Don’t forget why No Child Left Behind was needed, writes Karin Chenoweth in the Washington Post.
A very odd notion is circulating these days that the No Child Left Behind law has forced schools to become boring, dull places where children do endless worksheets and are discouraged from thinking for themselves. This argument holds that under “No Child,” students are forced to simply regurgitate what teachers tell them, which — because of flawed standardized tests — is often confusing and sometimes demonstrably false. Get rid of the tests, or at least pay less attention to their results, critics say, and schools can return to their pre-NCLB excellence.
. . . long before No Child Left Behind, far too many classrooms were boring, dull places where children were forced to do endless worksheets, discouraged from independent thinking and subjected to teachers providing confusing and sometimes demonstrably false information.
In short, there are no good old days to which we might return. The schools with the most “left-behind” students were not fun, creative, learning-loving places before NCLB demanded proof the students were learning reading and math.
Chenoweth is the author if It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, which describes schools that are teaching low-income and minority students to reach high standards. It is possible to do so without endless worksheets or rote learning, she found.
Update: In comments, Liz Ditz mentioned a terrific post on false dichotomies on Teaching in the 408. EssJ critiques a column in Teacher Magazine by Anthony Cody, who argues that testing is destroying the chance to achieve a “gold standard” in education. EssJ writes:
. . . he’s not right that a focus on teaching kids, especially Black and Latino kids, the skills they need and have been historically denied, is an impediment to bringing deeper levels of learning to our school communities.
. . . The NCLB false dichotomy argument states that teachers, schools, and districts face a choice between teaching either a bland, mind-numbing, soul-killing, love-of-learning-destroying curriculum of skill-based instruction, or a rich, multi-faceted, Duck-Dodgers-and-the-21st-and-a-half-century curriculum that fills up every fancy verb on the upper echelon of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The NCLB false dichotomy argument further asserts that otherwise good, hard-working, whole-child-supporting folks are being forced to choose the former or face all kinds of big badness.
Before NCLB, “more kids learned less,” EssJ writes. There was no gold standard.
Students should master basic skills before spending time on enrichment, even if that means postponing “yearbook, dioramas and the french horn,” EssJ argues.
I love this part:
[Cue: Teacher, with hands clasped, making the argument that kids who struggle in school are the kids who most need electives like wood shop, which is the only class they are "good in."
To which I respond: Bullshit. Kids who struggle in school need more help in school, not classes designed to make them forget that they aren't good in school. To the extent that these kids exhibit negative behaviors, the behaviors in question are derived from the negative feeling that comes from being bad at school, feelings which will not be changed by making a bird house. Low-achieving kids are helped by receiving the kind of instruction that causes them to no longer be low-achievers.]
In reporting for my book, Our School, I saw a lot of support for this. Students need to master basic reading and math skills before they can go on to understand literature, history, science and algebra.
That’s not my understanding of the rationale behind NCLB.
I understood that it was driven by the widespread misuse of Title I money, treating it by state and local school districts as if it were “found money” and not subject to usage requirements. The AYP requirements are a means of measuring compliance with usage requirements.
There are no good old days to which we might return in the schools where there were the most left-behind students.
But that’s not true in the good schools in middle class neighborhoods. There, most of the students would have done fine in yearly tests. Now, there is more emphasis on testing, arguably making those formerly good schools more boring, duller places by focusing on tests which most of the students would have passed anyway.
I was reading a short story this weekend. It was just a bit of pulp-magazine crime fiction that was written in 1945. Not a story with any axe to grind. At one point a character notes that a rather rough and seedy policeman has uttered a phrase “in passable high school Latin.”
Sigh. Imagine High School Latin. My father had Latin in school. Greek too. Also Calculus, English grammar, and world history. This was in a small town in rural Texas in the late 1940s.
There were “good old days.” They’re just so long-gone that we’ve forgotten.
Instead, we’ve got this:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20060315/ai_n16221034
“only 45 percent of California State University freshmen were ready for college-level work in math and English”
There’s going to be hell to pay for this decline. Hell to pay.
Cardinal Fang,
I love your work around the internet, but I think you’re mistaken here. No one’s holding a gun to those “good” schools’ heads and making them waste everyone’s time on weeks of test prep. The “good” principals and “good” teachers in the “good” schools have chosen that solution, which suggests to me that they weren’t that hot to begin with. What’s stopping them just pulling out borderline students for short-term small group tutoring, or maybe paying them to come in after school (to avoid interrupting their normal studies)? If you offered older students $15 for one hour of satisfactory work and younger students non-cash prizes, I bet ten hours would get you pretty far. You’d still have to pay the tutor, but this is still a drop in the bucket when you consider that the school probably has $10,000 a year to spend per student.
But that’s not true in the good schools in middle class neighborhoods.
It is true, these middleclass schools don’t do a good job with “poor” students and historically under-performing minorities either. Middle-class schools only do a good enough job with that sliver of students at the top. These kids are disproportionately located in affluent school districts, not in poor urban ones.
There is no evidence of a decline in these middle class schools as a result of NCLB’s testing mandates.
I went to a good middle-class suburban school, back Before NCLB, and it was boring, dull, and the work was endless and mostly stupid.
(Some of that was doubtless me, rather than the school; I’m sure I would have found any likely available school dull, boring, and mostly stupid.)
But, seriously – if they’re having to change to get their test scores sufficient to show proficiency, they obviously weren’t that great in the first place, didn’t they?
If they’re changing to have more emphasis on tests despite not needing to, that’s an administrative problem.
I think for wealthy suburban schools, there’s an education arms race. Everyone cares about property values, and property values depend on the perception of school quality. So if the school district next door has higher test scores, then, the argument goes, we’d better make our test scores higher.
Test taking skills can be learned: how to bubble correctly, how to erase, how to guess, how to outthink the test maker when you don’t know what the answer is, what kind of problems to expect on the test. Students who practice those skills will score higher than students who don’t, on average.
So school districts are doing this kind of test preparation. It works, in that it increases test scores, but it’s not improving the underlying skills that are what we really want to test.
We want third graders to read better, not to take reading tests better. We hope that the second is a proxy for the first, but inevitably, when we test for something, we get it. So, if our test partially measures the ability to bubble better and to guess better, and those skills are easier to teach than reading, we should expect schools to spen time on bubbling and guessing. Even though bubbling and guessing are not skills we actually care about.
Anecdotally: My niece and nephew go to the same schools I went to as a child. As elementary students, they spent a week or so a year working on test practice. I didn’t do that.
Was NCLB really needed? I have no idea. All my lifetime I have observed that educators who were susceptible to educational fads have argued that teachers used to “teach by rote memorizationâ€. I always thought that was a silly thing to say. It would be equally silly to fall into the habit of thinking that “before NCLB schools were boring, dull places . . . . .†The idea that there was a clear and present need for a national law on education, or that American education was obviously broken down and in need of “reformâ€, is, in my humble opinion, pure rhetoric. Schools have never been perfect. Teachers have never been perfect. Good intentions have always been a dime a dozen. True excellence has always been rare.
I read Karin Chenoweth’s article. It’s a good one. But it does not definitively answer the question – were schools better before NCLB, or now? I don’t think that question can be answered yet, or perhaps ever. Chenoweth observes that teachers not subjected to outside assessment tend to be unmotivated. My experience, growing up in the fifties, does not confirm that. I remember one teacher who definitely didn’t care, but only one. (Okay, there were a few would-be coaches who taught PE, and thereby taught a few other things that they shouldn’t have.) Most of my teachers were neither saints nor master artisans. They were competent adults, solid citizens, doing the best they could with what they had. They would no more need outside assessment to prompt them to be good teachers than they would need outside assessment to prompt them to be good parents.
There is a tendency to polarize and idealize teaching too much, to think that if learning is not exciting and fun it must be dull and boring. Since we don’t want dull and boring then the only acceptable standard is fun and exciting. I prefer a much more mundane, but effective and sustainable, perspective. School is the work of the child. Work is work. It can’t be always fun, and it doesn’t need to be. Work is not motivated by interest. It is motivated by necessity. But work brings rewards, intrinsic and intangible as well as material. A good boss minimizes waste and frustration in the interests of productivity. A good teacher does the same.
In the last few decades the term “worksheet teacher†has been used pejoratively. I think this is most unfortunate. Good teachers used worksheets before NCLB, and good teachers use them now. Poor teachers, then and now, can certainly use them unproductively, but the same could be said of any educational material. To disparage worksheets, it seems to me, is just another way of building up the pernicious dichotomy of dull-and-boring versus fun-and-exciting.
NCLB was needed? I’ll remain agnostic on that.
These are not my words but those of TMAO, who blogs at Teaching in the 408. He is commenting on an article in Teacher Magazine written by Anthony Cody.
This article, and the phalanx of ed school kids who support its underlying argumentation, creates a systematic dichotomy where it does not exist. The NCLB false dichotomy argument states that teachers, schools, and districts face a choice between teaching either a bland, mind-numbing, soul-killing, love-of-learning-destroying curriculum of skill-based instruction, or a rich, multi-faceted, Duck-Dodgers-and-the-21st-and-a-half-century curriculum that fills up every fancy verb on the upper echelon of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The NCLB false dichotomy argument further asserts that otherwise good, hard-working, whole-child-supporting folks are being forced to choose the former or face all kinds of of big badness.
This argument doesn’t hold water for any number of reasons: pre-2002 teachers didn’t like curriculum either; there never has been a so-called “gold standard” in education, much less one “drive(n) out” by a commitment to standardized measures of achievement; more kids learned less in the past than now; not to mention the widespread post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning in terms of how teachers, schools, and districts choose to respond to the federal mandate to ensure that at least 1/3 of kids should know some stuf
[snip]
Cody leaves terra firma, however when he starts applying causation where none exists, and when he asserts that we should be worried about what we paint on the bow of the boat before fixing the leaks in the hull. This is all a matter of prioritizing, and ending a denial of appropriate education comes first. The brothers Wright preceded Neil Armstrong, The Ramones preceded Green Day, and the commitment to develop an educational system that ensures kids gain the type of skills that makes all future learning possible must necessarily precede the nebulous “gold-standard” I don’t feel the least bit guilty for not embracing.
But you should go read the full blog post, and leave your opinions with TMAO too.
CF,
I can see maybe an hour’s test-taking practice on bubbling and guessing making a difference, but beyond that, there has to be less and less additional impact with each hour of purely procedural practice. Weeks of procedural test prep is not a good use of time, even the goal is just raising test scores. Also, if I were a parent at a school like that, I would make sure to schedule family vacation time during those weeks and return in time for the exam.
Now, if the test prep were focused on reviewing math facts and working math problems, I would be much more on board. But to an unsympathetic person like myself, it sounds like these schools spend most of the year meandering around without a plan, and then lurch into a poorly thought out intensive review session, not unlike a college freshman blowing off course reading until final’s week.
Most of my teachers were neither saints nor master artisans. They were competent adults, solid citizens, doing the best they could with what they had. They would no more need outside assessment to prompt them to be good teachers than they would need outside assessment to prompt them to be good parents.
If so, why were schools churning out so many illiterate students? Part of the answer probably is that teachers are not the only ones in schools, what they can do is drastically affected by what the school district administrators do. And the incentives on school administrators are doubtful – they don’t face the consequences in the classroom of their decisions.
Quite probably your teachers were doing the best they could with what they had. However, the best they could wasn’t that good. Direct Instruction’s results in Project Followthrough showed that better is achievable. All schools should be achieving those sorts of results, and teachers should be given the tools to achieve them.
Brian,
According to your post, schools and teachers never have been, aren’t now, and never will be perfectly good or perfectly bad. So our arguments and actions as to the quality of our particular schools are pointless when one realizes nothing can be done to change this immutable property of the public school system. That certainly makes it easier for one to do nothing. As for me, I think we can apply our reason, efforts, and wills to figuring out just how to deliver good educations to the majority of people. Of course, this won’t be easy.
Tracy W. wrote:
This is typical nonsense from the “reform” crowd. Here are the facts, from none other than US govt:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 99%
male: 99%
female: 99% (2003 est.)
Source:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2103.html
If we are talking about functional illiteracy, it is estimated that we are graduating a million of these functional illiterates from high school every year.
I recently joined a tutoring program, and last night was my first night tutoring high school students. In theory I was supposed to help with algebra. I found that the student working with me was completely lost, not only in algebra, but in arithmetic. After helping her name variables and simplify equations, she was left with 4x = 24. She was completely unable to solve for x. She also wanted a calculator for 18/2, and was confused by the idea that 1/2 x and 0.5x were the same thing. There may not have been a golden age of education, but my grandmother, who graduated in 11th grade from a country school that had one class per grade, was able to do arithmetic in her head. I don’t really care how it’s taught, of if it’s taught only because it’s on a test, but students graduating from high school should be able to do basic math.
If you visit TMAO’s website, be sure to read the Comments area, including Anthony Cody’s own reply to TMAO’s critique. He makes it clear that he never imagined “good old days.” Cody has been teaching in inner-city Oakland for nearly 20 years. His street cred is pretty good.
As for books defending or questioning NCLB and whether it’s narrowing curriculum and perhaps retarding progress toward better teaching (which is really the issue — improving teaching, not harking back to the old days), see Bill Ferriter’s blog post and review of the new book “Tested” by Linda Perlstein:
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/
Regarding conventional wisdom that says good suburban schools are bastions of superior teaching…
I have friends who have mortgaged themselves up the wazoo in order to live in a prestigious school district. They discovered that schools with great test scores also have their share of mediocre teachers who basically just assign math problems out of the text and let the kids teach themselves math, assign worksheets and make diorama “reading” projects. These teachers are very good at teaching students who don’t have a lot of academic needs. And if the student doesn’t get it, the parents step in with tutoring, science and math camps, etc. The difference for poor kids is that their parents can’t afford all the extras to make up for less than stellar teaching.