No Child Left Behind, Unless They Can’t Keep Up

By Bob Wire, 3-11-10

Today marks the end of Week 1 of MontCAS testing at Missoula public schools. Montana Comprehensive Assessment System is a series of standardized tests administered each spring under the heinous, deceptively-named No Child Left Behind program implemented by Congress in 2002. You would think from the very title of the program that the federal government will be providing assistance to lagging or underperforming students, in order to improve the U.S.’s educational standards and better prepare our youth to compete on the international stage.

Nah. NCLB is all stick, no carrot. Citing our “failing public schools” (which is bullshit), what President Bush and his duplicitous cronies did was create a system of punishment with no reward, putting pressure solely on state and local school systems to take several weeks away from their standard curricula in order to “teach to the test.” The MontCAS and other NCLB tests are geared solely to math and reading comprehension. No science, no social studies, no history, and none of that pesky arts and music that is cloggin’ up these kids’ heads. If a school’s aggregate test scores fail to reach a certain standard of Annual Yearly Progress for two consecutive years, instead of providing assistance or resources to help the school achieve the desired results, the Fed CUTS funding to that school, forcing them to drop programs, educational resources, and in some cases, teachers.

That’s right. Instead of stepping in with help, the feds give the students the option of are transferring to a different school, or providing for their own supplemental learning, with Sylvan or other tutoring services. On their own time. Paid for by the school, presumably from that huge pile of gold dust they have out behind the gym.

No Child Left Behind? This is like Dick Cheney calling his hunting expeditions No Face Left Unshot. It’s not news to any of us who can read a paper and do math that the Bush Republicans routinely took advantage of our largely slack-jawed electorate by giving their reprehensible policies names that are ironic at best, and deceptive at worst. The Clear Skies Initiative. The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. The Delivering Flowers To Iraq Via a B-2 Bomber Program.

So now each spring public schools are put in a half-nelson by the budget department, and forced to quit doing their jobs in order to take up factory-style teaching and pressure the students to ace these tests or else next year they’ll be learning American History in a field somewhere. This holdover from the Republican years of fear and paranoia is a pain in the ass to kids, it’s hated by the teachers, and despised by anyone who knows what’s really going on. My wife and I just met with Rusty and Speaker’s teachers last night for the parent-teacher conferences, and judging from the pained smiles the teachers wore when talking about the MontCAS tests, they are no exceptions. For them, it’s No Syllabus Left Unscrewed.

Bush, when not calling himself “The War President,” loved to call himself “The Education President.” Pretty ironic, for a guy who couldn’t read a book without moving his lips. What he really achieved with this spectacularly failed program was increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots in America. It hits inner-city and impoverished students the hardest, because the challenges of mere survival for the working poor make it most difficult to achieve the required results on these tests.

For example, Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported that at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school’s 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving less than one hour for all other subjects. These are probably the students who are dragging down the AYP on the standardized tests, but instead of beefing up their educational resources, the NCLB mandate starves them out by narrowing the curriculum to focus on only reading and math. Many students see no choice but to drop out.

The real effect that NCLB has had in its eight miserable years of existence is to inflate the dropout rate in the most impoverished areas to somewhere around 30%, as schools are actually rewarded for getting rid of their underperforming students. The draconian program hits the most disadvantaged the hardest, listing some 37 requisites in the AYP that are geared to income, race, and/or gender. But the Fed cooked the books, making it look as if the dropout rate actually plummeted during this time.

I’m not against publicly-educated kids achieving certain levels of learning. Duh. On the contrary, I would say that it’s obvious that the current and future generations of kids need a big bucket of ice-cold water right in the face. Playstation 3, World of Warcraft, Spongebob, YouTube, texting and Facebook are all helping turn us into a nation of idiots. For some of us it’s too late. But for those still in grade school and high school, educational standards can be improved and enforced. But not at the expense of the lesser-advantaged, and not at the cost of a huge swath of their curriculum. Instead of teaching to some narrow, unfair standardized math and reading tests, how about shifting the focus to the capability and efficacy of the TEACHERS? I would assume with all the days schools are closed so teachers can attend training programs and teaching seminars and so on, not to mention three class-free months to hone their skills, they’d be up to the task.

No Child Left Behind was a horrible idea, poorly implemented and a total failure. Even Roy Blunt, the Missouri Congressman who helped champion this steaming pile of legislation in 2001, helped introduce a bill in 2007 to allow states to opt out of the program, on account of it sucks. Resources and funding has been siphoned away from gifted student programs to help shore up schools that are not hitting the AYP. This dumbing-down of public education is exactly the opposite of what the Dept. of Education had hoped to achieve with this phony testing nightmare.

No Child Left Behind. The slogan might look good on a t-shirt, but thanks to the harsh realities of the program’s effects, lots of kids wouldn’t be able to read it.

[Bookmark NewWest.net/BobWire today. It may be on a government watch list tomorrow.]

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