No Child Left Behind - left a whole country behind

It’s probably because my research is centered on assessment that I find myself engaged by this topic. NCLB was the launch of “accountability." While the purpose and goal of NCLB started out as a way to standardize and improve education it quickly became a testing movement – a way to reward and punish schools and put them in competition with each other. In the end we now know that NCLB has not only done nothing to improve education or provide equal opportunity, it has been detrimental to world standing on the PISA and created an environment that led to higher drop-out rates, skill based test prep instruction and an underfunded, totally unrealistic reform that failed to do anything for teachers, students, schools, communities, states or our nation’s education system.

On pages 283-84 Darling-Hammond records our declining scores on the PISA since the implementation of NCLB. The US dropped 13^th to 21st in science, 24^th to 26^th in math, and scoring the lowest in problem solving. On the PIRLS we dropped 9^th to 18^th in reading. With that kind of pattern, we have to look at the whole picture. U.S. schools are failing. Why? Darling infers that attaching high-stakes to testing causes schools to purchase narrowed test-based curriculum and most state tests require recalling and recognizing information while the PISA is more general and inquiry based. I think we can all agree with Darling when she writes, “The kind of analysis assessed on the PISA is closer to the ways in which knowledge and skills are used in the world outside school.” Therefore we can conclude the assessments used by most states are irrelevant to real-life, well unless your goal is to get on Who Wants to be a Millionare or Jepardy.  

I’m reading this other book right now called, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  Diane Ravitch has a similar analysis of the impact NCLB has had on education. In summery she writes that the remedies proposed in NCLB failed for many reasons (fyi – you should know she was supporter of NCLB until November of 2006 when she was asked to be part of a think tank to evaluate NCLB). Non-performing students were not taking advantage of the choice of being bused to a better school or free tutoring, funding wasn’t supporting states in the reform the federal law required, the expectation of 100% proficiency in reading and math, even among students with disabilities, learning disorders and whose 1^st language is not English was not realistic. As a result schools that were not “performing” were punished and labeled, “School in need of Improvement.” Furthermore, there was no standardized accountability across states. States created their own standards and chose their own assessment. States could manipulate both to create an illusion of proficiency. Ravitch writes that she started to see that the continued implantation of NCLB would lead to privatization of our public school system and she wondered how many congressmen really poured over the 1000 page bill that shaped the failing education reform.

So to get back to the reason this topic caught my attention is in other countries, countries that are “doing it better than us” use assessment to promote and produce highly educated students. Darling notes that, “primary school assessments are used guide learning, diagnose students’ needs, and inform teaching…. High school examinations are used to provide information for higher education, vocational training and employment…students often choose the area in which they want to be tested as a means to provide evidence of their qualifications.” This is my view on what assessment should look like and how it should be used.

The United States, on the other hand uses assessment (non-standardized assessment) to reward and punish. Why the competition? It’s proven to not work and we know that there are some schools that simply cannot compete. What happens to those schools? They get closed down? What happens to those students? They get bused to a “better” school? Is this what we want education to look like? Is this a sustainable solution? No! It isn’t! It has not worked in the past and it is not working now. Time for a new idea. In reading chapter 9, I did gain hope for our young country. It seams that some of the things that other countries do and what the PISA measures are making their way into our education system at the federal level. Common Core State Standards and the Smarter Balance assessment seam to be steps in a better direction. My worry is funding and sustainability. Will we be able to keep this up or will we fall short and another action of reform fails?