I don't exactly know what NCLB does. Here's what I think it does. I think it requires schools to get their kids into a standardized curriculum and then test those kids according to standardized tests. The thrust of this being that no school can graduate its students with a substandard education. Schools who don't have the requisite number of kids passing the requisite tests are put on an exception list and defunded if they fail to perform over time.
That's a good idea. But there are better ones. Unfortunately they are not ones that can be mandated at the Federal level.
From my perspective, there are a couple of downsides, and I'll speak to those as they apply to my family in particular. My family lives in an upper middle class neighborhood where the public schools are just peachy. I just learned the other day that our local high school campus is physically the largest west of the Mississippi. It's rated about 450th in the top 1200 or so highschools in the nation which comprise the top 5% according to The Washington Post. We've got everything a public school needs. The number one problem I see is that NCLB will encourage teachers to teach to the test. This essentially means that it takes all of the creativity out of teaching and flattens the educational experience of the kids. That's bad for my kids, it's good for kids who suffer because of 'creative' teaching. Which is to say those kids who need rote the most will benefit. Those who already get it, will suffer the most.
In my neighborhood, there are parents who are well educated and these parents are very quick to make value judgments about which teachers their children are taught by. They will use their social skills to steer their children into the classes that they believe will have the teacher with the right attitude for their kid. For example. Boy needs a teacher who is very direct, a teacher who tells you exactly what is expected and calls you on it every time. This is the kind of environment he learns best in. Scholar, on the other hand, needs a teacher who encourages class participation and wants to have long conversations about the material at hand. Boy will never raise his hand unless he absolutely has to. Scholar will always pipe up in class. Very different learning styles very different needs. Again. If a teacher's class is not hitting the NCLB mark, then the school gets on probation. That reduces the chances any teacher is going to take to give their own classes personality. This counts in every dimension. Homework vs classwork. Tests vs papers. Projects vs in-class participation. Individual study vs group activity. If you don't know these things about your children and how the teacher's style is, then you get what you get. That's the attitude in my community.
William Weston, a sociology professor and moderate Democrat, writes:
"I think the best idea in Kay Hymnowitz' Marriage and Caste in America is that higher class parents see their main job as educating and developing their children, while parents in the lower classes see their main job as simply assuring that their children have the necessities of living. Middle class mothers, especially, organize their lives around what Hymnowitz calls The Mission. The mission to educate the children becomes the organizing principle of middle class households.Hymnowitz says the importance of the Mission has multiplied in recent years, as our economy is more and more based on knowledge and the sustained capacity to learn."
This is a fascinating commentary that I found after I wrote the above, so I just had to stick it in there. The point is that if it takes a village to raise a child, a lot depends on what kind of village you live in. In my village, the parents have the power, namely the stay at home moms who have the motivation and the time to get deep into the business of schooling the school.
From my perspective, the best way to teach children is skills based. I first learned about a skills based curriculum back in the early 90s. A guy I was working with told me about his perfect daughter and the program a one of the schools in Providence, RI. Basically, its rather like Hogwarts. You go through the years of school with your class, but not everyone graduates with the same amount of credits. If you don't get good grades in Geometry, then you simply don't get to take Algebra 2. After four years of high school if you only have two years of math, that's all you get. You don't get credit if you don't pass the proficiency tests.
I don't think you can begin skills based teaching until after middle school, that is primarily because of the importance of socializing children together. The difference between 10 year olds and 12 year olds is large and between 12 and 14 is larger still. Despite the fact that there is really no math to teach after arithmetic except pre-algebra and algebra there is no way I want 14 year old kids in the same pre-algebra class as 11 year old kids. Tracking within middle school makes sense but after that, I believe that high school should be skills based.
Our experience with skills-based teaching is extracurricular. We had all of our kids in Kumon, just to give them an extra boost in addition to the good public school education they were getting. Kumon, like many other tutoring programs, breaks down a very precise program into small intervals. So unlike the chunks I was talking about above, say Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, which are year-sized chunks, they create a rubric within each area of study. So there may be 8 levels of Algebra, 6 in Geometry and 10 in Algebra 2. A score of 24 after three years or 2 if you're good, indicates mastery of college-prep mathematics.
My personal experience mirrors that of many kids who had SRA Labs in elementary school. Now you can see SRA has so many different educational products, it's very difficult to distinguish excellence from achievement. At the end of the day however, only a few of us need to be certified, bonded or otherwise sworn to levels of competency. This is the downside. But one would hope that some standards are maintained somewhere against which all competencies of public educations can be judged. Isn't it odd that we're running to newspapers and magazines to help us make the distinctions.
We've also used School Wise Press a great deal as we've moved from town to town. As we've had our economic ups and downs, we've moved through different communities and schools. The quality of the public schools has always been our number one priority. That, and access to Thai food. Our decision was very clear and we stuck to it. Either we lease in an expensive neighborhood with excellent public schools, or we buy in a poorer neighborhood and send the kids private. We took the first course and it has paid off for our family.
This is all rather the tip of the iceberg. There are a huge number of other things we have done to insure that our kids are growing up well-educated, and a lot of that has to do with building character. We learned early that it wasn't so necessary to get kids to want to learn as it was to help them understand that it was their duty to learn. This orients them towards an understanding that life-long learning is always going to be part of their lives, whether they get it right away or if it takes time.
Ever since my conversion four years ago, I've recognized the importance of the middle class in any society. Our pursuit of mediocrity and our petty hierarchies are important, and because a free education aids and abets that struggle we are indebted to society. To the extent that I am in the upper middle class, I expect that the education I can afford bends me and my children towards the knowledge that actually matters in the world, and I hope that God has gifted us with sufficient intelligence to be able to process that knowledge. So while I recognize that we all don't necessarily need standards, and they don't necessarily grant us excellence, it is important that our achievements are marked and recognized.
No Child Left Behind, whatever its details, are something we in the general public generally get for free. It may or may not tweak the free system enough to get a few more millions of the masses into the great middle. I hope it does not do so at the expense of the few millions who are well-suited, or aim to be well-suited to attend to the key functions of our society because I believe that it is the ambition of parents for their children which is the greatest force for excellence. In my case and speaking for my current community, I see the way that it incentivizes flattening curricula and teaching styles as a marginal impact. That is only because parent involvement here is often fierce.
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