Excellence in Failure or Education for All?

Mark Spring, an educator of ten years, helped organize the “Rally for Children Left Behind.” The 2004 election “is not just about defending the country, it’s about being the country,” he says, explaining one of the reasons why he and many other educators and concerned Ohio citizens held the rally at the Ohio Statehouse earlier this month. Above all, Spring says, they were motivated by the belief that public education – the backbone of democratic society – is being eroded by the No Child Left Behind Act.

“All across the state of Ohio, more than 3,000 teachers have been lost under Bush,” Spring attests. “That’s one of the net results of No Child Left Behind.” The act was passed in 2001.

“One of the main goals of the act is to decrease class size, to have fewer students per teacher,” Spring continues, “but my question, and the question that we all had as rally speakers, was, 'How can you do that with thousands of fewer teachers?'”

The answer, according to Spring, is that this promise is simply not being kept, especially in the poorer districts. As many suggested would happen, wealthier schools are doing fine under NCLB, while the poorer schools are taking a huge hit. All across the nation, teachers and parents are growing weary of the many adverse consequences that seem imminent in Bush’s education system. The long-term impacts of these inequalities is one of their main concerns.

“What we wanted to do with our rally, and what I think Kerry is starting to try to do, is blast through the rhetorical firewall that the Bush team has erected as a defense against the criticisms that were inevitable,” says Spring.

NCLB is the hub of George W. Bush’s platform on education. Interestingly, it also appears to be one of the president’s weakest points as he vies for reelection. John Kerry’s job, if he is to successfully blast through Bush’s “rhetorical firewall” on this key issue, is complex. On one hand, he and Edwards seem compelled to respond to the opportunity for reform that the No Child Left Behind Act represents by promising to make sure it has full funding. (In 2004, NCLB was under-funded by more than $26 billion. The Bush administration’s 2005 budget allocates $24.9 billion to elementary and secondary education, more than $9 billion less than NCLB authorizes.) On the other hand, though, it might make more sense at this point to drop Bush’s Orwellian rhetoric completely and make it entirely clear that Kerry and Edwards offer a responsible and viable alternative for America’s educational system.

Essentially, NCLB requires every state to implement standardized testing, or, to use Bush’s preferred term, “assessments,” which has had a drastic effect on not just schools’ budgets, but their cultures as well. All students in grades K through 12 are to be tested at regular intervals throughout their elementary and secondary educational career. NCLB also goes a step further, however, and extends the concept of assessments to schools themselves, which the Bush platform persistently euphemizes as “demanding accountability.” This means that schools can now also “fail.” And since NCLB “demands accountability in exchange for the record levels of federal spending now going to K-12 public education,” it follows that any school that “fails” its assessment will have its funds cut. But perhaps the worst consequence is that any curriculum which doesn’t produce direct results in the “assessments” mandated by NCLB is now seen as trivial. Schools with little funding for programs in non-core academics are slashing spending on arts and physical education classes even further, in order to focus on the preparation for and administration of tests that are mandated but not fully funded at the federal level. In short, NCLB contributes to a de facto monoculture, as schools are forced to commit a majority of their resources to militant preparation for their many “assessments.”