Kenneth Bernstein recently retired as a high school teacher of government.
He regularly blogs as Teacherken at the Daily Kos, which is how I met him. He is–and I hesitate to write this–an almost saintly man, deeply devoted to students, teaching, education, and the betterment of humanity.
In this article, written in the journal of the American Association of University Professors, Ken explains to the professoriate that the students of the NCLB generation are woefully unprepared for the intellectual demands of college. The piece appeared in Academe and the original is here. Kudos to Academe for publishing Ken’s important article.
Please do not blame their teachers, he writes. Their teachers were compelled by federal policy to teach to tests that discouraged critical thinking. Even bright students in AP classes, like those he taught, were rewarded for bad writing. Bad writing is expected, promoted, demanded by the AP exams, which determine the reputation of high schools.
This is unquestionably the most remarkable and powerful piece that Ken Bernstein has written. Please read it.
Bookends: On the very first day this blog started, April 24, 2012, I posted a description of a college professor’s reaction to the NCLB generation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The original of Ken’s article is in “Academe” and can be found here: http://www.aaup.org/article/warnings-trenches#.URkfFx1JOAg. It’s a great piece, and important.
re “almost saintly” – my beloved spouse, who really is a saint for putting up with me for all these years, laughed at that and said I am never going to live that done.
and thank you, Diane, for the words of praise for this piece and for calling attention to it
You won’t find many professors who will buy that this trend didn’t start until NCLB came into place. As a graduate TA in the late 90s, it was assumed that ill prepared students were the norm. A good deal of this is because of the push for everyone to attend college and the jobs that require a diploma even though a college education is not needed.
In Chicago, up until I left the country in 2007, I was never given that much pressure about testing or teaching to the test. I even taught math, which is always under the microscope.
When I returned in 2011 it was like a different world. Obama and Duncan did more damage than NCLB was doing.
I agree. At my university we lose 20% of the first year class, and that number has not changed much over the last decade.
Indeed, the NCLB miseducated are coming to me wanting to teach English and wanting to teach it as it was taught them, for test readiness and little else, as readers who read (some of the time) what is assigned to find the answers in text that they think the teacher cares to have them remember. Not their fault. And, I am hearing, not the fault of the teachers who taught them to be so passive in their learning that even the most provocative ideas cannot penetrate the aura of boredom. Not their fault and, as I am hearing, not the fault of the teachers! Paulo Freire says that oppression can only be lifted through the will and actions of the oppressed. I read that teachers are not at fault and that what they did under NCLB was the fault of others, of administrators (who would also say that they were the victims and not the perpetrators) to superintendents, to people who were influential in shaping government educational policy. So, really, no one was responsible for NCLB and the crap I had to take for 10 years of resistance and alleged mis-teaching of teachers because my teaching called upon them to be thoughtful and to demonstrate English language arts skills of value by using the tools of language to resist the mandates. Like too many of my colleagues, and the teachers with whom they were assigned to work in internships, my students wanted to fit in and not do the work of advocacy for sane practices. While they knew what they were doing was not what should be done, they did what they were told to do because that is what good boys and girls do, they capitulate to authorities no matter how odious or stupid those authorities may be.
To let teachers off the hook, to say they were not responsible is to degrade the already degraded stature of the teacher. Whereas the teacher should be the model of good citizenship, it is necessary for the teacher to understand the notion of good citizenship and good citizenship has nothing to do with passive acceptance of authority. It has much to do with advocacy and, for English teachers, this is particularly important because it is in the English class that students learn to fight the good fight with words, with the proper words, with effective strings of words that are of a mindfulness that NCLB seemed to be intent on undermining. One only has to look at the final reports on Reading First to see how anti-thoughtfulness, pro-banking (method) NCLB was. Any real patriot would have understood that the methodology and the means of assessment were not in the best interests of the more perfect union citizens were to strive for as participants in their society’s decision making processes.
It is true that teachers were mislead by many of those in a position to lead, people of stature in the world of American education who, for whatever reasons, bought into and sold with “research” the virtues of a virtueless agenda. Indeed, it shouldn’t be difficult for a thoughtful person to see that NCLB, or the methodologies receiving approval under the NCLB regime, were not intended to inspire individuals to think for them selves, to think critically and voice the results of that critical thought to have a say in how the institutions of the society were to operate. NCLB, tied as it was to the post 9-11 era of deceit shrouded in fear, was one part of a campaign to prove to people that they should not think for themselves because it was impossible for them to understand the nature of enemies lurking around ever corner. NCLB was about softening up an already softened public, a public already tuned out to nature of the world surrounding them, already susceptible to the lies of advertisers and politicians who employed the tools of the advertiser to sell deceitful policies.
The teachers? Even before 9-11 were probably not as critical and critically diligent as they should have been to teach in and for the evolving before their eyes. Too many were using the text provided them by school districts who bought from textbook publishers whose nature and prerogatives we rarely investigated even though the Texas textbook censors were doing their best to make sure that the nation would suffer no information that the Gablers (look them up) and their friends (evangelicals, right wingers, etc.) did not want them to have. How many teachers had their students do research into the biographies of textbook authors and how many had their students investigate the process by which textbooks were chosen and whose “truths” it was that those books were telling?
Come on! Please, let us let no one off the hook for the way students have been untaught thoughtfulness. Let us do such so that we may begin where the new beginning needs to start, with the mis-education of those who teach by the schools in which they were taught. This would be a first step in de-schooling, a necessary process to remove the clouds that obscure the real goals of education that is humane, that is truly humanizing. What we need after we cop to charges is to recharge ourselves, to find again our imaginations so that we can think beyond what we think to be the possible. We need to rethink the research, all of it in light of the fact that “research” served as the foundation for NCLB and many other rotten initiatives that took the light out of the educational process. We need new goals and goals of a truly humanistic type, goals that take into consideration the value of our individuality, of our potential as creative, innovative, thoughtful, and, yes, compassionate beings with the capacity to change the world and not simply live in a world foisted upon us by those who pretend to know who we should be and become. Truth be told, they don’t know shit about who I am or who you are.
And that is a very good thing, if you really think about it!
No, Stephen, I’m not on your hook, and neither is Ken, and nobody needs to let us off. Does “deschooling” mean just walking away from the children in the actual schools?
I didn’t do any of the things you want me to cop to, and neither did many other teachers. We’ve been in classrooms these past decades, teaching and learning with our students, against the tide.
There are some deep questions we could address, about the dialectical role of teachers in delivering the heritage of academic continuity as well as the intellectual strength to smash through it when needed. To frame the issue, though, I’d need to know more about your own perspective. Where have you been, yourself, for the past 20 years?
You ask a very good question concerning where I have been for the past 20 years. Nowhere good is my answer and not good in so many ways as to have kept me at the level of an associate when others were climbing past me toward full professorship. I don’t mean to present myself as having done only what was right and moral, but I must say that I did fight like hell with all the tools I had at my disposal and with more energy than I really had. I pushed real hard against the research paradigm that has been so instrumental in guiding (misguiding) educational “reform” and wrote articles that tried to argue for schools and classrooms that excited students as well as their teachers, integrated, interdisciplinary team taught schools with classrooms engaged in projects where students could see firsthand both the power and elegance of the tools the disciplines offer. I worked with a program here called the Image Classroom project that put three grade levels of students in a single interdisciplinary project based classroom before working to set up the first real middle school program in the region, a middle school where interdisciplinary, team based instruction helped students to want to be doing school at all hours and during all seasons. I tried to spread that model but hit up against NCLB and such and then, frustrated with the mainline schools tried to start a new kind of school using charter school moneys. That school, Rainshadow Community Charter High School is in its tenth year and about to close its doors.
I teach teachers in teacher education courses and I try my best to help them develop the kind of love for education that might prevent them from giving into the forces that wish them to be something other than they know they should be to serve kids well. I fail regularly because the classroom where my students go for internships and then for paying jobs look nothing like what they know schools and classrooms should be. My problem. I too miseducate! I publish, I teach, I write to blogs such as this and present at conferences. I am a bit of trouble to most and a lot of trouble to many.
Am I better than? I try damned hard to be true to what I have come to understand to be right and I work to encourage others to come to what they have studiously come to understand as being right for individuals and for the good of the whole that serves individuals.
If I seem scornful, I am, and not of real victims but only of those of US who want to place blame in places where nothing can come of doing so except placing the blame. Yes, I do believe that schools have taught to conformity and I have seen this as an eye witness to my own children’s education, education I insisted take place in public schools. Did the schools do right by them? I think not, but they did well enough with the counter balance we provided, the questions we asked of the right answers to the quizzes and tests they took. Yes, we got them ready for the vocabulary and spelling tests and the multiple choice tests in math and science and history.
Do i support public schools? As I do the American democracy. With a critical eye to deficiencies and a dedication to moving things toward perfection.
One more thing. Why the concern with putting you on MY hook. For what do you think I am fishing?
You’ll do. Keep the faith, though, it’s not all darkness and defeat.
At the very worst, it may come to this:
“Way down the river, a hundred miles or more,
Other little children will bring my boats to shore.”
RLS
more and more kids get left behind because they change schools or are not properly displaced to there learning capability . The NCLB law only protects the teachers and Parents .. We need to look at how and the structure of those that fall behind and just quite or the Teachers pass them no matter what because they dont want to hear it from the parents. my daughter had 2 hip surgerys before she was 14 then life threatening Cancer well she missed school 1 year she was only there 50 days and she passed high honors and finished school on time “graduated ” Well this set her back from going to collage no one would except her . END the NCLB Please for the love of all those that need help ..tuff love is long respected
NCLB protects teachers and parents??? Please, the pain medication is supposed to be for your daughter.
Lady you must be a democrat cause all you do is criticize what one knows . NCLB act is a christmas tree law the only benefits Teachers and Schools and lawyers to lobbies new regulations . Makes bigger Government and protects the Union of Teachers .
Please, oh please tell me how I have benefited form NCLB!
I must have missed it.
Enlighten me.
George W. Bush is responsible…
NCLB is poised to accomplish what the original reformers wanted, but didn’t quite get, a century ago–An education for the great majority of American children to be no longer than the sixth (or maybe eighth) grade, thereby insuring that the children of the elites will always rule the country. For the original reformers, the Cubberleys and Thorndikes, “a place for everybody and everybody in their place” was the very definition democracy; and their children would have their place at the top of the heap along with the children of the rich.
And of course, we’ll get this result while paying for our children to stay in school for at least 12 years!
Heckuva, job, guys! Heckuva job!
Teacherken retired. Does this mean we’re getting old? While I share his alarm about the effects of NCLB on the generation we’re bringing up now, let us not fall easily into the old-fogy mode of lamenting the decline of these-kids-today.
I know I’m sending some live ones along, and any professor who looks up and sees them in his classes next fall should thank his stars.
Here, turn that frown upside down, and watch The Onion riff on Piaget:
<a href="http://www.theonion.com/video/us-high-school-students-
Okay, that didn’t work. I tried to embed it, and failed. Here is is.
http://www.theonion.com/video/us-high-school-students-falling-behind-china-many,30903/
Maybe this will work, although it might come up monetized, with the ad in place.
<iframe width="624" height="351" scrolling="no" frameborde
Nope, another failure. See, this is when you need one of those “woefully unprepared” whippersnappers looking over your shoulder.