June 14: No Child Left Behind Fails to Meet Expectations

Today Reuters reported that a Harvard University Civil Rights Project Study found that No Child Left Behind is failing to meet its goals. According to the report, only 24-34% of students will meet the reading proficiency target and only 29-64% will meet the math target. To anybody that understands education, this comes as no surprise. It's a lot like a doctor prescribing that a sick patient take his temperature every hour. No sick person has ever gotten healthier by simply taking their temperature. NCLB does not contain the mechanism to insure that every child can learn how to read or be mathematically literate. Simply mandating tests and standards does not provide the mechanism for meeting performance targets. It's a lot easier to legislate assessment than insure improvement.

I'll never forget during my first year of doctoral studies, sitting in a class and explaining that if people could get to the moon we should be able to improve our school systems. Another student replied that it might have been easier to get to the moon than improve schools. At the time this commet seemed ludicrous. However, as I thought about it more I realized that in reality it made a great deal of sense. There are specific things that any nation can do to get to the moon. If you build a rocket ship that can fly the correct speed at the correct angle you can get to the moon. Local context does not matter. When it comes to improving schools local contexts are incredibly influential. Individual people are even more important.

Local school practitioners need to ask themselves how serious they are about improving schools, which in part means developing and implementing the highest quality curriculum. Educators need to determine if they are ready to insure that every child can and will learn. Just because they give a standardized test once a year does not mean that they are ready to do what it takes to insure improvement on these measurements. Too many educators simply do not believe that they have the ability to make a difference. Too many believe that their students do not have the capacity to adequately succeed. Unfortunately, a simple blog entry cannot change anybody's mind. But I wish that I had the ability to take every teacher who didn't believe in himself or in his students and show him one of the thousands of classrooms in which high quality learning is occurring even in the middle of urban city decay. As an educator I have found that if I believe something can occur, it typically will occur.

School improvement and the development of high quality curriculum is far from easy. Indeed, it is possibly as hard as brain surgery. But just because something is difficult and will take time to implement successfully does not mean that we should stay away from it. Doug Reeves recently wrote that school improvement might take five years. But if we don't start now, where are we going to be in five years? More importantly, where are our students going to be in five years?

No Child Left Behind has ambitious goals for the children of our nation. However, the legislation alone will not enable these goals to be met. As educators we must do what it takes to insure that every child can and will learn.