Remember back in 2001 when Congress passed No Child Left Behind and mandated that all children in grades 3-8 would be proficient in reading and math? Remember when President George W. Bush signed it into lain January 2002, surrounded by Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller, Congressman John Boehner, and others who hailed a historic moment in Anerican history?
We now know that NCLB was a monumental failure. Testing doesn’t make kids smarter, doesn’t make education better.
Here is a great article by Lisa Guisbond of Fairtest, who explains why NCLB failed and how Race to the Top has preserved its failed ideas and made them even worse.
She writes:
“Unfortunately, those driving the federal school policy bus clearly haven’t learned any real lessons from NCLB’s failures. To the contrary, they’re staying the course of test-driven education reform. And they’re still trying to sell Miller’s false suggestion that the problem isn’t too much testing, it’s simply that communities can’t handle the truth being delivered by the test scores.”
But parents, educators, and students have learned the lessons of NCLB, and they are fighting back.
The question now is whether and how long big money and political power can keep their failed ideas afloat, imposed on other people’s children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
NCLB has been a great success…. but not for the kids. Isn’t profit a measure of success?
“We now know that NCLB was a monumental failure.”
Some of us knew beforehand that NCLB would be a monumental failure.” And have been fighting it since we first heard (which was before NCLB) an educrat utter the words “data driven dialogue/decision making”.
How could we possibly even consider that NCLB would work? It never made any sense pedagogically. You would think those who consider themselves the best and the brightest would have realized the idiocy of such a plan. To use Joanna’s favorite word, it was just plain “dumb.”
And yet CC$$ is simply the same two step made into the national dance
And just what “truth” are these tests exposing? It is beyond frustrating that these non-educators can take it upon themselves to “pronounce failure” based upon tests having no real proof of value or accuracy as to what they are measuring nor the appropriate developmental levels being examined.
Honestly, I think the only things that matter are profit for a few privatizers, reducing salaries of teachers via dismantling unions, and ridding teachers of careers rendering their investment in their education, professional development, dedication and love of students as meaningless.
Sure, there are a few unprofessional or inadequate teachers. They are present in any profession. This is not the way to eliminate the problems. Sure, there are schools that have low graduation rates, too much violence, and students with no desire to learn. This is not the way to eliminate those problems.
I would much prefer to have honest efforts to share new ideas, to work within existing schools, and to reduce class sizes to give young students every opportunity to grasp the basic foundations of learning.
Students aren’t products!! No one should be able to make a profit from public school funding. The underhanded means by which this takeover has grabbed hold of public schools should be exposed and rejected!!!!
I’d be hard-pressed to point to any benefit to K-12 public schools from either NCLB or RttT.
My overall sense of ed reform is that a large group of influential people who all agree with one another got together and all of them got each and every item on their wish list.
None of it is done well or carefully or even responsibly, but boy, there is a lot of it!
Next year my public school will have almost 2 million less in funding and the following experiments will be conducted:
Blended learning, teacher evaluations, school grades (A-F this time!), Common Core, Common Core online testing, and dealing with the effects on public schools of Ohio’s completely unregulated “choice” insanity, because of course “choice” affects every public school kid in the state, although ed reformers are apparently in some kind of denial of this fact. It didn’t occur to them that this is a SYSTEM, and public schools existed here when they parachuted in. They’re still denying it.
I’m basically waiting for an adult to show up and finally, finally, say “no, ed reformer, you can’t have that”.
Bill Gates says he wants “education voters”. He’s got one now. I’ll be voting against anything he backs.
I downloaded the whole NCLB law not long after it was passed and did multiples analyses, mainly for colleagues in arts eduction.
Then came Race to the Top with even more requirements for tests and managerial consequences for not meeting a whole bunch of performance standards and complying with the so-called Common Core State Standards.
I am astonished at the aggressively punitive nature of these initiatives and their duration.
I am also angered by the pretense that these initiatives are a matter of addressing the civil rights of students, giving priority to parental choice, introducing competitve pressures to improve public schools and the rest. Now faculty who educate teachers are being treated in the same way, with the bulk of time in student teaching being consumed with preparing for an examination marketed and scored by work-for-hire employees of Pearson. The examination, called Teacher Performance Assessment, or edTPA, is designed to produce data-driven, standardized teaching, completely rationalized in advance, task centered, and with constant monitoring of students to ensure they learn the correct answers to questions asked by the teacher or text or test. Pitiful.
Race to the Top & its Charter School fascination is only for those Not Left Behind.
I wonder how much DOE money has gone into NCLB and Race to the Top over the years, and what could have been done with those funds that would have actually made a positive difference in education in this country? How many billions (trillions?) of DOE dollars could have created medical care facilities in poor school districts, or free books for all FARM students, or after-school programs for at-risk kids, or lower class sizes in all high-poverty school districts, or libraries/media centers in every schools, or …
Or free dental and vision tests and free glasses for every child that needs them in America, or…
Speaking of glasses. In the area I taught in very few children wore glasses, but a lot of them couldn’t read. The school nurse tested them for nearsightedness but not for farsightedness. I had to intervene many times with parent and beg them to get their children’s eyes tested.
the opportunity costs of education deform are staggering
And speaking of vampires, it’s clear that Obama and wife were bitten long ago and are hell bent of preserving the immortality (or immorality?) of public school destruction.
I call for an appeal to silver bullets, stakes, garlic wreaths, and holy water . . . . . . . metaphorically speaking.
CC$$ + PARCC or SBAC:
Son of NCLB
NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized.
We’ve been there, seen that. It was awful the first time around. The sequel will be even worse.
Put a stake in it!
Our very own Creature Feature and Bela Lugosi of Education reform, Robert.
Thanks for the metaphor and laugh!
I see Eli Broad and the Koch Brothers as the leading head vampires . . . . .
What a ghoulish gallery of spooky characaters who are p art of their lair . . . .
The Kochs have actually been adamant in their opposition to the CC$$ and the national tests, much to the horror of the Deformers.
Even broken clocks are right twice a day!
Yup, NCLB and CC$$–the horror show double feature
I once heard George Bush, Jr. say, and I am not exaggerating,
“I solved the education problem in America on my first day in office.”
He was referring to his introduction, that week, of the NCLB legislation, rightly characterized in Lisa Guisbond’s article as the most hated brand in the country. It’s instructive to go back and read the hoopla around that introduction of NCLB.
If you are experiencing a little déjà vu in those CC$$ “trainings” at your school, that’s perfectly understandable. New day. Some new terms added to the Rheformish lexicon. But basically the same utterly absurd theory and program.
NCLB was a failure. So, of course, we need TO DO A LOT MORE OF THAT.
When will they ever learn, indeed.
Now, certainly, there are some slow learners in the world, but when the evidence is this overwhelming that something doesn’t work and yet people persist, you have to conclude that something else is driving this. For some, it’s profit. CC$$ means economies of scale for some monopolists publishers who have poured a lot of money into it. For others, deform is a cult. The Revelation to Achieve–the “give a guy a KPI” model–just CAN’T be wrong, whatever the evidence.
Those of you of a certain age will remember when half the country was saying that “We have to be in Vietnam. If we don’t stop the Commies there, they will be on our doorstep tomorrow.” Well, we didn’t stop the North Vietnamese. And what horrific consequence ensued?
None. zip.
And oh but the fundies on the right was certain, certain, that they could not be wrong about that. NCLB was an utter failure, but the same fundies are CERTAIN that their underlying theory–their teach to the bullet list and do extrinsic punishment and reward theory–cannot be wrong. Deform is looking more and more, to me, like a cult.
cx: were certain, of course
cx: monopolist publishers
“cx:” means correction?
Slow learners?
Did George W. Bush have an IEP? Maybe those in his cabinet failed to follow it. Maybe Mommy Barbara and Papi George Senior failed to get an accurate diagnosis of their son.
Or maybe he is socially and emotionally differently abled . . . .
Just think of how Bush Jr.’s slow learning cost this country trillions of dollars in war and an unfathomable amount of suffering held by our men and women in uniform.
George W. Bush is a criminal, and he and Cheney and Rice should be rounded up and jailed permanently.
yes, never-too-old!
What I find frightening and insidious is that during the entire process if NCLB implementation there was a sense of “it will go away” and “it can’t succeed” and “no one really believes in the 100% proficiency level” by 2014 or ever. these sentiments were shared by teachers and administrators.
Even when RTTT began, there was skepticism by all. Suddenly, in 2010 things began to intensify for teachers. We had been “shamed” into believing we had to participate in RTTT because the superintendent said our objections were only because we “objected to being evaluated”…he said this publicly and it was quoted in statewide newspapers. We are in southwest Ohio and he was quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Our district has been Excellent for years and we started getting the Excellent with Distinction tag 5 years ago. But it was due to the hard work and dedication of the teachers, not due to leadership demonstrated by our administration.
There were shifts in teaching demands and constant mini-sessions on professional development that we couldn’t afford, so we got the outline version and informed ourselves.
But we were caught up in an ever-changing almost month by month “new direction”. It became unbearable. Being “evaluated” by our principal was and is brutal because she can selectively place us wherever she wants on the rubric. It is as difficult to endure as being eaten alive by a carnivore. And it is an inaccurate evaluation.
If this occurred in a successful, diverse, rural/suburban district of moderate and low income, what must be happening in urban districts?
Top it off with a “governor” who says whatever he wants and who can’t be trusted and you have a recipe for Ohio to fall into the abyss.
The bad faith of NCLB was baked in: charity case in mathematics that I am, even I knew that achieving 100% of anything, let alone true proficiency in math or ELA, is a mathematical impossibility.
Public schools and their teachers have been set up to fail from the beginning of this disgraceful process, which long predates the law itself.
I should also remind everyone that it was liberal icon Teddy Kennedy who helped give us NCLB; it would never have passed without his imprimatur. This was not an isolated event: Kennedy also helped give us deregulation of the trucking and airline industries, which have helped turn truck driving, flight attendant and even pilot employment into poverty-wage jobs.
Be very careful before you trust a liberal, or you’ll find yourself waist deep in the Big Muddy.
Michael, this blog should not be a place for political bashing. There is enough blame for the educational mess we are in to be shard by all. We’ve got plenty to work on together.
Mr. Fiorillo is not bashing. He is simply expressing an opinion, and there are a lot of “liberal democrats” who have given in to the reform movement.
I’m pointing out some historical facts that have contributed to the crises we face.
Rather than get huffy about about the conclusions I’ve reached – as if political economy is not central to those same crises – please try to refute my point.
Peter Smyth,
I consider you an ally by all means.
But I’d like to add to Michael’s point that the Democrats have given into reform under Obama but did not nearly as much under Bush.
I am NOT a GOP by any means, but the truth is that the Democrats have gone rotten and, never having had the money the GOPs have enjoyed in the past – but having gotten a hold of it through corporate sponsors – the Democrats have shifted horrifically to the right and against the average working class person. They are more seduced by money in the sense that they were never the moneyed party, but relied on more populist techniques to get into office.
Joe Biden and his brother are pro-charter all the way.
Caroline Kennedy jumped on board with Joel Klein in the charterization movement in NY city.
Michael’s disapproval of the Democrats is correct, but I’m sure he realizes that both parties are rotten to the core, save a for a handful of people on either side of the aisle.
So, Peter, there is no bashing here. . . . just fact finding and acting upon those facts.
All part of the hard lessons of a growing and still very young democracy . . . . .
Robert, I agree. You can list the suspects from all sides.
I get concerned when I read things trying to lay the responsibility specifically on any side.
I tend to support Democrats, but there are no greater culprits today than Arne Duncan and DFER. So to me, my side has done more selling out than anyone else. But not, I think to liberal or left wing ideology (whatever that is) , but to the same thing that drives the other side – money.
I’d react the same way if someone tried to focus “blame”! only on the right.
I agree, with you, Peter . . . which is why I stated thay I feel most of both sides of the aisle are rotten.
Those who are truly progressive and liberal, for lack of better terms (I have close ties to France, and those terms mean something quite different than they do here) are people, in my mind, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, by and large.
Left wing or progressive/liberal ideology itself is a good thing, although I tend to think the core definitions of those words, as defined by history, has been hijacked by “neo-liberals” like Obama and his equally gruesome wife.
I have only voted Democrat in my life. . .. now I seek to support a third party and be independent. The working class must have true representation, and they mostly don’t any more.
Not to be a groupie of Michael Fiorillo, but if you follow his posts, he has balsted ANYONE and EVERYONE who has turned against educators and the middle class.
Michael first coined the phrase on this blog “the overclass”, which is a brilliant framing of words. . . . so few words to express so much that has happened in the last 20 years.
Please, Michael and Peter: keep posting anytime on this blog. I will be looking and reading. I find tremendous empowerment in your posts.
Robert. Copy that! Thanks.
Peter,
I pointed out the shortcomings of Mr. Kennedy only because too many teachers have the mistaken idea that if only those Bad Republicans were defeated, our problems would be over.
I take it as a given that the overwhelming majority of Republicans support the hostile takeover of the public schools, but that has been the case for quite a while now. It’s to be expected that they would.
Why do organizations like Democrats for Education Reform exist? They exist precisely because the Repugs are assumed to be on board with so-called reform, but that more work still needs to be done to make the Democratic Party captive to the ideology and practice of school privatization.
Who is more dangerous, a known enemy, or a false friend who betrays you?
Thanks, Michael. We’re on the same page. I sort of reflexively remind people we have a bipartisan attack on education, or at the least a bipartisan cluelessness. And I do think whatever Duncan’s doing, and Obama’s support of that agenda is more dangerous, in large part because state and local Democratic groups follow along.
We do seem to take the GOP agenda against education as a given.
Another important part of the Undead Vampire Law: the questionable evidence upon which all these current and expensive “evidence-based” (i.e. “proven programs”) in reading are based.
This excerpt from Jim Trelease’s review of Dick Allington’s Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence a quick summary of what Allington and others discover about the panel’s “research”:
**** excerpt ****
“Thus the politicians issued a call for classroom texts in which the majority (“most”) of words be “decodable,” that is, follow the basic phonics rules (“Nan can fan Dan.”). Texas legislators went so far as to declare that “80 percent” of the text for primary grades by decodable. Such mandates were based on the “research” that shows such texts are the most successful with beginning readers.
So Allington and Haley Woodside-Jiron went to the original “research” citations that were most often cited in these bills and state standards:
Beck and Black (1979)
Beck and Juel, 1992;
Adams (1990) and Adams, Treiman, and Pressley (1998)
And what did they find? Plenty of support for the importance of phonics instruction but no identification of the number or percentage of text pages that must be decodable. Indeed, some of the cited material warned of having too many such pages or words. The Allington-Jiron chapter clearly demonstrates the shallowness of much (though not all) of the national reading curriculum’s “research” and the grave danger in allowing amateur educators (legislators) and their political/religious agenda to direct the instruction and curriculum of schools.
If you read only one book on the subject, make it Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence.”
excerpt from Jim Trelease’s review of Dick Allington’s Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence at
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.php?id=134
**** end of excerpt ****
I want to add Stephen Metcalf’s description from “Reading Between the Lines” of this conundrum regarding the evidence behind the “evidence-based” movement.
(Reading ACROSS the lines: and now they are Obama-Duncan’s corporate allies, too.)
**** excerpt ****
“On the day he assumed the White House–the day he invited Harold McGraw III into his office–Bush called on Congress to help him eliminate the nation’s ‘reading deficit’ by implementing the ‘findings of years of scientific research on reading.’ Bush would loosen the purse strings on one condition: Instructional practices must be ‘scientifically based.’
To the literacy cognoscenti, the meaning was clear: Classrooms must follow the conclusions of the National Reading Panel, a blue-ribbon panel assembled by Congress in the late 1990s to determine the ‘status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.’ Thanks to the NRP report, the phrase ‘scientifically based reading instruction’ appears dozens of times in the new federal reading legislation. Education Secretary Paige recently explained in a speech before reading educators, ‘The National Reading Panel screened more than 100,000 studies of reading and…found that the most effective course of reading instruction includes explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, [and] phonics.'”
Rebecca, I agree with the NRP’s conclusion about phonics, but I part with them radically for having left out the development of oral language, conceptual language, language for schema, and experiential language based on the five senses. The development of expressive speech is CRITICAL, perhaps more than phonics, with phonics trailing right behind.
This omission shows a clear lack of scholarship on behalf of NRP.
I enjoyed your post and felt empowered by it!
Keepon posting; I’ll keep reading.
Correction:
I mean “Amy Rebecca (Williams)”.
Apologies to you, Amy.
Chapter 1 – Troubling Times: a Short Historical Perspective https://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/E00513/chapter1.pdf
I am amazed this is never part of the greater conversation about education and reading instruction – especially as our systems sell out to the latest “evidence-based” programs – especially high-tech.
All of these programs are based on the questionable foundation of that National Reading Panel’s report.
In short, they made it up – and discarded much of the real evidence about what the research shows.
So, both NCLB and RttT’s “approved scientifically-based” programs are based on a lie, to state it bluntly.
And there is no discussion about this (???)
Hopefully Dr. Ravitch may illuminate this further with her colleagues and their public platforms.