Ravitch: NCLB is "Death Star" of U.S. Education

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

NCLB: THE DEATH STAR OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

Education Week "Bridging Differences" Blog -- January 10, 2012
By Diane Ravitch

Dear Deborah,

I know you are touring schools in Japan and soaking up lessons for us as 
you travel. Since you have Internet access, I'd like to share some 
thoughts about a momentous occasion: the 10th anniversary of No Child 
Left Behind, which occurred on January 8.

After 10 years of NCLB, we should have seen dramatic progress on the 
National Assessment of Educational Progress, but we have not. By now, we 
should be able to point to sharp reductions of the achievement gaps 
between children of different racial and ethnic groups and children from 
different income groups, but we cannot. As I said in a recent speech, 
many children continue to be left behind, and we know who those children 
are: They arethe same children who were left behind 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/whose-children-have-been-left-behind-framing-the-2012-ed-debate/2012/01/02/gIQAz3nDXP_blog.html>10 
years ago.

In my travels over the past two years, I have seen the wreckage caused 
by NCLB. It has become the Death Star of American education. It is a law 
that inflicts damage on students, teachers, schools, and communities.

When I spoke at Stanford University, a teacher stood up in the question 
period and said: "I teach the lettuce-pickers' children in Salinas. They 
are closing our school because our scores are too low." She couldn't 
finish her question because she started crying.

When I spoke at UCLA, a group of about 20 young teachers approached me 
afterwards and told me that their school, Fremont High School, was 
slated for closure. They asked me to tell Ray Cortines, who was then 
chancellor of the Los Angeles Unified School District, not to close 
their school because they were working together as a community to 
improve it. I took their message to Ray, who is a good friend, but the 
school was closed anyway. The dispersed teachers of Fremont are still 
communicating with one another 
<http://fremontwatch.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-scarlet-number-and-kids-as-commodities/>, 
still mourning the loss of their school.

When I spoke to Citizens for Public Schools in Boston, a young man who 
works as a chef at a local hotel got up to ask what he could do to stop 
"them" from closing his children's school. It was the neighborhood 
school, he said. It was the school he wanted his children to attend. And 
they were closing it.

In city after city, across the nation, I have heard similar stories from 
teachers and parents. Why are they closing our school? What can we do 
about it? How can we stop them? I wish I had better answers. I know that 
as long as NCLB stays on the books, there is no stopping the destruction 
of local community institutions. And now with the active support of the 
Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of 
promoting privatization and community fragmentation.

I have often wondered whether there is any other national legislature 
that has passed a law that had the effect of stigmatizing the nation's 
public education system. Last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan 
said that 82 percent of our nation's schools would fail to make 
"adequate yearly progress." A few weeks ago, the Center for Education 
Policy reported that the secretary's estimate was overstated 
<http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=386>, and that it 
was "only" half the nation's schools that would be considered failing as 
of this year. Secretary Duncan's judgment may have been off the mark 
this year, but NCLB guarantees that the number of failing schools will 
grow every year. If the law remains intact, we can reasonably expect 
that nearly every public school in the United States will be labeled as 
a failing school by 2014.

If you take a closer look at the CEP study, you can see how absurd the 
law is. In Massachusetts, the nation's highest-performing state by far 
on NAEP, 81 percent of the schools failed to make AYP. But in 
lower-performing Louisiana, only 22 percent of the schools did not make 
AYP. Yet, when you compare the same two states on NAEP, 51 percent of 
4th graders in Massachusetts are rated proficient, compared with 23 
percent in Louisiana. In 8th grade, again, twice as many students in 
Massachusetts are proficient compared with Louisiana, yet Massachusetts 
has nearly four times as many allegedly "failing" schools! This is crazy.

More evidence of the invalidity of NCLB. The top-rated high school in 
the state of Illinois, New Trier High School, failed to make AYP. Its 
special education students did not make enough progress. When 
outstanding schools fail, you have to conclude that something is wrong 
with the measure.

The best round-up to date of the catastrophe that we call NCLB was 
published by FairTest in its report, "The Lost Decade 
<http://www.fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home>." I know you have 
read it, as this is an organization dear to your heart. I recommend this 
report to our readers. It shows in clear detail that progress on NAEP 
was far more significant before the passage of NCLB.

Congress, in its wisdom, will eventually reauthorize the Elementary and 
Secondary Education Act. I hope that in doing so, they recognize the 
negative consequences of NCLB and abandon the strategies that have borne 
such bitter fruit for our nation's education system. NCLB cannot be 
fixed. It has failed. It has imposed a sterile and mean-spirited regime 
on the schools. It represents the dead hand of conformity and regulation 
from afar. It is time to abandon the status quo of test-based 
accountability and seek fresh and innovative thinking to support and 
strengthen our nation's schools.

    
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/01/nclb_the_death_star_of_america.html