I was a loud opponent of No Child Left Behind, ("NCLB·" or nickleby) prior to its introduction, post its introduction and today. My principal complaint is its contentions that all the problems with US public education were clearly the fault of teachers, that they needed a big stick and that this big stick should be testing.
None of these were and are true, although I do think that much can be done to improve teachers and teaching. Better selection, greater standards in intellectual and academic competencies, higher expectations in understanding how children learn and the craft of teaching are all lacking across the board. However a big stick will not address any of these. Think pigs and lipstick. NCLB paid essentially no attention to the input side of teachers and teaching.
Similarly, NCLB ignored the realities of the children in the classrooms. Students without breakfast or dinner whose focus is on the school lunch are not ready to learn. Students who are sick and at school waiting to see the school nurse are not ready to learn. Students who look after several younger siblings, who live in cars or are surrounded by sex, drungs and gangs are not ready to learn.
The problem was that NCLB shifted the focus to outputs and drowned out any discussion of inputs.
Testing in the US has been so distorted that it is totally unfit for purpose. The biggest factor herein is that it must be "cheap" thus computer-scoreable, thus multiple-choice, The former means a percentage of answers are inevitably never rewarded because they cannot be read (and thus five year-olds learning to "bubble" instead of learning to share, reflect, take time). The second means a percentage of answers come from elimination, thus the well-known strategy of eliminate the irrelevant, eliminate the distractor and choose the better of the two remaining options.
Of course we all know of the problem of the north-eastern flower which has a different name in the southeast and which does not exist in the west. Or the intended reponse of "call the police" which is never the correct response for swathes of the nation.
I believe the biggest problem we have in public discourse and in US polity is the "two sides of the issue" view; the everything is black and white, in and out, you're with me or a terrorist posture. I strongly believe that this comes from generations of standardized testing where the grayness of real life is not explored. As teachers, we all know that the "why" of an answer is often more important than the "what", and that there is no such thing as "hot". Yet, the entire system of mass, cheap, standardized testing reflects none of the complexity of existence and reduces everything to one "right" and unlimited "wrong" answers.
Our "successful" district schools are notable for selection through wealth and opportunity, and charter shools through selection on performance or on drilling and test prep at the expense of all-round inclusivity. Curiously, our competitors in the independent sector opt for AP, Cambridge or the IB which do not use multiple or standardised testing, nor do our international competitors such as Finland, Germany, Japan.
At the risk of broken-recording, US education will never do what we as a society, as parents and as students want until we (a) define education and (b) define the role of schools within (a). NCLB completely ignored these fundamentals, and its progenitors did not even acknowledge that these were, and are still, undefined. NCLB failed and was destined to fail because its three pillars were each built on sand.
Further Reading
https://news.yahoo.com/why-no-child-left-behind-121500577.html
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