The No Child Left Behind law was not all bad; public schools needed an incentive to focus on students whose achievement lagged behind and needed to figure out a way to close those achievement gaps as quickly as possible. Testing wasn’t the answer, as we have all found out.
President Obama has gotten it right in his proposal to restructure the most damaging effects of NCLB: the policy of flunking schools if they don’t approach the unreachable goal of 100 percent proficiency in every student subgroup. Currently, a third of the nation’s schools have a grade of F, and, as any teacher knows, handing out failures is no way to encourage success.
What does encourage success is a subtler approach that takes into account the individual needs and abilities of students, and that’s what the restructuring proposal gets right. Schools, like students, are not one-dimensional and cannot be measured by tests in two subjects. Where, in NCLB, were the arts and music? Or physical education? Or ethics? Or other subjects that would contribute to the student as a person and future member of our society?
Those subjects, like the teaching of poetry in Virginia classrooms after the Standards of Learning tests dropped poems from the test, were languishing, while rote math and English lessons were taking their place. Teach to the test is dead; long live teach to the student!
Obama’s “Blueprint for Reform” in education, made available this week, is still short on specifics — but that is deliberate. States will determine how they will meet the standards — now reachable rather than Utopian — by the deadline of 2020. But the language is clear about how students will be assessed: They will be measured for college and career readiness, and assessments must include higher-order skills, not merely rote memorization.
Built into the “Blueprint” will be financial incentives for schools, districts and states to align their curricula with local colleges and universities. Successful schools will be rewarded, and the least successful schools will be targeted for intervention. But every principal’s fear of not meeting the Annual Yearly Progress goal, and being labeled a “failing school,” will no longer exist. No more threatening faculty meetings where administrators scare teachers with the prospect of school failure. (Teachers hate those meetings and are rarely motivated afterward to do better in their classrooms.)
Concurrently, governors have been developing a common core of standards for optional adoption by states. They are available for viewing and comment at corestandards.org. Adopting core standards across the country would create a solid foundation for the new educational “Blueprint.” These reforms should receive bipartisan support from all of us who have been frustrated by decades of contradictory and inconsistent policies — culminating in the impossibly restrictive guidelines of NCLB. Now we have something we can all stand behind in an effort to make our public schools better.
The improvement of our public schools, and the cessation of all those F grades for not achieving AYP, should be reasons for optimism rather than partisan ire. Let’s support President Obama’s “Blueprint for Reform” and put our nation’s schools back on a path to success, not failure.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
