Teaching Every Child is a Bold New Experiment in the Annals of History
In the annals of the history of humanity, public education—the education of the masses—would be barely a page in that weighty tome outlining kings and kingdoms, discoveries and discovers, plagues and the plagued, philosophies and philosophers. A little over 100 years on a time line which stretches back several millennia, public education is an experimental blip, a democratic footnote, whose lofty aims include the lifting out of darkness and leveling the playing field of ALL citizens, independent of social class, gender, race, or mental capacity. Public education’s goals have become the rehearsal of the pages of history for ALL people in order to create “a more perfect society”, irregardless of the expense; to assure that all people are “created equal”, irregardless of aptitude; and to instill the dream “of life, liberty, and happiness”, irregardless of personal choices. Public education’s worthy goals are to drag the masses—kicking and screaming—into an “enlightened” state of betterment –to pull the farmer’s children from the soil, the factory worker’s children from the machine, the miner’s children from the mines. Teach those children to analyze the soil to produce better crops, to develop the machine for better production , to explore those mines to discover new energy sources to fuel society. Once taught, send those children back to where they came from, armed with the tools to produce effectual and lasting change to world. For better and for worse, inevitably, the tools of change—statistical measurement, scientific analysis, and accountable reporting—were adopted to record the achievements and challenges encountered by public education in an effort to assure its own success.
I’m not sure how the great tutors and scholars determined a student’s achievement before the advent of public education. Did Socrates keep a grade book filled with marks assessing Plato’s performance? Did Sir Thomas More give King Henry VIII regular quizzes and tests to assess his readiness to control the British Empire? What academic records were used against British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to justify his expulsion from University College at Oxford? I do know that student achievement in modern times has developed along a very traditional and recognizable path. Teachers, school systems, future employers and educators all measure student performance through testing in order to rank each student mathematically and scientifically against his or her peers. Every assignment is rated, weighted, and recorded. To provide feedback to students and their parents, and to maintain accountability to communities and governments who provide resources to schools, throughout the year reports are generated with statistical analyses of student progress in obtaining skills, mastering content, and adapting to the academic social climate. Chauppuis explains
In response to the accountability movement, schools have added new levels of testing which include benchmark, interim, and common assessments. Using data from these assessments, schools now make decisions about individual students, groups of students, instructional programs, resource allocation, and more (15).
From the moment a child leaves the nurturing atmosphere of home to attend primary school, that child is probed and prodded, not literally with needles, but figuratively with homework grades, projects, quizzes, tests, social performance assessments by his or her teacher. Beyond the classroom, the child is subjected to annual achievement testing in basic skills, To move out of this system, the child must score within certain aptitude ranges on other tests such as the SAT or ASVAB. In a society in which education is valued so highly, “winners” and “losers” are determined. For the winners and their families, a kingdom where dreams-come-true is promised. Ironically, for the “losers” the system justifies more testing to create support systems designed to prod the unable, reluctant, or disaffected forward until success is reached.
This “support” system stems from good intentions. In our time, it is called NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, which was reauthorized by President George Bush at the turn of the new millennium. The federal law mandates that
states and districts must meet the federally established goal of “adequate yearly progress,” or face severe federal sanctions, penalties, and corrective actions, such as the replacement of staff, implementation of new curriculum, increased parental choice, and finally, complete takeover by the state (Rustique-Forrester 2).
We are a society obsessed with institutional success. Like a Army slogan, the very title of the law demands that we do not progress forward until every citizen has the ability to proceed with the masses. A social philosophy not even a decade old, it is too soon to assess the success of this law. As Rustique-Forrester explains, “little is known” about how NCLB
will affect the practices of schools and teachers, and what the long-term consequences will be for those students who are low-achieving. Under NCLB and state efforts to hold schools more accountable, schools have greater incentive to exclude weaker students from testing and staying in school. . . . Whether high school dropout rates will increase for students most at risk of failure; or whether more schools will exploit “zero tolerance” policies to exclude difficult students whose low achievement might mar a school’s overall performance needs further investigation” (2).
As a society and system obsessed with success, many of the good intentions envisioned by the “Leave Nobody Behind” idealogy will not be realized. As an institution, teachers and schools afraid of their own failure must find ways to assure their own success. While individually, the law will encourage many teachers and schools to help more students maintain the pace of progress, inevitably the system will be compelled to leave some behind or suffer the stigma of “failure”.
The ideals of NCLB are worthy. The problem is that functional change to individual and societal values will always be challenging. We want to educate everybody and we demand that nobody fall behind. In a diverse culture such as the United States possesses, one question becomes “who is everybody?” Educational institutions and the analytical tools which measure the success rate of progress are doing a good job at teaching everybody in the face of a century of conflicting idealogical and economic tensions. Racial integration in public schools since Brown V. Board of Education 1954 is barely a half century old. IDEA (1975) created “free and appropriate” education and “least restricted environment” regulations for all children irregardless of their disability. Not too many decades have passed since Plyler v. Doe (1982) struck down Texas’s denial of funding to educate the children of legal and illegal immigrants. Education has enlightened the path of progress to expand the parameters of who should be educated to include those who previously stood at the side lines. This is a wonderfully positive change.
Unfortunately, while the “who” of public education continues to increase inclusion, the “what” of education has not. This is often the problem with standards-based education and all its measurements. The composition of classrooms has changed drastically, but the content, the design, the reporting methods, etc. have themselves been “left behind”. If you peak into a traditional classroom, you will see a teacher leading his or her classroom forward towards “success” through the dissemination of copious facts and disparate data taught through lectures, practiced through homework, assessed through testing, and reported through grading. At the end of the year, the teacher’s “success” in teaching is reported through his or her students’ performance on some state-mandated national standardized test.
A self-fulfilling prophecy, these scores can justify traditional content, curriculum, and methodology, at the expense of motivating teachers and students to broaden their definition of “what” is taught just as we have already broadened our inclusion of “who” is taught. The traditional classroom, composed of the white Christian children of farmers, factory workers, and miners, no longer exists. These children are less likely to return to their hometowns as the farms and factories that provided economic opportunity have vanished. These children are more likely to move to urban areas for a livelihood and their employers may be from other countries. Tractors and fishing trawlers have been replaced with Excel spreadsheets and Wii Virtual Consoles. Yet for millions of children, “success” and “progress” are still measured as if they were citizens of Mayberry, RFD and the future is still plotted as a Walt Disney feature film.
From the moment a child first enters the classroom until he or she leaves, every moment of his or her day reinforces a success or failure in an abstract, imaginary world. If a child is good at decoding texts, calculating numbers, memorizing facts, conforming to social norms, then he or she will receive a life time of positive reinforcement through teacher praise and good grades. But what about children who are “intelligent” in ways that traditional classrooms are not designed to address? What about children who have other “ways of knowing” besides readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic? Do we call the child who excels in athletics or music a “loser” in our system of success? Do we label as defective and encourage to leave our school system the child who doesn’t speak English at home, but perhaps knows two or three other languages and cultures?
The regular assessment of students serves critical educational and life-learning functions. It focuses the efforts of educators and students on mastering important material. Testing provides educators with crucial intelligence about the needs and abilities of students and the performance of academic programs. Regular assessment provides students and parents with useful feedback regarding how well the student is building important skills and knowledge. (Wolf 690)
Grading, assessment, reporting, and all the things we teachers do in a classroom are vital. But in such a high stakes system as American Education, shouldn’t we re-visit the questions of “what” American Education has come to mean for a new generation of citizens who will live in a very different reality than Mayberry, RFD? Wouldn’t it be more useful to our society to have a generation of “successful” students who had been awarded that “title” after years of promotion through a standardized system more aligned to the “norm”? The education of the “everyone” is a relatively new social experiment in the annals of history. So far, the outcome has produced unprecedented changes in all of our American institutions and their ideals. Not the least of these changes has been the change produced by this educational experiment on itself. Every decade, education expands the opportunities available to more and more people who are ranked and rated, gathered into the fold or left behind. My only suggestion is to develop a valid and reliable system which can keep pace with the rate of progress. The annals of history will ultimately rate our generation’s “success” in this experiment.
Chappuis, Stephen, Chappuis Jan, Stiggins, Rick. (2009, November). The quest for quality. EL Educational Leadership, 67(3). pp. 15-19
Miller, David M., Linn, Robert L., Gronlund Norman E. (2009). Measurement and assessment in teaching, 10th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Publishing.
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), Public Law 107-110, 115 U.S. Statutes
at Large (2002).
Rustique-Forrester, E. (2005, April 8). Accountability and the pressures to exclude: A cautionary tale from England. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(26).
Retrieved [date] from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n26/
Wolf, P. J. 2007. “Academic Improvement through Regular Assessment.”
Peabody Journal of Education 82 (4): 690–702
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