Wednesday, September 29, 2004

No Child Left Behind and Socorro's schools

guest colunm

Dr. Robert Holson

(Editor's Note: This is the first in a six-part series of guest columns on the subject of the No Child Left Behind Act and it's effect on the Socorro Consolidated Schools, written by Robert Holson, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and education at New Mexico Tech. Dr. Holson has dedicated extensive study to the subject, however the views expressed in this series are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of his department, New Mexico Tech, the Socorro Consolidated Schools or El Defensor Chieftain.)

In 2001 the Bush administration enacted the No Child Left Behind act, the most far-reaching reform of the public school system in modern times. This series of six guest columns about the impact of NCLB on the Socorro school system warns that this act is the most destructive attack on our public schools in American history. In this introductory essay, I will introduce the major features of the act, and briefly indicate how each is fundamentally flawed.

The first and primary flaw in NCLB is that no part of the Act is based on scientific research. Yet educators and social scientists have intensively studied the causes of academic failure in the USA for generations. As we will see in the next essay, such research reveals that it is the home environment, not the school system, which is predominately responsible for academic success or failure. Further, it is economic poverty in the home which is the fundamental cause of academic failure.

NCLB ignores these established scientific findings, and instead relies on myth, political bias and scapegoating in attempting to reform the American educational system.

In consequence NCLB fails to address the real problems underlying academic failure, and in the process will contribute further to these failures. Right action seldom stems from mistaken first principles.

The second and most devastating feature of NCLB is that it demands absolutely impossible academic performance from schools and children alike. NCLB is a largely unfunded Federal mandate which necessitates hitherto unheard of levels of annual testing. The act further, and completely unrealistically, dictates that such test performance must improve every year for the next 10 years.

Thus the act requires that by 2014, every child must be performing at or above state-established norms. To reach these goals, most public schools will have to improve the percentage of students testing proficient or better by 3% to 6% annually, every year for the next ten years. Needless to say this is an impossible goal. There is no evidence that any school system in this country ever has or ever will perform such a miracle.

Next comes the most punitive aspect of the "test and punish" methodology of the NCLB, the punishment of the victims. As students inevitably fail to meet the impossible goals mandated by NCLB, the act scapegoats teachers and schools for failing to achieve the unachievable.NCLB does so by initiating a series of increasingly disruptive steps, culminating in takeover of the "failed" school, and even termination of the jobs of teachers and administrative staff.

This punitive approach to education reform is at the heart of NCLB.It is based on an untruth. This is the conservative belief that all public sector programs, including public schools, are failures, due to lazy, shiftless, immoral employees, bad people who will cease their indolent ways only when their jobs are either threatened or actually terminated.

The final stage of NCLB occurs when a school has failed to meet ever-increasing standards for five consecutive years. At this point the act mandates the "Enron-ing" of the once-public schools via takeover by management structures which are closer to existing pro-corporate conservative myths. These include taxpayer-funded corporations or religious groups, distance education via television and computer programs, and a variety of other, poorly-defined "cures" for the fictitious, NCLB-created "failure" of the public school system.

Of course there is no compelling evidence that any of these alternatives will work at all, let alone work better than the existing system. However, in the run-up to takeover, the NCLB will certainly have a devastating impact on teacher morale, on the children and communities labeled as failures, and on the ties between the community and the school.

This is precisely why NCLB will be such a disaster. Not only will it create tremendous disruptions, it will eventually remove local community control (but NOT taxpayer funding) of the public school system. This will destroy the critical link between parents, the larger public, and the local school system. Hence NCLB involves nothing less than the take-over by the Federal Government of the formerly community-based public school system, at community not Federal expense.

Next: Children Left Behind — Poverty and School Failure

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