Funding for NCLB?

One major focus of all the criticism directed against No Child Left Behind is the fact that it makes excessive demands on students, teachers, and schools, without providing the necessary federal funding to implement all its directives and achieve its goals. To that, I say, hooray for lack of funding. That's the best part of the whole NCLB package. It's such destructive legislation we can only hope it will never be funded enough to achieve its ends.

Typical criticism (I could quote many many more): "No Child Left Behind attempted to curtail the problem [narrowing the achievement gap], but simply continued the administrative trend of over-mandating and under-funding initiatives." Narrowing the achievement gap is, of course, what we all want. (Actually, I want the achievement gap eliminated, but that's another story for another day.) And of course, as a teacher I'm all for increased pay for teachers, which presumably would trickle down from increased funding for NCLB in general.

But let's imagine for a moment what a fully-funded NCLB means: as more resources are poured into the tested subjects ("math" and "reading"), funds will be pulled out of non-tested subjects. We have already seen that time is being taken away from non-tested subjects--everything from kindergarten naps and elementary school recesses to music, art, and social studies is being cut to the bone to make time for teaching to the math and reading tests. Now, as money for these programs continues to dry up, more time and resources will be spent on testable stuff, such as reading and math.

Of course, it's not testable--it just gives the vote-grabbing illusion of being testable. A score on invalid current tests of reading and math is meaningless, but it seems to mean something, and the politicians currently hawking NCLB use these meaningless scores to create votes for themselves, giving the illusion that they are doing something. "Accountability," they call it, and it's a "god-word" that masks the control over curriculum and education Washington is trying to establish.

The illusion of testability, the reliance on test scores as if they meant something, is one of the most dangerous aspects of NCLB that threatens to spread beyond education and into society in general. Of course, the American public is already overly-enamored of test scores (look at the almost unquestioned trust in SAT scores today, and the previously unquestioned trust in now discredited IQ scores. SAT scores are well on their way to becoming discredited as well.). The reduction of American education to that which can be simple-mindedly measured will only be furthered if NCLB is fully funded.

Much of Daniel Pink's recent work deals with the skills that future citizens will need to have. In A Whole New Mind he shows that left-brained abilities (the kinds of tasks which can be reduced to rote or automation or algorithm) were valuable in the Industrial Age and even the early parts of the Information Age, but that right-brained abilities are crucial to success in the 21st century. He notes "Six Senses" of right-brained thinking:

• Design (by which he means the holistic and emotional apprehension and manipulation of space and objects),
• Story,
• Symphony (synthesis not analysis),
• Empathy,
• Play,
• Meaning ("not just accumulation").

Check out CNN's Business 2.0 for examples of new careers in the new century; note the synthesizing of skills which cannot be tested. (Thanks to Daniel Pink's blog for highlighting this article).

Not one of these can be tested, nor can "mastery" of any one of these be demonstrated by tests. Yet these are exactly the skills and types of thinking and activities that are being dumped by NCLB. Fully fund the NCLB, and you relegate our children to a nineteenth-century skillset in the 21st century.