Dear Mr. President-Elect Week 3: On No Child Left Behind

Dear Mr. President-Elect Obama:

This week, I offer what will no doubt be the first of many commentaries on No Child Left Behind. This week’s thoughts have been provoked by David Brooks, whose column in Friday’s New York Times (12/5/08) seems to me to typify the attitude among those who have no experience with education towards those of us who have spent our lives working in the field and the significant and widespread problems we face. Mr. Brooks opens his column with this:

“As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.”

Rhetorical problems with that statement abound; primarily, he offers a vastly over-simplified dichotomy suggesting that all Democratic viewpoints can be fairly distilled into these two positions. He does not take the time to explain that the two positions are not mutually exclusive, and so are not dichotomous, and, indeed, it would not suit his purpose to do so. Equally misleading is the lumping together of all people involved in teachers’ unions and members of schools of education, the implication being that all members of teachers’ unions are of one opinion about what should be done to improve education, as are all members of all schools of education. Mr. Brooks would even have it that all members of teachers’ unions and all members of the “Ed School establishment” are of a single mind. If Mr. Brooks is to be believed, there is not a single member of a teacher’s union nor a single member of a school of education who supports either merit pay, charter schools, or tough accountability standards. Mr. Brooks’ most egregious oversimplification is his use of the term “superficial reforms,” which he does not detail. The word “superficial” is deliberately loaded to suggest that those people with whom Mr. Brooks disagrees are not serious thinkers, do not seriously care about education or the students in their care, and are too lazy, foolish and irresponsible to support any initiative that could actually result in substantive improvement in education in America.

Mr. Brooks intended, of course, to write an opinion piece, and he is entitled to his opinion, but opinions carry a great deal more conviction when they rest upon carefully delineated facts and an equally carefully explained line of reasoning. In relying on this collocation of cheap linguistic manipulations to reduce widely varied and complex attitudes to monolithic follies, Mr. Brooks treats a wide range of professionals with a contempt that they do not deserve.

I wish to ask you not to do the same.

The remainder of Brooks’ argument rests on a string of additional unsubstantiated claims: Linda Darling-Hammond promotes “weaker reforms” (no details supplied; no validation of the claim that her positions are “weaker”—not even any specification as to what positions are stronger), for instance. Brooks also makes the sweeping claim that “For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform.” He does not provide any evidence of this momentum, nor does he specify what he means by reform, though toward the end of the article, he offers what appears to be his definition:

“No Child Left Behind is about to be reauthorized. Everyone has reservations about that law, but it is the glaring spotlight that reveals and pierces the complacency at mediocre schools. If accountability standards are watered down, as the establishment wants, then real reform will fade.”

I deduce, then, that for Mr. Brooks, “real reform” is synonymous with the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, and that it is, indeed, No Child Left Behind which is responsible for this momentum for reform he wishes to see propogated.

I have worked in education for decades, and I have to say that for many—perhaps even most—of us who work in the field, Brooks’ claim appears to be nothing more than the most fanciful of pipe dreams. Where I go to work every day, in a public high school, we see no sign of a momentum for reform. On the contrary: the people I work with labor under the burden of a fading hope that things will get better that amounts very nearly to despair. Rather than real movement toward improvement, we see, instead, a momentum, spawned by No Child Left Behind, driving public education inexorably toward complete collapse.

Here is just one example of the problems schools are trying to solve as a result of sincere efforts to comply with No Child Left Behind. In order to try to ensure that every student gets every chance to pass the battery of Virginia’s mandatory tests, the Standards of Learning (SOLs), we must implement an extensive program of remediation for students who have failed required tests. That process looks like this: I sat in a meeting for an hour last week during which all the department chairs of our school worked with the administration to try to come up with some plan to provide a large number of seniors who need to pass one or more (in some cases as many as five) of the SOL tests that they need for graduation the opportunity to do so. The problem we were struggling with was trying to come up with a mechanism that would ensure that these students, most of whom have a long history of non-attendance to either school or testing, are actually present for remediation and testing.

One suggestion was to offer a four-day two-hour-a-day after-school academy (for which teachers would not be paid) to provide students with an intensive review in one or two subjects prior to testing. Another suggestion was that we use our daily 40-minute tutoring period to provide review time. The former solution was acknowledged to be problematic, as these are the very students who would not be likely to attend such an academy, as failure to attend during the regular school day is the source of most of their problems to begin with. The latter was acknowledged unlikely to be effective because if the students actually participated, the time would be too short for any real learning to take place. This strategy was tried, furthermore, last year, and we found that students sent passes to attend a test review during the Self-Directed Study period (SDS) chose not to go—took the pass and then wandered the halls—requiring teachers and administrators to hunt them down and escort them to the tutoring session. This naturally used up most or all of the potential review session.

Another suggestion was that we take a week in January during which we would split up all the existing classes, removing from the classroom all those students who do not need to retake tests (sending them off to be supervised by another teacher for the week to do, say, an enrichment project) and keeping all those who do need testing in class for a review. This would have the advantage of not having to chase the students down, since they would, if actually at school, already be in the room, and it would provide longer blocks of time (90 minutes) for remediation than the 40-minute SDS period would allow. But it would have the completely unacceptable disadvantage of effectively halting instruction for a week for the vast majority of students who had already done what they were supposed to do while we concentrated on those who had not. That idea was countered with an idea that teachers could give up their plan periods to tutor these students (again without remuneration for the teachers), which would solve the problem of our tutoring period being too short, but which would reinstate the problem of getting students actually to report to the tutoring room.

None of these seemed satisfactory.

When it was pointed out that all of these solutions require effort and sacrifice on the part of teachers, who would be expending extraordinary effort trying to help these students graduate, while concurrently teaching these students that they do not need to make any extra effort or sacrifice because we will chase them down wherever they are and do our best to make sure that they graduate, we were reminded of the sad fact that given the requirements of No Child Left Behind, we cannot afford to let these students fail, even if that is what they prefer, because we need every passing number we can get in order to retain accreditation. When I pointed out that every one of these short-term solutions, though it may, indeed, scrape us a few more passing scores and keep us barely in the black on the pass/fail budget, feeds the long-term problem, because none of these efforts does anything to teach students what we really want them to learn in order to be successful in life--to be responsible for their own actions and choices--my remarks were met with a sort of bemused silence, as no one has any answer for that problem. The pressure is for us to get X number of students to pass the test, no matter how hard we have to work to get it; there is no pressure to help students actually learn, or mature, or take charge of their own destiny.

Keep in mind that for this particular test retake session we were talking exclusively about seniors who must pass these exams to graduate from high school. When this was pointed out, however, and it was suggested that under those circumstances a requirement that these students attend free after-school tutoring for a week was not an unreasonable expectation, we were again reminded that we can’t let students fail. If neither they nor their parents care enough to put in eight extra hours after school to try to ensure their own graduation, in other words, we have to care enough in their place to find some way to force their attendance and participation in both remediation and testing, even if it means engaging in efforts we don’t believe will succeed and inconveniencing the larger majority of students who chose to cooperate with state and local testing expectations. That these efforts are not necessarily efficacious is demonstrated by the fact that, as one department chairperson told me, of approximately 65 retake tests that were given for her department last year, following a similar massive effort of requiring remediation, approximately 10 students passed. No one bothers, in these circumstances, to point out that even if we are successful at somehow beguiling, forcing, or tricking these students into attending tutoring and testing, we cannot actually force them to learn something, nor can we coerce them to give their very best effort when they do actually take the test.

This meeting went on for another hour after I left to go teach my class, and several department chairs met for nearly two hours again Monday morning, manually going through the lists of students, trying to identify which students might respond to which strategies, and trying to develop a remediation plan that would, in fact, increase those students’ chances. So far, that I know about, that’s approximately 28 hours of adult work time expended on just this one retake session, and that does not count the hours that the testing coordinator and the guidance counselors have spent meticulously going through the records, identifying which students need which exams to graduate and crafting individual graduation plans (with which the students will be presented on Wednesday). Include the tutoring and the actual testing, and we can estimate that approximately 40 adults will invest approximately 100 man hours trying to ensure that students have a chance to pass this test. Keep in mind, further, that this will be one cycle of four times over the course of the year when the whole exercise will be repeated. For each of those cycles, there is an additional make-up period for those who were absent during testing and an additional “expedited retake” cycle so that those students who failed the test during the regular administration will get another immediate chance to try again.

Between SOL regular administrations, make-up administrations, and expedited re-take administrations, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and college admissions tests, along with the county-mandated benchmark testing (designed to check how well teachers are sticking to pacing guides for SOL preparation) and semester and final exams, we will have standardized testing going on in the building for more than 60 student attendance days this year—just over 1/3 of the school year. Naturally the testing on any given day does not involve every student and teacher, but on the vast majority of days (say, 50), instruction is disrupted in some significant way: the computer labs or library (usually both) are not available for instruction, there is a change to the bell schedule so that some classes don’t meet or some meet for less time than usual, and some or all students are pulled from a large number of classes for testing.

This is what Mr. Brooks wishes to call educational reform, and this is what he vilifies professionals for opposing.

Mr. Brooks is wrong. No Child Left Behind does not represent momentum toward change. It does not reveal and pierce “the complacency at mediocre schools.” While I might be willing to believe, because in a large and varied world most dynamics manifest somewhere, that there are, among the approximately 90,000 public schools in the country, a very small handful in which the mediocrity of the teachers combines with a complacency widespread enough that none—no teacher, no building administrator, no Central Office administrator—cares enough to try to do a better job tomorrow than they are doing today. But I simply do not believe that there are more of those than you could count on one hand, a tiny fraction, in other words, of one percent. Rather, what No Child Left Behind really does spotlight is all those schools which struggle mightily every day to teach children, and do so in a context of a wide array of circumstances many of which are completely beyond the control of those schools. Given that reality, Mr. Brooks’ smug condescension is deeply offensive, particularly coming, as it does, from someone who has never, so far as I was able to ascertain from reading his biography on the New York Times, spent a single day teaching or administering educational programs. He makes uninformed pronouncements about right and wrong, competence and incompetence, passion and indifference, and in so doing, he denigrates literally thousands of decent, hard-working, committed people he never met.

I wish to ask you not to do the same.

I urge you to visit schools and send your team into schools to spend meaningful amounts of time observing classes and talking with those who are out there trying to do the job. I renew my invitation to you to send someone to my school to find out the real effect on instruction of trying to implement No Child Left Behind, and I encourage you most urgently to supply your appointees to the Department of Education with direct and ongoing access to input from qualified practitioners, still active in the field, who really do know, unlike Mr. Brooks, what No Child Left Behind is costing the people of the United States.

Sincerely yours, & etc.

Addendum: When the numbers finally came out, it turned out that there are 88 seniors for whom all those retesting preparations are being made. The total school population is approximately 2000 students.