State Representative David Bly, District 25B

Since the departure of former Commissioner Yecke, we have not heard much about NCLB, the President’s education act. Although across the country there is a lot of dislike of this unfunded mandate, it is difficult to encourage state legislatures to act against it, most likely because to reject it means loss of federal funds. Outgoing Minneapolis Superintendent, David Jennings, said in an interview on Public Radio that he would vote to reject the constraints of NCLB because it just costs too much to administer the plan and takes money way from the important work of the schools.

TEACHER UNION LEFT BEHIND ON NCLB LAWSUIT

The nation’s largest union boldly pledged a year ago to rally states to sue the Bush administration over education spending under the No Child Left Behind law. At least 30 state legislatures, including some led by Republicans, have expressed their displeasure over the law. Not one state, however, has agreed to join a lawsuit the teachers’ union announced one year ago and planned to file by last summer. “Maintaining a good relationship with the federal government that oversees your programs and suing them at the same time makes it a very difficult proposition,” said Patty Sullivan, deputy executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “You have to be pretty certain that you’re going to win, because you really will jeopardize your ability to get other things. You have to think through the politics of that,” she said. The threatened challenge, which would have been the most direct shot at the heart of Bush’s domestic agenda, is not dead, the union says. A few school districts have agreed to participate and the union is weighing when to go on if no state joins the fight. Union leaders claim the primary reason the suit has stalled is that states fear retaliation by the Education Department. Yet participation by states is critical because they would have the strongest standing to sue, the union says.

I’ve quoted Deborah Meier before and find her commentary on President’s No Child Left Behind legislation enlightening, here she is in a recent article in The Nation:

No Politician Left Behind
by DEBORAH MEIER
[from the June 14, 2004 issue]

Education is always about politics–in the best and worst senses. In the best sense what happens in our schools is an expression of our beliefs and values, what we want the next generation to be like. But education is also political in the partisan sense–as politicians of all stripes seek to rally their troops around schooling practices, to tie other political agendas into our agendas for schools. Social promotion, bilingual education, phonics, “new math”–all are issues that resonate with different audiences for reasons other than those that directly concern teachers, parents and kids. Phonics is seen as “right-wing authoritarianism,” social promotion as “permissive liberalism” (and depicted as the scourge of New York City schools, despite the fact that almost half the city’s children have been entering high school at least a year over-age for decades) and so forth. Reality often gets lost, and kids suffer in ways neither opponents nor proponents had in mind.

So along comes No Child Left Behind, and from right to left, everyone climbs aboard. It was, after all, an extension of a policy idea hatched under Bush Senior, pursued under Clinton and replicated in many states–the premise of which is that frequent testing will solve educational problems. And in fact the focus on “results,” not “opportunities,” echoes older liberal, not conservative, themes. Yet had anyone read the bill with care, it would have been hard not to fault it on almost every ground, except perhaps the high aspirations embedded in the title.

NCLB proposes to accomplish a statistical impossibilitythat all children score in the top twenty-fifth percentile; it raises false expectations; it’s built on an illusion that tests alone can–and should–measure worthwhile standards; that schools can do it all; that progress comes in steady increments; that penalties will motivate children and teachers; that lack of money is a mere excuse; that a single nationwide system is part of the American dream; and, finally, that schools can do it all. The law literally dictates the books we are allowed to use on a national basis, not to mention the pedagogy for teaching literacy and, coming soon, math. Before long, until eighth grade, little else will get taught at all.

Testing will continue until the education establishment adopts a curriculum, which makes it obvious to legislators that standardized tests can’t evaluate student performance. Marion Brady says, “For more than 30 years, I’ve been trying to convince my fellow educators of this in books, journal articles, and newspaper column. Apparently, it’s a waste of time, for thus far they’ve taken neither issue nor action.
I did it again in my Orlando Sentinel/KRTcolumn for 6/10/04. (See below.)”

How to raise test scores

When Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974, over a period of several years I read it four or five times. I did the same with his 1991 Lila. Both touch on many matters, but what interests me most are his thoughts on human values in general and on “quality” in particular.

I dog-ear my books. Turning down the corners of pages makes it easy to go back and re-read, which is what led me yesterday to Pirsig’s contention in Lila that societies build their beliefs on what they think are facts, but once those beliefs are in place, there’s little interest in new facts unless they reinforce old ones.

“A contradictory fact,” he says, “has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too.”

I’m a hammerer (and not-very-patient one) so being reminded that a fact I’m trying to get people to accept may be rejected for centuries is pretty discouraging. It’s even more discouraging if you believe, as I do, that continuing to reject the fact will contribute to the decline and eventual demise of America.

No, that’s not an exaggeration. Those in today’s classrooms will soon be running things, and the quality of their education will have far-reaching consequences. What they don’t know, and what they don’t do because of what they don’t know, will determine the future of the nation. More than likely, given America’s power, it will determine the future of humankind.

What’s the idea I’m hammering? The same idea Alfred North Whitehead was hammering in 1916 when he told the Mathematical Association of England that school subjects disconnected from each other would be “fatal” to education.

It’s the same idea Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was hammering in 1948 when he wrote that the main thing wrong with American universities was “the curse of departmentalization.”

It’s the same idea John Goodlad was hammering in 1984 when, following a massive study of America’s schools, he said, “The division into subjects and periods (makes schooling) increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.”

It’s the same idea, which dozens of well-known, respected educators were hammering when, a few years ago, Congress shoved them aside, took over the nation’s schools, and legislated the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom of the 1930s.

The idea? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Throwing disconnected, unrelated school subjects at kids may keep them off the streets, may give them some minimal skills, may produce good standardized test scores, but it doesn’t teach them how the world works.

That idea is a really tough sell. It’s unfamiliar. It isn’t logical.. To most people, it doesn’t seem important. And, if it is important, doing something about it is surely someone else’s responsibility. Given all those obstacles, if an integrated curriculum has any chance of making it into classrooms, it probably has to piggy-back on something else-something everyone cares about.

Right now, that “something” that everyone cares about is standardized test scores. If integrating the curriculum promised to raise the scores, it might have a chance.

Raise scores it would. The more kids can remember, the better their scores. Remembering requires a system of mental organization. To be integrated, knowledge has to be organized. Integrating knowledge, then, will improve test scores.

If I’m right, Washington’s pressure on the states to write separate standards for each school subject stands in the way of better test performance.

Merely raising standardized test scores is a poor reason for integrating the curriculum, but if that’s a winning argument, your elected representatives need to hear it.

The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton gave us a far more legitimate motive for acting when he wrote, “. . . we break reality into pieces and then wonder why, after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves out of touch with life, with reality, with the world, and most of all with ourselves.”

What discourages experienced teachers is the fact that words of wisdom like those carry less weight with most of the public and the media than a mysterious number created by a secret test.

Across the state schools and teachers will be busy preparing to meet the newly enacted standards passed by the legislature. It is unfortunate they did not include funding to help with the cost of implementing the new standards, which will require districts to purchase new materials and invest in planning time.