Right on banks, wrong on schools: “No Child Left Behind wasn’t designed for the types of realities in my school”
A congressman says even progressive Democrats fall for "accountability," over-testing and phony education "reform"
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders (Credit: Reuters/AP/Jonathan Ernst/Susan Walsh/Photo montage by Salon)
Progressive Democrats are right to hail the new populism in their party driving the debate about the nation’s economic policies and the atrocious inequality those policies have created. Heartened by the bold leadership of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the huge crowds cheering on the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, progressives can truly feel their agenda is driving the national debate and propelling change.
So it’s beyond disappointing when progressive leaders in the Democratic Party who can knock an argument for economic populism out of the park continue to whiff on education populism.
Currently, the House and Senate are in the process of rewriting No Child Left Behind — the federal law that started enforced testing and harsh punishments in public schools. Both versions that have passed in their respective chambers allow for states to end current accountability measures enforced by high-stakes testing if they develop their own alternatives. Public education advocates have backed this new direction enthusiastically.
But during the amendment process in the Senate, a curious thing happened. As The Washington Post explains, an amendment proposed by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, would have kept the federal government in charge of defining what is a “failing school” and prescribing how states should intervene. Thankfully, the amendment was voted down, but most Democratic senators, including Warren and Sanders, voted for it.
Supporters of public schools were outraged. “Democrats pushed to restore a punitive accountability system, much like NCLB,” education historian Diane Ravitchwrote on her personal blog, calling the vote, “evidence of how little Congress knows about education.”
Classroom teacher and popular edu-blogger Steven Singer wrote on his site, “This provision was an attempt to keep as many test and punish policies as possible … The Democrats seem to be committed to the notion that the only way to tell if a school is doing a good job is by reference to its test scores. High test scores — good school. Bad test scores — bad school. This is baloney!”
Another classroom teacher-blogger, Arthur Goldstein, addressed Sanders specifically. For The Huffington Post, he wrote, “We are disappointed with your recent votes in the senate that contain provisions which perpetuate quantitatively based measures of education … Quantitative measures are invalid. They are masks for social inequalities. They merely highlight and then reflect economic and racial inequalities.”
Civil rights leaders such as Rev. William Barber, the voice of the Moral Monday Movement, have called on politicians in Washington, D.C. to “fix public education and end high stakes testing.”
Other prominent voices in the civil rights movement, Judith Browne Dianis, John H. Jackson and Pedro Noguera, wrote in Education Week, “Today’s status quo in education is annual assessments that provide no true path toward equity or excellence … It is time for a change. Throughout the country, parents, teachers, and students are calling for an alternative to the test-and-punish culture.”
Also recently, an alliance of 38 organizations of student and parent groups in black and brown communities joined with 175 national and local grassroots organizations in an effort to end high stakes testing. In a letter to Senate leaders, they declare, “We respectfully disagree that the proliferation of high stakes assessments and top-down interventions are needed in order to improve our schools. We live in the communities where these schools exist. What, from our vantage point, happens because of these tests is not improvement. It’s destruction.”
What’s going on here? Why are progressive leaders in the Democratic Party out of Right on banks, wrong on schools: “No Child Left Behind wasn’t designed for the types of realities in my school” - Salon.com: