That noble purpose has been lost with No Child Left Behind, A Nation At Risk, and the other duplicitous attempts to make the American people believe that our educational system is a miserable failure, by comparing our system, which attempts to educate everyone, with other countries, which select which students should go on to advance learning and steer everyone else in other directions.
Part of it has been the desire of some to cash in on the business of education, whether it be through operating schools, selling materials for testing (and for succeeding on those tests), or by steering money from the public school system into private schools.
While no one has questioned the slogan "No Child Left Behind," and it has always been the American way to assume that all people can succeed, it is the definition of success, a definition that makes it impossible for any public schools, including the best ones, to succeed that makes No Child Left Behind so reprehensible.
Consider this: No Child Left Behind requires that all students with IQs of 60 be proficient in math and reading by 2014. When these people talk about proficiency, for the most part they are talking about students having to have a B average. This flies in the face of common sense. Some students are going to fail, whether it be from their own lack of purpose, their home lives or a simple inability to deal with subject matter. If a student with an extremely low IQ works hard, a good teacher can bring that student up to a D or C level, and that should be considered a success. Under No Child Left Behind, it is not. Essentially, every student has to be a B student.
If students do not care, if they receive no support from their parents or guardians, if they have problems that some of us cannot even imagine, the only people to blame are those who teach at the public schools, if you listen to the nonsense being spewed by those who favor educational vouchers and every other attempt that is being made to weaken public schools.
In his latest offering, syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff notes another danger in the unhealthy emphasis being placed on standardized tests in today's education- We are further developing a class system where those in public schools are not being taught how to participate in our society. Schools are being forced to drill over and over again on math and reading, and because of the high stakes involved, everything else including the courses referred to in the past as civics, citizenship, government, current issues, is being pushed to the side. This will ensure that our next generations of leaders are more likely to come from the type of private schools that the whole idea of No Child Left Behind favors, schools that will be able to take the dollars, and siphon the top students from the allegedly-failing public schools, and teach them without having the government requirements to take the standardized tests that are destroying public schools.
Consider this sampling from the Hentoff column:
When I was a kid in school long ago, there were civics classes showing us — through vivid examples in our history — how voters can help determine much of what happens in our daily lives, and especially in times of national crisis, by who they choose to represent them.
That's how many of us back then gained a very personal interest both in our history and the battlefields of current events.
Now, a lamentable effect of the No Child Left Behind Act is that civics classes are absent in many schools that feel bound to keep testing and retesting on subjects whose students' scores determine the school's status, or even its continued existence.
...
Research shows that schools can boost young people's participation by providing ... social studies classes, service opportunities, discussions of current events and other activities." But, a Circle report adds, school systems around the nation provide more opportunities to learn about, and then participate, in our constitutional system of self-government "to higher income students, white students and academically successful students." Once, in Miami, I was asked to speak to a large number of high school students in connection with my book "Living the Bill of Rights." Before I went on stage, two teachers told me not to be disappointed at the youngsters' lack of interest because "all they care about are music and clothes." After an hour of telling them stories about how we Americans won and then fought to preserve our First Amendment rights and the right of blacks and women to vote, as well as the essential checks and balances in our government to keep us free citizens, I got a standing ovation. Not because I was so eloquent but because these youngsters had discovered America.
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What too many youngsters are discovering now is that standardized tests are the only thing that matter in public schools. If your grades slip, even the slightest bit, on these all-important tests, you have to scrap nearly everything you have been doing and show a drastic attempt to bring scores up.
And one of the first victims of this insane effort to reach an impossible goal has been the elimination of the very classes our young people need to succeed as citizens. From that aspect, all children are being left behind.
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