IN FAIRFAX'S "NO CHILD" FIGHT, A REFUSAL TO LEAVE CHILDREN BEHIND
Washington Post -- March 22, 2007
Marc Fisher Metro Column
Jack Dale is no anti-testing zealot, shielding the little ones from
the reality of a competitive world. He's not out there with the
activists who believe the No Child Left Behind revolution in
American schools has turned education into a grim, mechanistic culture.
But the superintendent of Fairfax County schools, who presides over
one of the highest-achieving systems in the land, has taken a stand
at the schoolhouse door: "The last thing I'm going to do is subject
some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them
saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must
complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it."
In the next couple of weeks, either Dale or the U.S. government will
blink. Until then, threats and counterthreats are flying across the
Potomac. Dale, backed up by his school board and several other
Northern Virginia superintendents, insists he will not require newly
arrived immigrant children to take the same reading test that other
kids take. And the feds reply: Oh, yes, you will -- and if you
don't, you'll lose $17 million in federal dollars.
This is not about accountability; Dale's all for that. In fact, the
children at issue are already tested twice a year on their English
skills. When they reach a decent level of proficiency in their new
language, they take the same test everyone else takes. But Dale
refuses to make a kid who has just arrived in the country sit at a
desk and be humiliated by a test that can only make him feel like a moron.
The federal approach to No Child Left Behind is what you might
expect from an administration whose response to a failing strategy
in Iraq is to throw good bodies after maimed ones. "We need to stay
the course," Raymond Simon, the U.S. deputy secretary of education,
told The Washington Post's Amit Paley. "The mission is doable, and
we don't need to back off that right now."
No Child Left Behind is built on a mirage. At some point that's
always just over the horizon, the law assumes, all children in the
nation will miraculously read and compute at grade level, simply
because they have been tested and tested and tested again. The
theory is that somehow, when told the exact number of children who
are lagging in achievement, teachers will agree to render the magic
that they have thus far withheld and -- poof! -- those kids will
become smart, cooperative and productive.
As we get closer to that utopia, it's becoming ever more clear that
Some Children Remain Behind and that, gadzooks, Not Every Child Is
the Same. Oh, and this: Staking everything on a test doesn't produce
a flowering of inspired teaching, but rather what Dale, a former
math teacher, calls an "obsessive focus on tests."
"You focus obsessively on multiplying two-digit numbers," he says,
"as opposed to how to apply that knowledge in the real world and how
to play with mathematics in a creative way."
The flaws in the nation's new education regimen continue to elude
the Bush administration. Dale has met twice with senior officials in
Washington to push for enough flexibility so schools are not
condemned as failures -- even if 500 kids took and passed the tests,
"two Hispanic children or two special education children didn't
pass, and the rules say that makes the school a failure." Both
times, senior Education Department leaders told Dale there would be
no exceptions to the rules. (Virginia's two U.S. senators jumped in
on Dale's side yesterday, filing a bill that would force the feds to
give Fairfax schools and others a year's reprieve.)
In most of the country, the children in classes for non-English
speakers were born in the United States, and Dale agrees that by
third grade, they should be tested in English, as the law requires.
But in Fairfax, 63 percent of children in such classes were born in
other countries. Those children, Dale says, deserve a little time to
soak in the language before they are subjected to high-stakes tests in English.
What this is really all about, the superintendent thinks, is an
unresolved debate over whether there should be national education
standards. Remember, the same people who now mandate Testing Uber
Alles were pushing two decades ago to abolish any federal role in
education. Under the No Child law, designed by a purportedly
conservative administration, the amount of time that a
superintendent such as Dale must spend satisfying the federal
bureaucracy has skyrocketed from hardly any to hours and hours each week.
No Child Left Behind is built on a lie. Not every kid will go to
college, no matter what you do. So you can either lower the
standards enough to pretend that everyone is succeeding, or give up on the lie.
But the feds won't talk about that; they just repeat "Stay the
course," and any school system that balks is threatened with punishment.
"I've been warned that to speak frankly in this area is not wise
personally or professionally," Dale says. But he's speaking anyway,
because, as a good teacher, he knows that "we don't succeed well
when we go punitive. You need standards, but they should be
aspirational; it needs to be about incentives, not punishment."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032101970.html