We’ve done it now. Eleven years educators had to educate the public, to register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people what was coming, and we blew it. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now we — and our students — are paying the price.
We looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them down. We allowed the proponents of No Child Left Behind to control the discussion from the beginning. They wrote the language, sent out the media notices, wrote the definitions of AYP, “highly qualified” and leaned heavily on the fact that none of us would dare protest anything to do with a name that implies we would be providing a high-quality education for every single child in America.
We knew from the outset that NCLB and its goal of 100 percent — every child proficient in every area as determined by a single test on a single day each year — was patently, blatantly and insidiously absurd, but we took no concerted action.
Surely, nobody believed a school deserved the failing label because two or three kids in a subgroup didn’t pass a test?
Yes, they did and still do.
We even learned in some places to game the system and hold back those kids we feared might not pass the test or might raise those student numbers to create a subgroup in areas we really didn’t want to see a subgroup or, God help us, to cheat or to make sure that we could hold out two or three of “those kids” on test days so their poor scores wouldn’t have a negative effect.
Our kids were the ones whose education was stilted by our submission to the belief that one test could effectively distill and determine the depth and extent of an entire year of a child’s education. They are the ones whose time was wasted by “academic pep rallies” and “test prep” and by the subtle and insidious ways we told them the test was “important” and put pressure on them to “do their best because our school is counting on you.”
They were the ones who did without art and music and chorus and drama because we increased the amount of time they spent on what was on the test, English/language arts and math.
I struggled with the rest of you as to why NCLB would go to such great lengths to make public education appear to be such a failure. One day it finally hit me. They didn’t want to change the policy because the policy was designed not to aid education, but to create an image of a failed public school system in order to further the implementation of vouchers and the diversion of public education funds to private schools.
I am not usually a conspiracy theory guy, but this was no theory. These were cold, hard facts slapping me in the face. We failed in our obligations to protect our students from one of the most destructive educational policies since “separate but equal.”
We did not educate the public on the myth and misdirection of “adequate yearly progress,” and we allowed closet segregationists to direct the implementation of policies that we knew would result in our being the guys in the black hats responsible for “the failure of public education.”
If we try to convince them otherwise we are “making excuses.” Vouchers are a part of every legislative session in almost every state. High-stakes testing for all public education students is considered a necessary reality, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves.
I hope the generation of teachers and administrators that follows has learned something from the failure of our generation to ward off those determined to destroy public education.
We didn’t stand up to be counted. We didn’t stand in the schoolhouse door and tell them they couldn’t do that to our kids, and we didn’t educate the public about what a gigantic failure another one- size-fits-all education policy would be.
Jim Arnold is superintendent of Pelham City schools.
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