All across America, public schools are grappling with the challenge of raising student achievement, closing the gap between students who have reliable support for learning in their lives and those who do not, and helping students achieve to their fullest potential. As always, the public schools in America reflect America itself — all that is good and all that is lacking.
Six years ago, the president and Congress devised a costly, complicated system of accountability that judges students’ progress, teachers’ competence and schools’ success based on standardized test scores. Success is reduced to numbers.
Clearly, some students with special learning needs, hungry students, unmotivated students, non-English-speaking students, medically challenged students, students whose parents have neither the time nor the expertise to help their children are never going to meet the test-taking demands of No Child Left Behind.
The superintendent of a large metropolitan school district, in an address at a national convention, joked, “If only parents would keep their underachieving kids at home!” His lament highlights what No Child Left Behind mistakenly ignores: the child.
As reauthorization approaches, Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, calls for a federal law that “promotes community schools to serve the needy children that provide all the services and activities they and their families need.” Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, agrees that NCLB is driving a national resolve to close the achievement gap, “but, alas, where is the national resolve to address equal educational opportunities for all students? Where is the political will to eradicate poverty and its related conditions including health care, housing, employment, preschool education, etc.?”
The newly adopted AASA legislative agenda, All Children Will Learn, issues a clarion call for a “worthy” successor to this flawed and ill-conceived legislation. Until we rise up and demand a return to the original intent of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, our children will be lost to this miserable mania of obsessive testing. They deserve better, and we have a sacred trust to see that they get it.
Professor Cornel West of Princeton University captured it best when he said, “Bold speech, frank, honest — even if you have to pay a price. …The last thing one wants to see is people who are well-adjusted to injustice.”
If our government truly wants to close the “achievement gap,” it should commit resources to providing many more skilled teachers and promote the kinds of curricula that will help students develop their curiosity and creativity for a world beset with problems they will be called upon to solve. It should provide the tools students need to learn and thrive in the real world of high technology and information science.
We can recapture the joy, the passion and the vision — the dream. We can free ourselves from the constant scrutiny of test scores, say “enough,” and return to educating the total child. We can lift our teachers’ morale and return to them the idealism they once had. We can restore parents’ and the community’s faith in the education system.
We should urge the president and members of Congress to pause and listen to the wisdom of veteran educators who know that while the basic tenets of NCLB are noble, no child was ever saved by a standardized test and no struggling schools can improve when they receive sanctions rather than support.
We should be asking our lawmakers what kind of education they want for their children and grandchildren.
Randall Collins is AASA president for 2008-09. E-mail: RCollins@waterfordschools.org