The Test of Our Time: Can We Break the Shackles of NCLB?
By Monty Neill.
I came to FairTest in October 1987 as a movement activist and an educator. Over the years I’d worked in anti-war and black liberation support campaigns, wrote for underground newspapers, engaged in community organizing, edited the newspaper of the New England Prisoners Association, and for decades, before and during FairTest, participated in Midnight Notes, an irregular publication of political analysis.
In education, I attended alternative colleges, where I deepened my understanding of existing social, economic and political systems, resistance to them, and efforts to birth new systems. I also began to think about education itself. I taught in day care, at an alternative high school for dropouts, and in college, particularly as director of the Prisoner Education Project. I studied education as an international phenomenon. My doctoral dissertation was titled, The Struggles of Boston’s Black Community for Equality and Quality in Public Education.
So in this article, I will weave around particulars of testing and education and my sense of much wider social justice issues that we in education must address.
When I came to FairTest, my knowledge of testing was limited. I understood that it operates as a sorting mechanism to perpetuate class and race hierarchy. I learned about its roots in eugenics and its consequences, and how it contributes to tracking and is a selection tool for special education and gifted and talented. It often determines grade promotion and high school graduation, who gets into college and what college and whether one gets a scholarship. All of those play out by race and class, so the best you can say about testing is that it may not always be worse than the overall system, but it does nothing to alleviate the reproduction of inequities and hierarchies.
The 1990s was a period of gains. A growing testing reform movement won test cutbacks, developed performance assessments and portfolios, and expanded test-optional college admissions. Then, in 2001, came No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
The various advocates of NCLB advanced at least five main goals:
First, there were those who saw it as opening the door to school privatization. They have proven to be all too successful.
Second, there were those who wanted testing to control teaching and learning. Sadly, they, too, have been successful.
Third, there were those who thought that the test and punish regime would improve learning. NCLB failed at this. It could not even consistently raise scores on the standardized National Assessment of Educational CONTINUE READING: The Test of Our Time: Can We Break the Shackles of NCLB? - Living in Dialogue
