The United States’ educational system is under siege from within. Antiquated legislation, governing pedagogy, and maligned curricula have failed to prepare our youth for the fluctuating intellectual landscape of society.
Increasing political and economic pressures resulted in government intervention to solve the problem of universal education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 aimed to rectify the situation by delineating a series of national achievement standards for every student by grade level, and holding schools accountable for implementing Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) plans. The course of action mandated that all schools demonstrate their teaching efficacy by using student performance on standardized tests. The incentive of meeting these performance standards being continued federal funding. The lofty goals of the law to realign our ailing institution have had mixed results. While it is true that some schools are showing improvement on standardized test scores, the unforeseen consequences of the NCLB have crippled schools’ abilities to serve all students on an individual basis. Class sizes across the nation are at an all time high, funding for “non-essential” programs like the arts or foreign languages is at an all time low, and the pressure for students to succeed on standardized tests has shifted students’ emphasis away from learning-to-learn” towards learning-to-test.
The discrepancy between the government bureaucracy that formulates the policies and the classrooms that they affect stems from a pedagogical oversight. The NCLB offers an impressive text that claims to promote equity in schools, and yet also acknowledges that not all students share the same needs. Yet, all schools and students are held to the same standards, whether they are primary or secondary English speakers, rural or urban students, equipped to succeed or not. In a society that values personal agency, it seems inappropriate that our school system educates students as if all citizens need only one skill set to maintain its complexity. It is an unrealistic expectation that a homogenized reform of schools could prepare a heterogeneous student body to thrive in our global society. This is incredibly problematic because the funding available to suburban schools allows better access to technology, better nutrition in school lunches, greater community outreach opportunities and so forth. Schools that either can’t afford these resources or value other pedagogical pretenses are disabled relative to the thriving suburban school districts. Classes in non-suburban schools populated by students outside the mainstream middle class are therefore denied optimal learning conditions. It is unrealistic to expect these schools to offer the same caliber of education without also providing them with equal access to resources, the most notorious of which is funding.
No Child Left Behind requires that schools show an annual performance increase in order to remain eligible for federal funding. Funds from the Department of Education make up approximately 35% of k-12 funds. Schools that fail to meet expectations risk losing precious financial support. The rippling effects of one school shutting down would be felt throughout the district, as students would need to be bussed into other programs. Class sizes would rise, and student-teacher contact ratios would quickly escalate. This negative progress might be a good method of purging less homogenized schools, but it is a terrible method for educating the children who attend these failing districts.
The fundamental assumption that all teachers provide an equal space for students to learn is inadequate. Based on the capitalist nature of our society, the school districts with higher budgets to fund teachers’ salaries will be able to attract and retain more high-caliber teachers. In almost all other fields of work in the United States, the professionals who perform at the highest levels are compensated with better salaries and benefits. Poorer schools and districts, most commonly found in the problematic rural and urban zones, simply can’t afford to compete with suburban schools on the basis that local taxes comprising 55% of their total funding are substantially lower by region. The NCLB offers no institutional framework for professional development to assist districts in honing the efficiency of their teachers because of the cost of ongoing faculty education. Teachers are held responsible for school reform success by their potential termination if students don’t meet standards, but little support is given to facilitate their success. Turnover rates of quality teachers is therefore an important variable that is left out by the NCLB, and the better funded, already high-performing schools will naturally attract the better talent. The result of this is a perpetuation of the education gap rather than achieving the goal of educating all students.
What about the students? NCLB takes a Core Knowledge (aka Traditionalist Perspective) approach to educating the masses. By requiring blanket standards for all, students are essentially reduced to receptacles for knowledge to be poured into by the institution. Rather than empowering students with life skills necessary for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their agency is limited to their ability to buy into the dominant paradigm reflected in their curriculum. In the capitalistic model of our culture, it makes poor economic sense to spend money for a purpose that the spender will not see a return. By funding public schools with taxes the society is investing in a future return, but exactly what is that return? Blanket standards of achievement model behavior of future workers – economic pawns that are the backbone of the industries that allow our culture to persist. Students are not encouraged to think outside the box, move for social change, or deviate from what is required because, similarly to how schools receive negative fiscal reinforcement for poor behavior and no compensation for high achievement, students are not rewarded for innovating. A system of education where all individuals are given equal investment on behalf of egalitarianism cannot be created or supported by a capitalist society, because it makes little economic sense.
The unfortunate losers in this drama surrounding No Child Left Behind are the students. Closing schools and breaking up learning communities can only alienate students from the educational system. Instead of continuing to navigate the idearchy, once students have outlived their ten-year obligatory schooling they might just be more prone to drop out entirely. A quirk of the No Child Left Behind mindset is that students who do not graduate high school were provided all the services possible to facilitate their success. The irony that a reform system founded on the principle of all children given equal opportunity has so many cultural shortcomings that hinder achieving that goal requires further inspection. Our government has a system of checks and balances to prevent centralization of political power because a single, elite standard cannot meet the diverse needs that naturally occur in populations of people. It makes little sense for a sweeping centralization of power to govern our education system on this same principle. In spite of policymakers’ best efforts, there continue to be students in our modern NCLB era that do not graduate high school and are effectively left behind. By creating a culture of broad, non-individualized standards our educational system has not succeeded in incorporating all students. By assuming institutions and teachers are immune to fatigue or competing industries with better resources, NCLB has largely overlooked the method of facilitation of its idealized reform. This top-down, centralized model fails to meet the needs of the diverse student population. Students are the last link in the chain of knowledge transfer. They are not the priority of our system – its time that the NCLB be left behind in favor of a system better suited to serve the diverse needs of our student population.
http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/compreform/2pager.html
http://www2.ed.gov/fund/landing.jhtml
By JoJo Cuchiaro
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