The Case Against "No Child Left Behind"

Congress is currently considering the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which it first passed in 1965 and modified, in 2002, by adopting the Bush administration's standards-and-testing agenda, called "No Child Left Behind." NCLB has enjoyed bipartisan support--indeed, Senator Edward Kennedy defends it passionately in today's Washington Post--because it promises to improve educational opportunities for America's poorest children, who have for many years been the victims of what Jonathan Kozol famously called the "savage inequalities" of American education.

But NCLB is the wrong way to promote a more fair and democratic education system. NCLB forces schools to adopt a transmission mode of teaching: the authorities determine what bits of knowledge need to be learned, they package it into textbooks and curricula, and then relentlessly drill and test young people to ensure that this version of the world is transmitted into their minds. Paulo Freire called this approach "banking" education, where pre-determined knowledge is deposited into the passive vaults of students' minds. Freire, like John Dewey and most progressive educators, saw that a transmission/banking model of education is antithetical to genuine democracy. It encourages rote memorization rather than creative or imaginative thinking, selfish competition rather than collaborative problem solving, and obedience to authority rather than critical inquiry. Educators across the U.S. are astutely aware that NCLB has drastically curtailed creative and critical inquiry, and narrowed the process of education to a mechanical technique of fact-retention, with the facts pre-selected by policymakers, not by the educators who are most intimately familiar with young people's aspirations, concerns and challenges.

NCLB is more accurately labelled "No Child Left Untested," or even more to the point, "Childhood Left Behind," because the ways that children most naturally learn--through play, hands-on engagement with materials and projects that truly matter to them, and unfettered inquiry--are completely stymied by the unforgiving standardization of learning promulgated by NCLB. The politicians think schools should be "accountable," and they believe that comparisons of test scores and assessments of "adequate yearly progress" are meaningful. They believe that the purpose of public education is to crank out workers, managers, and technicians who will keep the American corporate economy competitive with the rest of the world. These are all flawed assumptions, because they utterly neglect the developmental needs of growing human beings. They turn children into standardized automatons.

Educators are organizing to oppose NCLB and to stand up for a more truly democratic and learner-focused approach to education. A group called the Educator Roundtable has issued a sophisticated critique of the standardization agenda and is circulating a petition to defeat NCLB. See www.educatorroundtable.org for more information, and please consider signing their petition.

Additional writings that expose the flaws and fallacies of NCLB can be found at www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/bushplan/index.shtml

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An expanded version of this blog posting will be published as my editorial in the spring, 2007 issue of Education Revolution magazine. See www.edrev.org/aeromagazine.html for information about subscribing and ordering individual copies.