Nation's Students Still at Risk

Turning to the U.S. Department of Education's Web site in these troubled times, it's easy to conclude that educators are the enemies of America's children. In the description of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation, the emphasis on planning, mobilizing, punishing, exposing and leaving "no place to hide" is unmistakably hostile to teachers and school administrators. After 20 years of finger-wagging, foot-tapping and histrionics aimed at schools, this new bombast is simply the latest evidence that the emperor of school reform has no clothes.

We've badly missed the boat on school reform, misjudging everything from what's required to what it will cost. It's too bad, because it could have turned out differently. It should have turned out differently. And perhaps it still can.

On April 26, 1983, about 30 of us walked into the White House with a report for President Ronald Reagan, "A Nation at Risk." Since then, politicians, business leaders and journalists have mishandled what should have been a historic opportunity to make American schools world-class. The bumbling began immediately as Reagan startled us by hailing our call for prayer in the schools and the abolition of the Department of Education. We hadn't said a word about either.

It continued with corporate calls for improving the skills of American graduates, apparently to equip them for jobs that were being moved off-shore as fast as management and shareholders could locate shipping. It seemed to reach its nadir in the 1990s, when vicious partisan clashes between Democrats and Republicans torpedoed the promising America 2000 program of President Bush's father before savaging Bill Clinton over his Goals 2000 legislation.

The latest policy non-starter is the No Child Left Behind Act, a shock and awe campaign in its own right. It takes a venerable federal program of aid for low-achieving students in low-income areas and transforms it into a national testing effort. Tests have become the nation's latest weapons of mass instruction. No Child Left Behind's defenders cite the testing requirements as the anchor of a new, better and more accountable school system. But "accountability" is a smokescreen. Behind this euphemism, educational decisions have been moved as far as possible from the classroom.

Federal officials are now in a position to make decisions that would have been unimaginable even two years ago. They've established the criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and even defining appropriate curriculum for American classrooms. What's surprising is that this truly radical reversal of respect for local school control has been put in place with scarcely a peep of protest.

No Child Left Behind is the latest manifestation of a bloodless, technocratic vision of schooling that has grown to consume the nation's (and the state's) policy elite in the past 20 years. It's one that makes the mistake of thinking that because achievement is measured in schools, all learning occurs in them. It ignores what happens to students in the years before they begin school. It turns a blind eye on what's going on when they're out of school (80 percent of their waking hours). And it pretends that the decisions students and their parents make about learning aren't as important as the pipe dreams of bureaucrats and policy wonks. In the end, it's a vision that alienates most educators, offends many parents and turns off a lot of students.

It's true that schools have failed many students, but so too have a lot of adults around these kids, including parents, communities and the larger society. If we become a nation of nags about schools, we continue to enable society's dysfunction around these larger issues.

Those of us who framed the arguments in "A Nation at Risk" can't evade our own responsibility. The excellence commission's report was made up of hundreds of compromises. All of the good things the report had to say about American schools had to compete with the report's hand-wringing about the loss of American global economic dominance. Its images about educational mediocrity as "an act of war" were themselves militaristic and far-fetched. Lines like these won the public-affairs battle at the cost of the campaign for excellence.

The story line of the past 20 years is "oracular reasoning" meets "incestuous amplification." Communications theorists describe a phenomenon of oracular reasoning. When the oracle speaks, primitive people have no alternative but to take what they're told at face value. All evidence contrary to the oracle's prediction is ignored or explained away. We like to think that savvy people like ourselves don't behave that way, but of course we do.

And today the oracles have spoken on school reform. Testing, technocracy and reshaping school culture around business models are the preferred solutions to the nation's educational woes. Contradictory evidence is simply belittled. So, in the Evergreen state and elsewhere, we are asked to believe that 97 percent of our elementary schools are not up to snuff by the standards of No Child Left Behind.

Yet, it is clear from international comparisons that the performance of the nation's elementary school students makes them world beaters. How is it possible to remain so clueless?

Here we run into the dilemma of what military strategists call "incestuous amplification." This is how Jane's Defense Weekly, the bible of military analysts, describes incestuous amplification: "a condition... where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

And, of course, that's precisely what we see when governors, state superintendents of instruction and corporate moguls get together to talk about schools. Huddling together for warmth, they behave for all the world like primitive people praising the oracle around the campfire. Nobody should think for a minute that there aren't very real problems with learning in America. There's a lot to be done. But we're not going to solve these problems on the cheap, on the quick, or in schools alone.

Here are some ideas that might bring some common sense back to the discussion. First, learn the right lessons from parochial and exclusive private-school programs. High and demanding expectations are set for student performance. The expectations are reinforced with individual attention and a palpable sense of community support for each child. In the best of these schools, every child is respected and even loved. It's hard to find any signs of real affection for children in today's reform discussion.

Next, rein in this obsession with testing. Sure, we must know how well our schools are doing. But we can find that out far more efficiently and at much less cost by testing samples of students every three to four years — along the lines of the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) schedule. What about the performance of individual students? Here, Washington is a genuine trailblazer with a legislative requirement for senior class projects, scheduled to come on line for the class of 2007. These will be capstone demonstrations of what students are capable of doing. Already in place at schools such as Nathan Hale, Mountlake Terrace and Anacortes high schools, these projects dazzle local citizens who take the time to look at what today's seniors can do.

Third, build flexibility into the system, along with more variety and greater responsiveness to student and parent preferences. Seattle has made a reasonable start on this. The Gates Foundation is funding a lot of interesting experiments with small high schools, in Washington and elsewhere. Charter schools can undoubtedly help in a lot of places.

Fourth, go back to some of the ideas advanced but abandoned by the first President Bush or his son. We should make sure all infants have a decent start in life so that they're "ready" when school begins. That way, we won't have the disparity of affluent children starting kindergarten with a vocabulary of 5,000 words, while children of the poor struggle to get by on 1,000.

We should be worrying about the 80 percent of their waking hours that students spend outside the school walls. Policymakers can do a lot to extend the school day, provide for community centers and support recreational programs that engage young people in productive ways.

And maybe some of the rhetoric about family values we hear from politicians could be backed up with support for families. How about a living wage for working parents; affordable day care; child care on site with job-training; and assistance for struggling mothers going back to school?

We can't afford these things? Nonsense. The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity. It even has enough money to pay for what truly civilized societies do — supporting parents who want to stay home with their infants. The point is that learning takes place in a lot of places besides schools — and a genuine reform strategy would worry about them all.

America is the land of second chances. A punitive, test-driven society that encourages young people to drop out of school isn't what this country is all about. American education has taken a lot of people who looked like losers in Act I of their lives and turned them into winners by Act III. In this great drama, schools aren't just props or part of the scenery. They're the essential story line. We still have time to make sure the story has a happy ending.

About the author

James Harvey is co-author of A Legacy of Learning. He can be reached at harvey324@earthlink.net.

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