Am getting lots of emails like this one–and if readers of the Corner don’t like the “No Child Left Behind Act,” who does?
Peter-
As a new school committee member this year in a
suburban Boston district, I can tell you that in
practice No Child Left Behind too often means “No
Child Gets Ahead”. This is the result of two
dynamics. One is the legislation itself, which
focuses resources on everything but the advanced
learners in a system. The other, however, is the
near-theology of public education.
Classroom teachers come overwhelmingly out of state
colleges, are fairly pragmatic, and know better than
just about anybody what works and what does not work….
However, policy initiatives at the level of central
school system administration, or state regents or
departments of education, or the federal DOE, are
driven by a group of people who do not come out of the
highly hands-on and empirical state colleges. Rather,
they come out of the “top” graduate schools of
education in the country….[And] the
people who wnet through them and are far enough along
in their careers to have decisive influence in those
policy initiatives are still in thrall to
near-theological ideologies of egalitarianism,
universality, and mainstreaming….
The result is that kids are all thrown into a
mainstreamed classroom. Some do not belong. Some are
behaviorally disruptive, reducing everybody’s
opportunity to learn. Rather than recognize these
problems and question their ideologies, the theorists
tell the classroom teacher to implement
“differentiated instruction”, basically telling a
teacher that solving the mess that the theories have
made is the teacher’s job. The result is that a kid
who is capable of algebra slogs through a year of her
classmates not quite getting fractions. A kid who is
asking himself questions about irony, prophetic voice,
and narrative devices gets no engagement on those
topics while the class reads the umpteenth simplistic
morality play about how a multiracial kid with two
moms came to be liked and accepted and overcame her
loneliness…..if something is not done to triage the damage
currently being done, the effect on the global competitiveness of kids
educated in American public schools will be enormous.