—countless research studies—indicate that students learn science best by doing hands-on, inquiry-based activities.
“I simply don’t have the time,” she says. “I am forced to use direct instruction to deliver mass quantities of information that students might be asked to regurgitate on a test. No topic is ever covered in-depth. Teaching students to think critically, analyze data, and evaluate findings takes time, and the assessment of these skills is not accomplished by filling in squares. The entire focus of my teaching has been forced to change because of standardized testing.”
Students don’t respect these tests because the focus of schooling shifts to these tests and preparing for them; school becomes a joke that they are not interested in.
Quinn Franklin, one of my classmates, asked “Why would I go to school when nothing we were learning was interesting? [The tests] weren’t even helping me become more educated. Not ‘til my Oppressed Peoples History class my senior year of high school did I learn to think about my own history and actually enjoy school.”
“As NCLB took cut after cut from the school the scars were evident in the increased levels of illiteracy in classes of freshmen to seniors,” Ching added. “At one point students were passing classes they should have failed just to make room for more students—not so that they too might have an equal chance to struggle in a remedial class, but to allow for everyone enough hard surface space to write when the occasion arose, to see the board if ever necessary, to hear the teacher if ever spoken to. This by any standards would not be classified as a quality education—which is supposed to be accessible by any young American.”
Most likely, the NCLB will be reauthorized; the largest coalition (headed by the Forum on Educational Responsibility) sees reform as the only responsible way to change it, not abolition of the document (as advocated by a group called the Educator Roundtable) replaced by state level discussions of education. There is one common idea held by both groups (and by many people): education must remain public and serve all communities.
Ursula Mlynarek is a freshman at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She currently serves on the Milwaukee Public School Board and loves music.
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