No Child Left Behind

Per the L.A. Times

The Obama administration has given 10 states a waiver from the federal law known as No Child Left Behind -- once a bipartisan hope to raise education standards, but now generally regarded as too cumbersome and draconian.

The White House announced the first round of waivers for 10 states Thursday morning. The administration had said that it would grant the waivers because efforts to revise the 10-year-old law have become bogged down in Congress even though members of both political parties agree that the law has problems and is in need of major changes.

“After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility,” President Obama said in a statement released with the announcement.

“Today, we’re giving 10 states the green light to continue making reforms that are best for them. Because if we’re serious about helping our children reach their potential, the best ideas aren’t going to come from Washington alone. Our job is to harness those ideas, and to hold states and schools accountable for making them work.”

First, let’s look at the No Child Left Behind act requirements.  Basically, the law required states to show that they had reached 100% proficiency by 2014.  This requirement was for ALL students, including the “Gap” children (minority and poor).  Because the law’s framers wanted to be able to take corrective action along the way they called for annual achievement testing to show that at least a linear projection of the progress to get to the goal in 2014 was met or exceeded.  This annual requirement was termed AYP (Annual Yearly Progress).  The consequences for not meeting the AYP consistently could be many but at the top they meant that the state would take over the school, fire all the staff and start over.  The law did have one gigantic flaw.  It allowed each state to define proficiency for its students, irregardless of how that matched up with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or the standards of our best foreign competitors.  As you would expect that has led many of the states to adopt “weak” definitions of proficiency.   And in fact you can safely say that all states fall far short of the international competition and short of the NAEP requirements.

Now it is true that educators consider the requirements of No Child Left Behind to be draconian and cumbersome as the LA Times article mentions.  Educators are consistent in stubbornly refusing to embrace the changes needed to really solve our education problems.  Of course, they are very comfortable with the status quo in an education system that is run for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the students.  They are expert at “playing” the system to get a continuing, ever-increasing flow of money to support new initiatives which preserve the status quo.  These always fit the “trying to do the wrong thing better” category.  That is, the weakness of our system is not that it isn’t being worked correctly, it is that the system itself can’t work which is why improvements of the scale needed are never achieved on a broad scale.  You have to hand it to our educators for their ability to ignore the facts that all of the countries who beat us in achievement use a different system. 

Sadly it is the one we used to use in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries before John Dewey and the Progressives began to take control of our education establishment. Their approach was dumbed down and much less rigorous in teacher training.  The takeover was complete by the late 1960s when all high school graduates had essentially been exposed to the new system for their entire school career.  Consistent with that time frame SAT scores plummeted.  To fix the problem requires going back to the rigor of curriculum and teacher preparation that existed before.  You will hear from educators that the current teacher training is more than what was required in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It is true that teachers back then were typically trained in Normal schools which gave two to three years of training after high school to prepare teachers.  Today all teachers require at least a bachelors (4 year) degree from an education school to be certified.  There are alternative certification routes but they amount to very small portion of all teachers. 

The problem with the new teacher training is that it takes the majority of students from the bottom third of their high school graduating class and transforms them into all A students.  The ed school diploma (with a few exceptions like U of Virginia and Hillsdale College) is only indicative of “tuition paid and seat time” in the ed school diploma mill.  The main reason our ed system does not change to what works is that their human resource; teachers and administrators are all untrained to do it right.  That is they have virtually no subject knowledge and the administrators tasked to lead do not know how as they have weak ed school training and no role models once at work to learn how to do it well.  Thus, to employ the techniques that work so well for our foreign competitors and their students would require a complete retreading of the current workforce.  Also, the need to set high standards for certification would mean that not all teachers or administrators could or would be able to pass muster.  A daunting task to be sure.  However, the current “reduce standards if they bind” approach does nothing to fix our broken education system.

At times like this, I always hear examples of kids who are brilliant and are products of our education system.  That is true.  They tend to fit into those who have parents, tutors or other support systems to fill the void between what they need and what the schools provide.  It is fortunate that some students learn in spite of the schools.  It does nothing however to provide the training that the majority of kids need in today’s knowledge society to allow them to find decent paying jobs.  Thus, actions like today’s taken by the administration only continue pushing the day the kids are finally served well into the distant future.