Should the No Child Left Behind Bill be reauthorized for the 2007-2008 school year?

No

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by LaDonna Hatfield

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The No Child Left Behind bill, in its present form, should NOT be reauthorized for the 2007-2008 school year. In order to understand the frustration of teachers and school systems with NCLB, you need a basic knowledge of just what the bill proposes. The current NCLB system uses standardized test scores as a basis for determining whether or not schools are doing a proper job of educating the future citizens of our society. While standardized tests are wonderful tools for determining a school or school district's weaknesses, the bill does not allow for using the information to improve instruction in the classroom. Instead, NCLB concludes that every child in America should be able to score well above the fictional "national norm" as the result of increasing our students' abilities to take a test. In the end, the bill's goal is to have every school's population scoring at or above the 90th percentile on test scores.

You need to understand the concept of this fictional "national norm". National norms on standardized tests are developed by testing representative samples of students from across the country. While I do not know the current norms groups locations, teachers access to that information is no longer available, I do know that in the first decade of my teaching career during the 1970's, the norms group that represented my students were from rural farm country in Iowa. I live in southern coalfields of West Virginia. Yes, we are a rural area. I assure you that there is where the similarity of the students in the norms group and my students ended. Rural Iowa includes long stretches of straight highways that lead to large cities. West Virginia is filled with narrow, winding roads where distances are measured in terms of time rather than miles. It is true some southern West Virginians still farm their lands. However, most of the economy here depends on the mining of coal. The mindset of the students here is totally different than that of the students whose parents farm the land for a living. The economy is precarious in both places because of the dependence on a single industry. However, my students come to school in the morning knowing that when they get home, a parent or brother or sister may have lost a limb, broken a back, or no longer be alive. My students know what it is like to have parents who spend their time under the earth seeing less daylight than a prisoner in a jail. My students are familiar with the mountains, and they can identify a tree or plant by its leaves, an animal's tracks, and what that noise in an engine signifies. My students are bound by sense of extended family that exists in the coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, but probably is not as pronounced anywhere else in the United States. When I went to college, the culture shock was amazing for my peers and for me. They could not believe that I knew who my cousins were much less that I kept in touch with them. They were surprised to find that holidays meant "the whole family" got together, not just the immediate family. Does this make my students less intelligent than their counterparts in the norms group of Iowa? Of course it doesn't. However, it does make them different. Their language, their heritage, their sense of community, their priorities are all slightly different from the norms group they are compared with.

Does this really make a difference? For years, the US Department of Education struggled with the fact that standardized tests did involve a major bias for students who were black or from other subcultures. That cultural bias has never been truly overcome in the formation of a standardized test that is without bias for all groups. In addition, the cultural bias is only the beginning. The real problem lies in the concepts of validity and reliability of the tests being used. In order for a test to be valid for all the students of the nation, it must reliably predict how well students know material, how skilled they are in test-taking strategies, and how well the test actually measures what it is intended to measure. This is a huge point. What exactly do we want to measure with these tests? Are we measuring what students know, or how well they reason, or to what degree they are test-savvy? Are we measuring all of these concepts and to what degree? How reliable are the results we get? If we measure group after group after group, we should get similar results by using similar methods of instruction. Are we using similar methods of instruction? How much diversity is there for the students in each sample that is tested? Some of these questions are impossible to answer reliably. How well is the American public school system doing its job of educating the nation's children? It is a risky business to use an unreliable measure to make that determination.

In the real world, where real teachers teach and real students learn, the use of a standardized test score to determine the value of a school or district is ridiculous and allows no room for students with lesser abilities. The bill does not encourage, nor does it account for, students whose "book-learning" abilities may be low but their creativity and mechanical aptitude are extremely high. Instead, NCLB assumes that all children can reach a proficiency in all subjects that is so far above the normal level of ability for an average student that the whole proposition is ludicrous.

I am mystified by the concept that developing a student population that scores well on standardized test develops a citizenry that is ready, able, and willing to contribute to the good of society. Has our nation totally forgotten the purpose for the development of public education in the first place? When Thomas Jefferson worked on a plan for educating American citizens to be prepared to take their role of managing government by becoming literate enough to read and understand the policies governments make, then vote accordingly, I am certain he did not have in mind a school system whose focus was making tremendous grades. To the contrary, Jefferson wanted the children of America to grow up to become the adults who would govern and adjudicate and develop the laws of the land. Considering Jefferson's own thirst for knowledge in such a wide variety of areas, I feel that he would have hoped America would develop a school system that sought to teach each student basic knowledge and then strengthen their greatest talents to be used to provide for themselves, their families and their nation. Did he envision only scientists and mathematicians? Jefferson loved literature and architecture and agriculture and mechanical gadgets. He saw the value of promoting the development of those who were skilled in whatever areas their strengths lay. It was this idea that set America apart from the rest of the world.

If we want to become a nation that proclaims its students are the brightest in the world, we should follow the example of those countries who weed out the less intelligent in elementary grades. Send those students to farm only or do gymnastics only or fix engines only or paint only or write only or pick up garbage only. Get them out of that public education setting because some of those students will bring down that idealized test score below the 90th percentile mark we are shooting for in this country through NCLB. Stop educating the public to take part in governing the nation and concentrate on winning the prize for having the highest test scores in the world. How did that ever become a competition anyway?

There is one more thing that the general public needs to know about the NCLB bill and how it affects individual schools and school systems. With NCLB, a school or school system that fails to meet Annual Yearly Progress as measured in large part by the scoring of standardized tests, the students of that school or that system are to be given the option to attend a school or district that does meet AYP, and that arrangement is to be funded by the school district where the school(s) fail to meet that Annual Yearly Progress. Is it any wonder teachers refer to it as No Teacher Left Standing?

Standardized tests do have a place in education. They are tools that can help teachers develop more rigorous curricula to challenge the better students and better remedial strategies to help those students who are being left behind still. However, test scores are only tools. They do not give value to a person. They fail to encourage students to create new ideas, to explore their own interests, to develop their abilities outside of the reading, writing, arithmetic, and science measured on standardized tests. They are unable to identify a student's artistic gifts, their kindness to others, their ability to listen and help others, or their unique perspectives on age-old problems. Standardized tests dehumanize the future citizens of America who are participating in the public educational systems. NCLB fails miserably to help stop the flow of students who "slip through the cracks in the system". In fact, this bill contributes to pushing students out the door of the school if they fail to measure up on a standardized test. If America truly wants to leave no child behind, it must find a better way to do it than by measuring a child's worth, a school's worth, or a nation's public school system's worth by a test score.

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