The Road Less Traveled

THE FEDERAL journey into public has followed a long and winding road. Most educators know that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is simply the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which dates all the way back to 1965. In the years since its initial passage, the ESEA road has taken a number of turns and has been reauthorized many times, in various forms, under various names. The 1994 reauthorization, for example, was called the Improving America's Schools Act. In the past, ESEA was seen as a positive, supportive law, designed to help local school districts provide equitable and adequate to children who face challenging and expensive hurdles to learning. This segment included students with disabilities, poor children, and children whose first language is not English. About five years ago, ESEA reached a fork in the road, and the decision was made to go down the very different NCLB road. This new path was carved out of the landscape by the kind of high-stakes accountability that is based on inexpensive standardized tests and comes with an extremely narrow focus on low-level knowledge and skills. In addition, NCLB replaces decision making by those closest to the students in the school community (e.g., teachers, parents, school boards, and site-based councils) with rigid control by the federal government. The NCLB path has been fraught with numerous unintended consequences. Most fundamentally, NCLB fails to address the needs of the whole child and reduces the guiding purpose of public from the development of effective and contributing citizens to an unending quest for higher scores on tests that cannot assess what we value most in a democratic society--things like critical and creative thinking, problem solving, effective and persuasive communication, cooperation, perseverance, caring, respect, and appreciation for diversity. These qualities empower citizens to thrive in a democratic society and in our complex, ever-changing world, and they cannot be measured on the easy-to-score, paper-and-pencil tests that are the centerpiece of NCLB's accountability policy. The good news, however, is that these important qualities can be demonstrated by means of 21st-century, real-world, authentic performance assessments and that our schools can be encouraged to foster them through rich, meaningful, empowering learning experiences in caring, high-participation learning environments. The bad news is that NCLB's focus on once-a-year, multiple-choice tests--until 2007 in just two subjects--actually works against such a learner-empowering approach. In other words, the aspirations of Sen. Kennedy and the other architects of NCLB that our public schools would guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class have deteriorated into the pursuit of a single reading score and a single math score per year on low-level, paper-and-pencil tests. NCLB's advocates call this achievement--as if there were no other indicators of student learning and performance. Why this profound reduction of aspirations? Because NCLB's accountability provisions mean that the test scores themselves have become the motivators and chief driving force of the system. Educators, students, and their schools face stiff consequences if these predetermined test-score standards are not met every year. Hence, in too many U.S. schools, education for life has been reduced to preparation for tests, and as a result the teachers in those schools are witnessing the serious discouragement of their students and colleagues. The more teachers are compelled to focus on producing scores, the less time they have to focus on the learning that they feel will most benefit their students in the long run. …