Upcoming
mini-summit

NET arts assessment
language needed

The effects of
standardized testing: a case study

No Child Left Behind 25 years from now

outelligence \aü-tel-i-jen(t)s\ n : the opposite of intelligence adj : outelligent

Virtually all defenses of NCLB perch on a thin branch of an assumption: That the data is good. I have coined a term that describes people who believe this: They are outelligent. Okay, that's unkind, but one of these days that branch is going to snap. Here are some of the reasons why:

1) SAT scores have been declining for years. Last year they hit a 10-year low, and this year's scores matched last year's. We are told that it's because more students took it. That might be partly true, although the size of the N doesn't necessarily bear on performance. Here's another at-least-partial explanation: Our standardized test-driven curriculum is failing so thunderously that students can't even pass the most important standardized test most of them will ever take. The seniors of 2008 spent the latter half of their 12 grades under NCLB. If the law isn't improved, in another six years our nation will graduate the first class that knows no other curriculum. Even if a better law is enacted at that point, it will be an additional 12 years until the first class that has never known NCLB will graduate. We cannot afford to waste a quarter of a century.

2) Where does the pressure to do "whatever is necessary" to raise scores begin? Superintendents? No, higher. State supervisory agencies? Higher. The U.S. Department of Education? Higher. The chain starts with the President, who hires and fires the Secretary of Education at his or her whim. And of course it also reaches below the superintendent, all the way down to the major and, ironically, most voiceless players—the students. They, not we adults, are the ones placed into special ed classrooms, tracked classes, or even made to repeat grades based on errant snapshot performances.

3) People perform badly, sometimes even dishonorably, when the stakes are so high. President Bush has passed responsibility for the failures of NCLB to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. Secretary Spellings puts a pretty face on data she surely is clever enough to know is specious (I was going to say "puts lipstick on a pig," but I understand that it's been used). State education agencies, caving to uninformed governors, legislatures, and special interests, emphasize efficiency as if the task were to create cars, computers, or boxes of mac and cheese instead of educated citizens. And many adult players in this ugly scenario ignore the vast body of education research that offers good data on how to assess what kids know.

4) Knowing their jobs depend on test scores, some superintendents tell principals that their jobs are on the line if their buildings' scores don't go up. So some principals in turn tell faculty that their jobs are on the line, while they remove low-performing students from their test pools by creatively re-defining "dropout," "special education student" and other categories. And of course some faculty give kids the answers to test questions, and some kids get answers from other kids. Not to mention the teachers who like the pre-packaged curriculum because they don't have to prep, or even think.

Twenty-five years from now, NCLB will be remembered for various things, but perhaps one thing more than the rest: It caused the first internally-derived corruption of public education in U.S. history.

Let's not let that happen. Let's catch the children left behind.

Warm regards,
Dennis