NCLB: A Predictible Train Wreck

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

The following is from Marion Brady, a very sophisticated educator, 
analyst and writer who works with the Florida Coalition for Assessment 
Reform.

September 18, 2006
To members of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind

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.

Marion Brady
4285 North Indian River Drive
Cocoa, Florida 32927

mbrady22@cfl.rr.com
321-636-3448
http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html

Cc: All media willing to pay attention