September 18, 2006
To members of the Aspen Institute's
Commission on No Child Left Behind
by Marion Brady
My name is Marion Brady, and I live in Cocoa, Florida. I've spent the last
seventy-four years in education as a student, high school teacher, college
professor, county-level administrator, publisher consultant, writer of journal
articles, textbooks, professional books and newspaper columns, and visitor to
classrooms across America and abroad.
You may or may not be surprised to hear me say that No Child Left Behind is an
educational train wreck.
I'm no defender of pre-NCLB public education. When the legislation took shape,
although the education train was still on the track, it was barely moving. What
it had going for it was mostly potential. Thoughtful educators were pointing out
that General Systems Theory as it had emerged from World War II, and research
clarifying how the brain organizes information, could, together, move student
intellectual performance to levels not previously thought possible. The train
was creeping, but it was going in the right direction.
The unduly alarmist 1983 publication of "A Nation At Risk" stopped it cold.
Fearful leaders of business and industry pushed educators aside, took control of
"reform" and, working through politicians, set the train in motion. Backwards.
Really fast.
A wreck was inevitable. Picking through the present pileup as it settles into
place, questions for those now in charge arise:
Question: Management experts say poor institutional performance almost always
indicates a "system" problem. NCLB doesn't blame poor performance on the system
but on teachers and kids. Are the experts wrong?
Question: NCLB demands "standards and accountability" for school subjects.
Wouldn't it make more sense to key standards and accountability to ends rather
than means, to kids' ability to fuse and actually use what they've learned?
Question: Some researchers say that pre-natal and early childhood care,
environmental contamination, parental attitudes, family income, language
facility and many other factors affect student performance. In well-run NCLB
schools, are these irrelevant?
Question: NCLB relies on market forces to shape schools up. Does this mean that
learning is unnatural and won't happen unless teachers and kids are threatened
or bribed?
Question: NCLB is rapidly pushing "frills" out of the curriculum. Has research
now established that art, music, physical activity and so on have nothing to do
with scientific and mathematical reasoning ability?
Question: Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of kids are being held back because
of poor reading and math skills. Is the ability to interpret symbols the only
way the young learn, and therefore sufficient reason to flunk them?
Question: NCLB's avowed aim is to "close the achievement gap." The tools for
measuring that gap are tests of symbol-manipulation skills. Don't these skills
track relative wealth and privilege, therefore tending to maintain the gap? And
aren't the tests incorrectly but nevertheless widely seen as indicators of
intelligence, bringing into play gap-perpetuating self-fulfilling prophecies?
Question: NCLB goes a long way toward cutting local educators and school board
members out of the decision-making loop. Does the history of top-down,
centralized control suggest this change strategy works well?
Question: Education is supposed to teach kids to think for themselves, not just
recall what they've been ordered to remember. Are the centerpieces of NCLB
(corporately produced, machine-scored tests) able to judge the relative quality
of complex thought processes? If so, why aren't they already doing that?
Question: NCLB assumes the "core" curriculum (the mainstay of present schooling)
is as appropriate today as it was when it was adopted in 1892. Is it?
Question: If there are problems with the traditional, same-thing-for-everybody
curriculum, don't "raising the bar" and "rigor" just make them worse?
Question: Will manipulating the curriculum to "maintain America's competitive
position in world trade" be more likely to ensure America's future well-being
than helping kids love learning because it lets them pursue their interests and
talents wherever they lead?
Question: Frantic to avoid the test-triggered "failing" label, most schools use
myriad strategies to "game" the system. For example, knowing the worst kids will
never make the cut on high-stakes tests, and the best will do so without help,
the "marginal middle" gets most of the attention. Is it possible to track and
counter all the ingenious strategies emerging in response to naive policies?
Question: Many educators (maybe most) now assume that NCLB is a clever strategy
less concerned with closing the achievement gap than with undermining confidence
in public education and laying the groundwork for privatizing the institution.
Are they wrong? And if they are, how can their cynicism be countered and morale
restored?
How matters stand
There's an old rural joke the punch-line of which is "You can't get there from
here." It's applicable. At the deepest level, what ails the nation's schools and
universities is the failure to recognize and capitalize on the seamless,
systemic, mutually supportive nature of knowledge. Until that problem is
addressed, even the best institutions will continue to waste student potential
at a prodigious rate.
A brief list of specific problems with the present approach to general education
curriculum may help underline its unacceptability. From about the fourth grade
on through the university, students have imposed on them a regimen which has no
clear, overarching aim, directs information at them at intellectually
unmanageable, fire-hose velocities, ignores the brain's need for order and
organization, has no criteria for determining the relative importance of what's
taught, relates only tangentially to real-world experience, disregards fields of
study of critical importance, has no built-in self-renewing capability,
overworks short-term memory at the expense of higher-order thought processes, is
little concerned with moral and ethical issues, doesn't move smoothly through
ever-higher levels of intellectual complexity, penalizes rather than capitalizes
on student differences, doesn't encourage novel, creative thought, ignores the
basic process by means of which knowledge expands, vastly underestimates student
intellectual potential, and, of course, ignores the holistic, systemic nature of
reality and the seamless way humans perceive it.
Yes, of course today's specialized studies are essential. But sense making
(surely the main point of schooling) requires a grasp of the whole as well as
the parts. A simple metaphor may help: Assembling a jig-saw puzzle, it's the
picture on the lid of the box which makes sense of the individual pieces (and
identifies the missing ones).
Western-style education has no
"picture on the lid of the box." Indeed, it sends kids the false but powerful
message that the subjects they're studying aren't supposed to fit together, much
less be parts of a comprehensive, coherent, integrated structure of knowledge.
What now?
Coming to grips with the fundamental nature of knowledge and the brain's way of
coping with vast amounts of random information was where education was headed
back in the 1980s when today's "reformers" took over. Many of those reformers
believed then, and still believe, that educating is a relatively simple matter
of "distributing information."
They believed then, and still
believe, that what teachers and kids need is mostly good old-fashioned boot
camp-style discipline. They believed then, and still believe, that those who
disagree with them are whiners, incompetents opposed to standards and being held
accountable, and resisting change by hiding behind tenure, unions, and other
self-serving defenses.
American education's bureaucracies within bureaucracies within bureaucracies are
extremely resistant to change and, absent external permission and pressure, will
resist it mightily. But the naive, reactionary, conventional-wisdom-driven
approach of NCLB is a disaster.
It isn't just failing, it's making a
bad situation far worse, taking schools back to the 19th century educational
world of Charles Dickens' "Mr. Gradgrind." And left in place, its simplistic
conceptions of standards and accountability will keep them there. Permanently.
Incidentally, it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see an intent to
replace fifty state K-12 NCLB-generated fiascos with one national NCLB-generated
fiasco, then move on to attack America's colleges and universities with some
version of the same.
If America's future well-being is more important than dumping an economic theory
on education to see what happens, I have some suggestions. I'm no change expert,
but here's one of many possible alternatives to the continued micro-managing of
America's classrooms from Washington:
1. Call for another national conference like the one that kicked off the present
thrust of reform. Invite the usual power players, but this time, include some
respected, straight-talking educators (yes, there are some) and actually listen
to what they have to say. Keep the conference in session until there's consensus
on the overarching aim of education. (From inside or outside the conference,
I'll be campaigning for "helping kids make more sense of experience," with
something like "cultivating a life-long love of learning" as runner up. And yes,
these aims are hard-nosed enough to allow progress to be measured.)
2. Simultaneously, back off high-handed, punitive actions against the States,
and tell them to do the same internally. Recall that it wasn't threats and
bribes that motivated the teachers you most respected. Indeed, those would
likely have driven them out of the profession.
3. Treat the States as R&D labs, (a much more legitimate application of market
forces) supporting and rewarding those having the most success pursuing the
agreed-upon overarching aim.
4. Simultaneously, to avoid trauma while #3 is being operationalized, continue
handing out federal money, but do so on some simple (perhaps per-pupil) basis.
Given the bipartisan political capital invested in NCLB, given the necessity for
saving Congressional face, given the educational naivete of its advocates and
defenders, given the kind of money now changing hands, given the culture's
near-religious faith in the ability of market forces to cure all ills, given the
sincere belief of many that NCLB is "99.9% pure," that it just needs a bit of
touching up, significant change seems unlikely.
However, futile though protest may be, let those in the future who look back on
this era in disbelief, know that at least some professional educators resisted.
Sure, what we had before NCLB was incredibly messy.
Sure, it needed major, major
attention. But that messiness at least allowed sufficient autonomy for patches
of greatness to emerge, stimulated creativity and productivity envied by much of
the world, brought America far and away more international prizes and
recognition than any other society, and attracted here education officials from
other countries looking for reasons why their sometime-higher test scores didn't
translate into patents and Pulitzers.
What we had was a foundation upon which to build. There's not much left of it.
"Human history," said H.G. Wells, is "a race between education and catastrophe."
No Child Left Behind makes catastrophe a sure thing.
mbrady22@cfl.rr.com
http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html
