Examiner column for March 17.
The No Child Left Behind Law was not all bad; public schools
needed an incentive to focus on students whose achievement lagged behind, and
needed to figure out a way to close those achievement gaps as quickly as
possible. Testing wasn’t the answer, as we have all found out.
President Obama has gotten it right in his proposal to restructure the most damaging effects of NCLB: the policy of flunking schools if they don’t approach the unreachable goal of 100% proficiency in every student sub-group. Currently, a third of the nation’s schools have a grade of “F” and, as any teacher knows, handing out failures is no way to encourage success.
What does encourage success is a subtler approach that takes
into account the individual needs and abilities of students, and that’s what
the restructuring proposal gets right. Schools, like students, are not
one-dimensional, and cannot be measured by tests in two subjects. Where, in
NCLB, were the arts and music? Or physical education? Or ethics? Or other
subjects that would contribute to the student as a person and future member of
our society?
Those
subjects, like the teaching of poetry in Virginia classrooms after the
Standards of Learning tests dropped poems from the test, were languishing,
while rote math and English lessons were taking their place. Teach to the test
is dead; long live teach to the student!
Obama’s
“Blueprint for Reform” in education, made available this week, is still short
on specifics—but that is deliberate. States will determine how they will meet
the standards—now reachable rather than Utopian—by the deadline of 2020. But
the language is clear about how students will be assessed: they will be
measured for college and career readiness, and assessments must include
higher-order skills, and not merely rote memorization.
Built
into the “Blueprint” will be financial incentives for schools, districts, and
states to align their curricula with local colleges and universities.
Successful schools will be rewarded, and the least successful schools will be
targeted for intervention. But every principal’s fear of not meeting the Annual
Yearly Progress goal (AYP) and being labeled a “failing school” will no longer
exist. No more threatening faculty meetings where administrators scare teachers
with the prospect of school failure. (Teachers hate those meetings, and are
rarely motivated afterwards to do better in their classrooms.)
Concurrently,
governors have been developing a common core of standards for optional adoption
by states. They are available for viewing and comment at www.corestandards.org. Adopting core
standards across the country would create a solid foundation for the new
educational “blueprint.” These are educational reforms that should receive
bipartisan support from all of us who have been frustrated by decades of
contradictory and inconsistent policies—culminating in the impossibly
restrictive guidelines of NCLB. Now we have something we can all stand behind
in an effort to make our public schools better.
The
improvement of our public schools, and the cessation of all those “F” grades
for not achieving “AYP,” should be reasons for optimism rather than partisan
ire. Let’s support the Obama “Blueprint for Reform” and put our nation’s
schools back on a path to success, not failure.
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