No Child Left Behind

I went to parochial school when all eight grades were taught by nuns. It was an era of rote "times tables" and diagramming sentences. In my early years there were only four rooms with two grades in each--so we're talking a long while back.

When I got to high school I found that the kids from my school and other parochial schools in the area were scholastically ahead of the kids from public elementary schools. Either we slowed down or the others soon caught up but, by sophomore year, the playing field seemed to have leveled. My high school was not very challenging--so maybe a little bit of both happened.

We had standardized tests (yes, even in those days) but they were not the focus of our curriculum. Today, with "No Child Left Behind", it seems the schools who can turn out good little test-takers get funding while others fall behind, others are financially penalized. Teachers are increasingly forced to teach to the tests and not teach their subject matter in order to avoid funding problems.

Recently I heard a college professor speak about teaching as listening. This professor regularly volunteers time at the local secondary schools in addition to his college classes. He characterized learning as a dialogue in which the teacher presents some material and then engages the class to talk about it while he basically listens, occasionally guides. His point was that thinking and language are inextricably linked so that talking about a subject, forming verbal arguments about it, is an excellent way to make it your own. I thought, "How different from teaching to the standardized test! How humble, in a way, to let the students discover the subject matter with their own natural enthusiasm rather than force feeding it to them."

I don't see a good future in NCLB. Instead, I see generations of students who know how to take tests on short term, rather disjointed facts with no real depth learning going on. I have young grandchildren who are currently learning at a very rapid pace because they are engaged but I fear NCLB-driven curricula will dampen their enthusiasm so effectively that they will soon find school to be drudgery.

I can remember high school physics. I loved every day in that class because the phenomena we discussed and experimented with were all new to me. A colleague at my office told me one day that she hated physics when she was in high school. Incredulous, I asked "How can you not like physics?" I actually couldn't understand how a young person could dislike physics--as I saw it, the science unfolding the mysteries of the world and of the universe. (Apparently I had a good physics teacher.)

I don't see how "No Child Left Behind" gets us to that outcome. And without it our elementary students will remain unprepared for high school, secondary students will remain unprepared for college, and graduates will enter the workforce unprepared for global competition. I know this sounds like grandiose doom saying. But I suggest you ask your children every day what they are learning, and get involved if you don't like the answers they give you.