Tinkering with the No Child Left Behind Act is like trying to clean the air one side of a screen door: a waste of time.
It’s good to see The New York Times finally admitting that NCLB is flawed, but they still aren’t admitting its fatal flaw: testing will not and cannot improve schools.
The rebellion of states against the federal NCLB law is growing. This week Connecticut announced that it was preparing to sue the federal government, arguing that Bush’s education law forces the state to administer new standardized tests at a cost of millions of dollars and that Washington refuses to pay for them.
NCLB’s demands for increasing test scores are unrealistic and assure that virtually no schools with large populations of low-income students will meet benchmarks for “adequate yearly progress.”The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) points out four ways in which NCLB exacerbates real problems that cause children to be left behind:
* The gauge of student progress in most states has been reduced to reading and math test scores. Many schools have narrowed instruction to what is tested. Education is damaged, especially in low-income and minority schools, as students are coached to pass a test rather than learning a rich curriculum to prepare them for life in the 21st century.
* Most schools fail to meet the unrealistic demands imposed by the law’s “adequate yearly progress” provision. Virtually no schools serving low-income children clear the arbitrary hurdles. Many successful schools have been declared “failing” and forced to drop what works for them.
* Sanctions intended to force school improvement do the opposite. They pit parent against teacher, parent against parent, and school against school. They take funding away from all students to be used by relatively few students. The law’s ultimate sanctions–privatizing school management, firing staff, state takeovers, and similar measures–have no proven record of success.
* The federal government has failed to adequately fund the law. Most states are now cutting budgets to the bone, watching their education resources dwindle just as they are hit with the demands of the law. Neither federal nor state governments are addressing the deepening poverty that makes it difficult for so many children to learn.
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