In an online chat at the Washington Post website, Howard Dean
said:
No Child Left Behind is bad policy. Texas and Ohio have already reduced their educational standards in order to save money. This bill is hurting American education not helping it. We need accountability in education and high standards and this bill is doing the opposite. I would scrap the majority of No Child Left Behind, fully fund special education and create a very high standards test with technical assistance to help schools meet the goals.
Most of these are good points, and Dean could note that Vermont has come up with some effective approaches to standardized testing, but I'm wary of his statement that he would "create a very high standards test..."
The problems with No Child Left Behind are many, but one of the things that gets missed in the arguments about its economic impact on schools is the fact that standardized tests are at best marginally effective ways of assessing students' learning, particularly in the humanities.
For some ideas on alternatives to standardized testing, see the Rethinking Schools website.
What continually frustrates me as a teacher is that decision-makers so often discount the knowledge held by people who teach in classrooms every day. I teach at a private boarding school, so am not held to any of the national requirements, and in general I think we do a pretty good job of teaching an extremely diverse student body (1/3 of our students are coded as learning disabled, while others are National Merit Scholars). We're able to accomplish what we do because our administration trusts its faculty. I certainly don't agree with everything we do, but our approach to teaching is to keep it an ongoing dialogue, an experiment. What we do has begun to gain some national attention, and we're continually surprised to find some of our most basic practices seen as revolutionary -- for instance, we believe that students and teachers should talk to each other as much as possible, that lines of communication should always be kept open, that nothing is sacred except for intellectual curiosity. Hence, I've had students in my Advanced Placement classes who were so dyslexic they didn't learn to read until they were 13 years old -- and they were able to find success in my extremely rigorous class.
As long as the national dialogue continues to focus on coming up with some sort of magic test, on punishing schools and students, and on summing everything up as a number or letter grade, we're not going to fix the education system in this country. Democracy needs public education -- effective, fair, rigorous public education. I love the school I work at, but it makes me sad that it's a private school, and that many of the very basic, simple, inexpensive techniques we use to reach as many students as possible are ones which are alien to the public school systems.
That's what we should be talking about with No Child Left Behind. It's not about building a better test -- there's no such thing. It's about finding effective ways of teaching and effective ways of assessing teaching and learning.