The concept behind No Child Left Behind is a noble one: Public schools should be accountable for educating children to a minimum level of success and that success should be measurable.
But as Editor Pete Graham (Missouri Valley TimesNews) notes:
There is a problem I have with NCLB: it leaves everything else behind, whether it be history (for dummies or for regular folks), the arts, the little extras that teachers used to routinely impart to students, those extras that made stand-out teachers, stand out.
This is my fundamental problem this year with Dancergirl’s school. Tonight was Back-to-School night — the seventh consecutive that I have attended at this particular school. As a precursor to Back-to-School night, her Honors classes teachers called the parents in for a meeting Monday night. As they explained, the purpose of Monday’s meeting was to discuss the Honors standards; the purpose of Back-to-School night was to discuss the State Standards.
The Honors standards were far more interesting.
I received a 16-page handout from the History teacher tonight outlining all of the State standards students are expected to have been taught and demonstrate knowledge of on the May exam.
Let that sink in. SIXTEEN pages
Some examples:
- Know the significance of Hammurabi’s code
- Note the origins of Christianity in the Jewish Messianic prophecies, the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the New Testament, and the contribution of St. Paul (???) the Apostle to the definition and spread of Christian beliefs (e.g., belief in the Trinity, resurrection, salvation)
- Analyze the importance of family, labor, specialization, and regional commerce in the development of states and cities in West Africa
- Understand the scientific method advanced by Bacon and Descartes, the influence of new scientific rationalism on the growth of democratic ideas, and the coexistence of science with traditional religious beliefs
So…the second bullet is Bigdog’s PhD thesis in a nutshell. I can’t imagine how compressed that material gets in the bigger picture.
Here’s the thing: As part of the testing done at the end of 7th grade, students are required to take a history test covering all 16 pages of the standards despite the fact that they are expected to MEET the standards by the end of eighth grade.
I’m a real fan of challenging kids to learn and learn well. What concerns me is that when teachers are presented with sixteen pages of requirements and part of the overall school API depends on students’ performance on that history test, then what you end up with is a bunch of goal-driven students and teachers driving toward that test grade without really learning to love the learning or the teaching, for that matter.
I thought Graham hit it right on the head with this:
If you define life as hitting the interstate in a huge SUV at 7 a.m., cutting in front of as many other drivers as you can so that you can arrive at work early enough to one-up the guy whose job you want, then NCLB is for you. If you would rather develop a keener sense of what life can be when you care, when you learn broadly, and when you conserve, NCLB can be the bane of your existence.
What is there after testing? No one believes that a strong emphasis on reading and mathematics (and science and writing)) is wrong. It is wrong, though, to emphasize those to the exclusion of all else. That leads to narrow points of view, intolerance of other cultures and religions, narrow political views, a nation of no-nothings…
What I saw in the faces of the history and literature teachers tonight was that SUV/interstate driver mentality — “We have to hit these stops and we have this much time to do it and more to the point, your students are Honors students so we have to hit them harder and faster and dammit we’re already on the way.”
Compare this to the non-Honors Science teacher, whose words still resonate with me. He started off the presentation by making us all laugh and then explaining why laughter creates a better learning environment, going into a bit of detail about endorphin release and the like. He never mentioned testing or standards. He did talk about how his classroom operated, what kind of learning environment he thought worked with kids this age and how much he loved teaching science and seeing kids get excited about it.
And the Yearbook Advisor/Art teacher just rocks. Of course, if Dancergirl hadn’t made the yearbook staff she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn Art from this teacher. She would’ve been forced into the AVID elective track instead so that she could be prepared to write her college essay, a resume, and all number of other things, all focused on preparing students in the ‘academic middle’ for college.
Does that suggest that the arts should only be available to the Honors students and that those in the ‘academic middle’ are best served by taking their electives for all of middle school and high school and applying them toward getting into college?
Is college the only path to success? Really? Is AVID the only path to get there? I digress, sorry.
My thoughts on AVID and college are for another post. The point of this one is to say that while NCLB is a noble thought, in my opinion the execution falls short, particularly in the area of teaching kids to love learning and encouraging teachers to teach creatively.
Technorati Tags: NCLB, education, missouri valley timesnews, Pete Graham, AVID
