Last week the Department of Education
presented an exciting new roadmap to the nation's governors. The roadmap is a blueprint for making sense of the "sometimes-complex" No Child Left Behind Law. In addition to mapping out the roadmap and printing out the blueprints, Secretary Spellings is "bright-lining" the principles that are the keys to understanding the Law.
"Along with annual assessment and closing the achievement gap by 2014, reporting data to show every child's achievement is one of what I call the "bright line" principles of No Child Left Behind," Secretary Spellings said. "On the road to achievement, we must continue to be guided by these principles. We must continue to have high expectations for every child. We must measure progress towards these standards. And we must hold ourselves accountable for reaching our goals."
cross posted: Political Porn
I think we'd all be alarmed if Secretary Spellings were running a hospital, saying: "We the road to achieving health, we must be guided by these principles: High expectations for every patient, measure progress and hold ourselves accountable for reaching our goals (of measuring health for all patients)." That's not how it works in health care and it's also not how it works in education. Expecting (or willing) the least powerful in the system to do well (the students) won't do much to improve learning. Measuring progress is as basic as sterilizing surgeons tools, so it's not much of a goal. And writing a set of principles that will produce results five election cycles from now is not how you make oneself accountable.
As always, the Blueprint/Roadmap/Bright Lines are about making politicians less accountable while looking as best they can.
Oh, and in true Bush administration fashion it's also about holding onto power, as evidenced in this little quote from Spellings in the forward to the plan: "We must dispel myths about the law that have led some to place roadblocks in its path."
If we expect the best, that's what we'll get. I am proud to report that's the direction our nation and its schools are headed. (Secretary Spellings)
There you go. Will things to be better, through in a bit of cronyism and privatization to stay in power, and things get better.
Here are some passages from the introduction of the document itself:
NCLB was a national endorsement of the conviction that every child matters and that every child can learn. The law and its key goals - to dispel what President Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and to help all students achieve - were supported and passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress.
"The soft bigotry of low expectations" is a brilliant political frame. First, it implies that liberals are the reason for the achievement gap, by being softies when it comes to student achievement. Second, it raises this softness to the level of great injustice, implying that liberals are racists when it comes to education, and making it difficult to go against the narrowing of the curriculum inherent in the simplistic testing regimes called for by NCLB. Third, the statement does all of this while also expressing a truism. Who doesn't agree that having high expectations for students isn't essential? While expectations do matter, they are at the most fundamental level of the school-student relationship, meaning that a lot more follows. It is these details that really matter, not the basic principle of expecting students to work to their abilities. And finally, the statement places the blame and responsibility on the teachers and students. Teachers with low expectations are the problem. Fix those teachers, by raising expectations, and students will learn as desired.
NCLB was, and remains, an ambitious vision for our Nation's schools. It aims to raise achievement for every child. It pushes the education community to identify and use what works. It provides educators, parents, policymakers and the public with unprecedented data about student and school performance. NCLB holds schools accountable for student learning and asks that teachers receive the skills they need to help children learn.
Once again, this passage speaks to the very simplistic nature of the Law. Look at what they claim to be delivering: Raise achievement, use what works, get data on learning, hold schools accountable and ask teachers to be qualified to do their jobs. If these very basic goals are not met by our school systems, then 2014 is too far off for getting things fixed. Using what doesn't work, not tracking results, letting schools go unaccounted for and unqualified teachers are so basic as to be meaningless platitudes. As such, the Law itself isn't really about these meaningless goals, as it is actually quite specific in its agenda and vision for education. Why Spellings leaves these specifics out points to (1) her skill at political communication (to get too complex) and (2) her desire to really get those (hidden) things done (make the debate about something else).
The document then goes on to outline some of the principles, or bright lights, of the Law:
Proficiency by 2013-14: All education reform efforts, from federal and State policies and programs to individual classroom strategies, must strive to be informed by the best of what we know from research and focus on the bottom line of raising student achievement and closing achievement gaps. States must include all students in school accountability systems and set targets for all students to reach State standards for proficiency in reading and math by 2013-14.
Highly -Qualified Teachers: States are responsible for implementing a rigorous system for ensuring teachers are highly qualified, making strong efforts to ensure that all students have access to highly qualified teachers, and providing support for recruiting and retaining the best and brightest teachers to our schools.
Options for Families: Education consumers - especially families of children attending persistently low-performing schools - deserve opportunities such as access to tutoring services, charter schools, and the ability to move their child to a school more suited to his or her needs if the current school is not meeting them.
These principles will lead to (1) limiting educational practices to the most simplistic practices since these are the practices that can be most easily measured, (2) raising the bar for teachers, but without raising salaries or working conditions, which will result in fakery and make the field even less attractive to those who could get higher wages elsewhere - who's going to accept high opportunity costs when it comes to wages and also spend a lot of time and money getting through additional hoops? Most likely, it will be those for whom the wages are good compared to jobs as a junior manager at Wal-Mart or some other crappy job, and (3) privative schools and create a windfall for tutoring services that succeed by teaching only to the test.
That said, it is hard to oppose "all students learning well" by 2014, good teachers and options for parents of students in failing schools. And that is why the law has framed in this way. It puts opponents to the Law in the defensive, as we must oppose the obvious. But what worse is that this, like the laws before it, will do little to improve the real problem with American schools: Lack of equity. We already know how to teach children what we want them to learn - we do this in most schools most of the time. What we are failing to do is to make sure that these practices are done throughout all schools. Moreover, at the intersection of poverty and education, things get more complex. Schools can't end the effects of poverty, poverty must be ended outside of the schools. A better program by the Department of Education would be one that, quite simply, addressed poverty itself.
cross posted: Political Porn