CURMUDGUCATION: Another Bad NCLB Apologia

CURMUDGUCATION: Another Bad NCLB Apologia:
Another Bad NCLB Apologia

At FiveThirtyEight, economics writer Ben Casselman has concocted one of the saddest revisionary apologias for No Child Left Behind.

Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.

Casselman buries the leded about four paragraphs down:

Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gapsremain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.

And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."

The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little CURMUDGUCATION: Another Bad NCLB Apologia:


Fired for Competence

You may have heard this story already. You're going to hear it again, and you should. And that's the point. Because one of the things we need to understand about the world is that it includes people who do bad things for stupid reasons.

Jeena Lee-Walker is bringing a lawsuit in federal court because, she says, she was fired from her job teaching English in an Upper West Side high school for teaching a unit that administrators feared would "rile up" students. 

Lee-Walker's unit was about the Central Park Five case,a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice. If you've forgotten the 1989 case, it began with the savage assault and rape of a 28-year-old investment banker in Central Park on a night during which widespread attacks were occurring throughout the park. The police pinned it on a group of five juveniles, whose confessions were taken under circumstances less-than-consistent with any kind of proper procedure. Their stories did not match and there was no physical evidence to tie them to the assault, but they were none of them exactly model citizens, and so they were convicted, serving from six to thirteen years for the crime. Then, in 2002, a career rapist already in prison confessed to the attack. DNA evidence, physical evidence, his account of the attack-- they all confirmed the confession. Oh, and he declared that he had acted alone. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated. In 2003, they sued the city for malicious prosecution, but the city under Mayor Bloomberg refused to settle, and in fact still had not settled in 2013, when Lee-Walker was teaching her unit. That settlement didn't happen until 2014, under Mayor de Blasio.

Lee-Walker says her bosses were concerned that her unit was not balanced enough. I am not sure how one works balance into an account of these events. The most common defense of the wrongful conviction is that the Five were all Bad Actors, but the "Well, I'm Sure They Were Guilty of CURMUDGUCATION http://bit.ly/1hqZ7wL


The Test-Centered School

While politicians and policy-makers have made mouth noises about the amount of time spent on the Big Standardized Test and the prep therefor, those elements only scratch the surface of how test-and-punish policy has messed with American schools.

At various times in ed history we have talked about teacher-centered schools, community-centered schools, and student-centered schools. What we have seen over the past decade is the rise of the test-centered school.

In the test-centered school, regardless of what its mission or vision statement may say, test results are the guiding force.

In the test-centered school, there are remediation courses, but these are not remedial courses in the classic sense of trying to help students who are behind in their comprehension of content. These are test prep courses, in which students' time and attention is devoted to practicing the skills of test-taking. Perhaps the school uses a program package so that students can work independently on computers, drilling multiple choice responses to test-style questions, over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after mind-numbing day, until the students have been taught that English and/or Math (because these remedial courses are never required in non-tested departments) are miserable disciplines filled with nothing but drudgery and boredom.

These remediation courses will have two other side effects. First, they will fill up the student's CURMUDGUCATION http://bit.ly/1hqZ7wL