“NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” LEAVES CHILDREN BEHIND
July 10, 2015
Whatever emerges from the current
US Congressional and Executive debate over how to renew the 2001 No Child Left
Behind Act, the federal government will continue to collect nationally
standardized test results on schoolchildren from the age of 8 on, and states
and school districts will be given power to use those results to hold back
students, to set pay or fire teachers, and most dramatically, to close both
public and private schools.
(Interestingly, home schooling is never mentioned.) Like measures of “crime” and “criminality,”
National grade-by-grade standardized test results have become embedded
politically as the index of whether children are failing, succeeding in
learning what everyone needs to know, in the order in which every student needs
to learn it.
The very existence of
standardized scores implies their political validity for use in determining
relative success and failure in learning and teaching. If it were granted that a student who scored
in a low percentile might still be learning in equally significant ways and in
different progressions, there would be no point in going to the expense of
paying experts to construct and administer the tests and standardize the
results. If results are socially and politically
valid indicators, there must be a percentage of test-takers whose results are
unacceptable. They, their teachers or
their schools have failed. It is inevitable
that odds of success and excellence will favor those who group in places and
families most highly represented among the learned test-makers—the substance
and hierarchy of the test questions closer to the learning experience of
children in their social milieu. Combine
this social and political bias as to what should be known when and what
demonstrates learning with the privatization of tax-funded schooling, and “no
child left behind” becomes validation of the socio-economic status quo—that
their inferiors really deserve to be left behind. Our ignorance of the many things “they” know
that “we” learn becomes all the more invincible, more firmly embedding de facto
segregation in US schooling, all the way through higher education where the
science of “curving” grades has greatly evolved since I started there.
In my last blog post, “beyond
passing judgment” (July 7), I criticized the bias implicit in degrading the
status of entire persons based on a single act.
Deciding students, teachers and schools fail when they don’t bring test
scores up above a certain percentage of other test-takers is a case in
point. Love and peace, ha
Just how does this program deal with special needs students? Do they affect teachers ratings? Sam Luckey
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