NCLB: Old Education for a New World

I'm rereading Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind, and though it's not a book about education, it's a book about the future, in fact the future that is already so close as to be tangible. I think that A Whole New Mind is one of the two most important books of the first decade of this century (the other is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat). Both give pretty clear portraits of the world of the 1990s and the early part of this century, and both are able to clearly extrapolate what the coming world will be like and, mostly by implication (since they are not education books), what education for American citizens must be right now. And of course No Child Left Behind and what Pink calls "test-happy America" have it all wrong.

Pink's general thesis is that, because of what he calls "Abundance, Asia, and Automation," the old jobs associated with the Information Age are going, going, almost gone. Those jobs--the ones that can be automated by computers or outsourced to Asian workforces who are skilled, educated, and willing to work for 20 cents on the dollar--cannot be reclaimed by American workers. And they are characterized by mostly left-brained skills--logic, repetition, programmability. And, for our purposes here, they are comprised of mostly testable skills: right or wrong, black or white.

Though left-brained skills will not disappear from the new society, right brained skills will be of equal or greater value. Pink calls this new age the "Conceptual Age," and he makes a strong case that the Industrial Age and the Information Age have been left in its wake. The conceptual age is here.

And what specifically are the skills, the knowledge, needed to succeed in the 
Conceptual Age? Pink lists what he calls the "six senses": Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. It's not my purpose here to go into any of these six in detail, but suffice it to say none of them are testable. These are all right brain, high-concept qualities and they are the skills that will be needed by American citizens in the future. None of these can be tested; none of these can be objectively assessed, and adequate yearly progress can not be unambiguously documented. "More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify," Pink writes. Tougher to quantify: quantification is exactly what the NCLB is trying to do, and because of this it's missing the more important qualities of a 21st centruy education.

One of the impetuses that drives the conservative support for the NCLB is the need to ward off ambiguity and change, to reduce the world to neat tests of correct answers. But, as Pink shows, the word will have none of it. Regardless of Bush and Spellings and the rest of the NCLB supporters, the world is changing.

The NCLB, giving in to this outdated urge for correct answers and left-brained algorithms, is doing a great job of preparing American children and future citizens with all the skills they will need to compete for 19th and 20th century jobs. We are testing our children back into the cotton mills and auto assembly lines.

However, someone should tell test-happy and obsessed-with-punishment Congress, as it debates the re-authorization of the NCLB, that it's unfortunately now the 21st century.

The Definition of Proficiency and, Ultimately, of Education

An entry, pretty insightful in many ways, by Erin Richards in the July 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel School Zone Blog brings up a couple of interesting points, but I believe that she has misunderstood the value of her observations and misinterpreted the results. After attending a session at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, she writes, "In [Tony] Wagner's opinion, one problem is that nobody agrees on what constitutes 'effective education.'" Yes, of course that's true. Nobody agrees on what makes great music, beautiful figure skating, or excellent marinara sauce, either. (I know that in all cases here--including Wagner's--the "nobody" part is an exaggeration: of course there are groups of people who agree that Beethoven is great. Let's let that slide for the sake of discussion.)

For the most part, this lack of agreement is not a problem: it's a reality and in fact a strength. It's called "many ideas," "two heads are better than one, " or even the "D" word that so many conservatives loathe, "diversity." The current trend in education to test everything that breathes, best exemplified by the NCLB, runs directly counter to this, however. It's an attempt to remove this wonderful multiplicity of ideas and substitute for it a hegemony of ideas (actually, one idea). And to further exacerbate this, it's a hegemony of bad, even dangerous, ideas.

A few days later, in the same blog in the same newspaper, Alan J. Borsuk makes a very telling point: "What gets tested gets taught." He concludes from this, rightly, that "[s]chools are spending more time on reading and math [the two areas required to be tested by the NCLB]and less time on other subjects such as science, social studies and various kinds of arts, as a general trend." The intersection of these two ideas reveals the danger: if we all agree with Bush and Spellings and swallow the NCLB's wrong assumptions and bad policies, we damage American education.

For the NCLB assumes that the only things that matter are those that can be tested by mindless tests. Even the report from the Center on Education Policy, which occasions Borsuk's article, falls into the trap: The press release, kind of an executive summary, states, "[t]he weight of evidence indicates that state test scores in reading and mathematics have increased overall since No Child Left Behind was enacted." Of course they have increased! That's all that's being taught--how to pass these tests. What is happening here is that "proficiency" and "education" are being re-defined as "passing tests." It forces schools to concentrate on the meaningless--passing tests--rather than education, whatever it is. In fact, decrying the demise of other subjects such as social studies and science, the Center on Education Policy's report calls for more testing in these subjects. They just don't get it.

The impetus behind this reduction of education to tests of testable trivia comes from the belief in the value of objectification. It's akin to the difference in the Olympics between swimming and diving, or between speed skating and figure skating: swimming and speed skating are races, and excellence is determined by who wins, an assessment that can be objectively determined (and with modern technology, there can't even be any arguments in the case of races that are decided by .001 second and cannot be assessed by the eyes of observers).

But diving and figure skating are more iffy. While there are rubrics for the judges to follow and clear scales of performance to be applied, it comes down to the judges: experienced experts carefully who apply all their knowledge and skill and experience to determine a "winner." It's to some extent a subjective matter: identical performances by skaters or divers on different days with different judges very easily will give different results. And this is what drives the testers like Spellings crazy, this is what they can't handle: diversity.

Richards writes, "an 8-year-old knows that the only way she gets better at gymnastics is by watching videotapes of herself and listening to her coach's evaluation." Her use of a gymnastics example is felicitous: gymnastics is one of those judged sporting events, where proficiency cannot be unambiguously measured. This is a great model of education, a sort of No Gymnast Left Behind (Really!), if you will: you have experienced coaches [teachers]; you have an almost one-to-one educational situation, not 8 classes a day of 35 students each; you have the necessary equipment and supplies; you have careful and constant feedback [not one-time, high stakes tests] from the coach [teacher]; and the result of a poorly executed move is positive advice and feedback designed to help, not punish; the penalty for a mistake [such as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress] is not immediate termination. Yet, in the Bushy education model we are supposed to agree on, what are these evaluations, tests, and assessments; and who are the coaches? Multiple choice tests of grammar and memorized word definitions pass for measures of writing proficiency. What is the value of this?

You have to be very careful of "education" reports that profess to show increases in "proficiency" when what they really show is that force-feeding our children a steady diet of test-taking strategies produces higher scores on a limited number of trivial tests. We don't all agree on what education is, but whatever education is, it's not this. NCLB stinks like rotten fish in a marinara sauce.

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.

Is the NCLB Horrific?

On the home page of his Eduwonk blog, Andrew Rotherham quotes someone who has praised it for "separat[ing] the demagogic attacks on NCLB from the serious criticism." In his July 5 entry, Rotherham, who, among his numerous books on education counts a book he has co-edited with Chester Finn (remember him?), notes "I'd still really like to see someone make the true and courageous point that while hardly perfect, No Child Left Behind isn't nearly as horrific as it's made out to be."

In serious rhetorical criticism, we call this "begging the question." The question to be asked is not, "why is no one of courage and truth standing up for NCLB?" as Rotherham would have it; it's "is the NCLB 'horrific'?" (to use Rotherham's word). Let's determine the answer to that first, before we attribute courage and love of truth to supporters of the NCLB.

The context of Rotherham's statement was the appearance of the major Democratic presidential hopefuls before the National Education Association Convention. In his blog, Rotherham waxes ecstatic over Senator Obama's supposed support for merit pay and Senator Clinton's supposed support for charter schools. Also commenting on Rotherham's observation is blogger TeacherJay, who offers caution about jumping on the NCLB-bashing bandwagon because, "When you get right down to it though isn’t NCLB’s goal to help children and reform schools?"

To TeacherJay, I answer, no, at least not as I understand "helping children" and "reforming schools." I agree that education is in trouble and I assert that children are not being helped by it as much as they deserve to be. I also agree that it needs to be reformed. But the NCLB's "reforms" are analogous to reforming the tax code to increase Exxon-Mobil's profits: it's not the way the country needs to go.

Merit pay and charter schools have been two cornerstones of the conservative attempt to "reform" American education for a long time. But what's behind these two principles?

Merit Pay

Merit pay sounds like a good idea: in true capitalist fashion, meritorious teachers get rewarded by receiving more money. Non-meritorious teachers don't get more money. The dirty little secret of merit pay, however, is who determines merit? And how do they do it? (For a grimly humorous but oh-so-telling look at this issue, see "No Dentist Left Behind.") For the sake of illustration, let me hypothesize an exaggerated example: suppose in an advanced algebra course, the final "assessment" consisted entirely of questions on plumbing. (This is what we call an "invalid test," by the way--a test that doesn't really measure what it says it's measuring.) And further let's assume that teachers' merit pay is based on their students' scores on this invalid assessment.

You can see where I'm going: unless the means of evaluating "merit" are valid, i.e., give accurate results about the items being evaluated, the awarding of merit pay becomes very problematic. But what if the assessment (evaluation) is manipulated, controlled by forces with political agendas? Can you imagine a biology teacher's merit being based on his students' score on a Creationism assessment? A geography teacher's merit being based on his students' scores on multiple choice tests that include questions such as, "The capital of Yugoslavia is (A, B, C, or D)...?" Or an English teacher's merit determined by her students' ability to parrot back pre-determined and un-thought-about interpretations of great works of literature?

By the way, Elizabeth Kantor has come very near to advocating this in her speech before the Conservative Women's Network, reprinted on the Heritage Foundation's site: ranting about "politically correct" liberal English teachers, as one example, she laments the loss of "...the 'permanent things' that conservatives are supposed to be defending. Some of those things—like the chivalrous attitude toward women that you find in Chaucer's poetry—are wonderful inventions for which we can thank Western civilization." Imagine a teacher's merit being determined by whether she can get her students to accept, unquestioningly, the permanent value of chivalry. If you can think imaginatively and creatively about a work of literature, she seems to be saying, you fail. And, under merit pay guidelines, your teacher fails.

In short, "assessment" underlies "merit pay," and assessment equals control. Teach what we tell you to teach or you lose your merit pay.

This is not educational reform; this is educational hijacking. And the metaphor is not that strained: Paul D. Houston has written of the NCLB: "For example, pilots, while subject to rules and regulations, are still presumed to know better how to fly the plane than their passengers." Or those who try to hijack their planes.

Charter Schools

The concept of charter schools is part of the larger goal of privatizing education, based on the theory that anything people like parents and teachers and local school boards can do, private corporations can do better, or at least make money from it. (A number of observers--see Stan Karp's chapter in Many Children Left Behind--have asserted that, underneath, this is the real goal of the NCLB--to manipulate the tests so public schools will be deemed failing, and then re-channel the money into private for-profit schools.) Under the much-hyped voucher system, charter schools get to take money from the public coffers intended for public education and spend it on their own students, whom they have taken out of the public school systems.

Now, who do you suppose will get the vouchers to go to those for-profit and charter schools? The same ones whose parents shop at Bloomingdale's and Hammacher Schlemmer. And who will get what little is left of the educational money? The ones who shop, if they can afford to shop at all, at Walmart. This ever growing split in the education afforded the haves vs. the education afforded the have-nots in our society is devastatingly documented by Jonathan Kozol in his most recent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. It is not courageous to support this.

When charter schools and private for-profit schools are supported with public educational funds, the result is the Walmartization of public education. When teachers' pay is based partly on how well they teach their students to be little more than mindless test-takers, the search for truth suffers.

Horrific indeed.

Education and the Unemployed

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the point in her new Bait and Switch that modern corporate practices of laying off workers of long-standing loyalty and productiveness will ultimately be counter-productive for this nation. (She doesn't say "for the world," but I think it may be extrapolated to that.) And it seems to me that modern America post-NCLB education will be a central player in the continuance of this.

Bait and Switch, a follow-up to her eye-opening Nickel and Dimed, is an account of how Ehrenreich went undercover as an unemployed woman looking for a job in early 21st century America. It is a long and painful and sad journey through an America that is cold, heartless, phony, exploitative, and demeaning beyond belief. It shows how the unemployed and underemployed white collar workers in America, seven million in number yet uncounted by cleverly massaged governmental statistics on unemployment, have been sold a bill of goods by our society. They were told, get a good education, work hard, be creative and thoughtful, and you will have a rewarding job, health insurance, and security for life. In fact, those who get a good education and work hard are likely to be among the tens of millions of workers laid off summarily and unable to find any form of employment even close to what they have a right to expect or what the nation and world need of them. As educated and skilled workers commanding good wages in the new American economy, they are most threatening to mega-corporations' profits and thus need to jettisoned in the name of the bottom line.

It is of course too early for the NCLB to have affected these people, most of who are in their forties or fifties with decades of productive work behind them, but it's important to examine the role the current trends in education will play in perpetuating that world. On one hand, it may be argued that a mindless education that teaches nothing so much as how to take dumbed-down tests, follow orders, and not think may be the perfect education for a corporate America that values exactly those traits. Ehrenreich notes that as her job searches proved more and more futile, it became clear that one thing working against her was her intelligence and ability to think independently. (Others were of course her age and her femaleness, as you might imagine.) For corporate America, the much-sought-after "Team Player" is really just bizspeak for "Unquestioning Order-Taker." She ends her book with a sobering recounting of the challenges facing America's educated and experienced and skillful unemployed and a sort of call to action: "Nothing will change until America's disposable and disposed-of white-collar workers begin to come together to reclaim their dignity and self-worth...." (page 247). She has developed a website, http://www.unitedprofessionals.org, to jump-start this coming together.

Now, who better to come together in a mass refusal to take it anymore than millions of highly educated, creative, intelligent people who have been grievously wronged? Imagine a new Cesar Chavez stepping up and mobilizing all that intelligence!

Which is why education is such a threat to the wealthy Republican right, why they take such amazing steps as teaching "creationism" in place of real science, promoting private school vouchers so that privatized schools can make more money off our children, continuing to channel huge amounts of money into already wealthy suburban white school systems while withholding funds from inner city schools as "punishment" for failing to meet "standards," and, most important, using the NCLB to dumb down education to ensure generations of non-thinking, multiple-choice-test-taking, order-accepting students.

Now, if this were just a matter of isolated entities like Exxon-Mobil or IBM existing in their own little worlds, with no effect upon most of us, I would have no complaint. But in fact, these corporations engaged in laying off, downsizing, outsourcing in the pursuit of ever-larger profits are citizens of America and of the World. Ehrenreich makes a good case that it's not only profits that impel them; even worse, it's sheer incompetence, a culture built on firing the educated and talented and experienced and creative and successful, and rewarding the glassy-eyed yes-men. (The sexist reference is intentional here.)

We have the resources and education and brain-power in this country right now to solve many of our problems, indeed many of the world's problems. We need medical researchers and nurses and software engineers and writers and accountants; most of all, we need thousands and tens of thousands more teachers. And we have them, but they are being systematically cut out of useful positions, stripped of healthcare, forced to spend 10-12 hours a day looking for a job--any job, even if it's a people greeter at a Walmart. Our economy, once the envy of the world for its ability to marshall its brains and resources to solve huge problems, allows New Orleans to drown and doesn't even know how to save it. Children educated under the NCLB, multiple-choice tested into submission, won't have a clue about how to come up with a smart, creative solution to anything.