It is now 2014, the year by which all students, and I mean
ALL students, are supposed to be grade-level proficient in reading and
math. This was the deadline set by
George W. Bush’s landmark act, “No Child Left Behind,” which received
bipartisan support and ushered in a sweeping series of educational reforms,
promising to fix the woefully broken and languishing education system by
enacting rigorous national standards for testing and evaluation with the goal
of ensuring all students have the opportunity to succeed.
Not surprisingly, it has been an utter and dismal failure.
Now I know there are those out there who may point to some
examples they feel are successes of the program, and while I find most of them
specious at best, I’m going to let those points wait for another day. I’m pointing the finger at that “100% grade
level proficient by the end of the 2013-2014 school year” thing.
I will grant you, it’s only February, and we’ve still got a
good three and a half months left before the final bell, but I’m giving you all
the heads up: <SPOILER ALERT!> we ain’t gonna make it, folks. It is my sad duty to inform you that at my
school (and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess at roughly all of other schools,) 100% of the
students will not be proficient. Not
gonna happen.
But then, it wasn’t ever
going to happen, was it?
I mean, who expects 100% in anything? If you have a garden, do you expect 100% of
your seeds to sprout? Surgeons have to
be prepared for losing a patient or two, tragic though it may be. Hell, even a cook at McDonald’s is going to
face ruining a batch of French fries once in a while, tragic though it might
be.
No, I’m not saying that any of those are the same as
teaching, but 100% just isn’t realistic in pretty much any area, especially
when human beings are involved. And
remember, that’s not just talking about the ‘regular” kids (ever met any regular kids in your life?) They are talking about all students, everywhere.
That means that by the end of this year, according to the
great minds behind dear old NCLB, we should no longer have any students with
special needs. No students with mental
handicaps or learning disabilities, no children with developmental language
issues, not even a single swatch of color on the autism spectrum. Those children will all be grade level
proficient in a few short months.
And as for those children who have just arrived in this
country, and do not yet speak THE
language? Well don’t worry about them;
they too will be able to demonstrate mastery of THE language on the state-designed test, which is given only in
English. And then everyone will be
happy, n'est-ce pa?
And that should have been the second hint that NCLB was
doomed to failure. 100% grade level
proficiency in thirteen years is so laughably unrealistic, displays such a
criminal lack of understanding of how education works, that it should have been
a huge red flag to those who approved the measure. Couldn’t they see that setting such an
unattainable goal would undermine any good it might achieve? I mean even from a political standpoint, this
is such an easy avenue of attack, why would you leave yourself open that way?
But then, that just points to the first warning sign: the
name itself. I mean, let’s analyze the
grammar and structure of the act’s title and consider what it tells us about
the motivations and perspective behind it.
“No child left behind.”
A simple enough phrase, and full of the feel-good proactive
tones that are the hallmark of such grand gestures of legislation. But beyond the pie-eyed optimism and woefully
unrealistic optimism of its message, there is a sinister secret lurking in the
grammar of the phrase, revealing the fundamental flaw in the logic, the glaring
oversight that will ever doom such well-intended, yet imperiously blind acts of
governmental officiousness, the single addition error that inevitably causes such vast
equations to crumble into mathematical gibberish.
Let’s begin with the verb shall we? “No child left behind” is not a complete
sentence, for it lacks a subject, although there is certainly one implied, but
we’ll get to that later. But we
definitely have a verb here, in the form of ‘left.’ This verb is further modified by the
preposition ‘behind,’ gamely playing the role of adverb, informing the reader
that 'behind' is how whatever is being left is being left.
This is all well and good, as we can all understand that the
phrase ‘left behind,’ as it is used in the common vernacular, is an undesirable
outcome, wherein one is excluded from the desirable, pushed out beyond the safety
of the communal firelight and cast into the outer darkness of ignorance and
fear (or something involving Kirk Cameron or something, I’m a little fuzzy on
that one.)
But being left behind sucks, I can grok that.
And who, precisely, is being left behind in this
phrase? Why ‘Child’ of course. It should go without saying that a child
being left behind would be terrible indeed.
Thankfully, ‘No’ appears like an adjectival white knight to complete the
phrase, and reassure us that the number of said children who shall be summarily
left behind is zero. Hooray!
But still our sentence is incomplete; we lack a
subject. “Just who is it that is not
leaving the aforementioned children behind?” we may well ask. And here’s where things get sticky.
Seeing that it is the great and the good within our fine
government, the men and women behind the creation and passage of this bill who
enacted this great legal endeavor, should we not assume that the mission statement is
for them to execute? Shall they not
perform the tasks necessary to avoid such behind-leaving of our children,
whatever they should be (conspicuously not specified within the titular
phrase.)
Much as I fear to shock you, dear reader, I’m afraid it was
never the intent for this august body to engage in the daily practices
necessary to avoid such dire consequences.
No, such tasks fall (as indeed so many tasks tend to do,)
upon those lower in the bureaucratic hierarchy, in a thunderous cascade of
delegation and passed bucks until it reaches the local education systems. It calls to mind one of my father’s great
aphorisms: “shit rolls downhill.”
Casting our glance ever downwards along this descent, we end
up at the bottom with the humble classroom teacher. It is these menials upon whose backs rests the
burden, and it is incumbent upon them to ensure that the number of childs is no, and
their lefting is not behind.
So if we were to complete this sentence, it would most
likely read: “No child left behind by teachers.” This is a terrible sentence, and not just
because it is written in passive voice.
We could of course restructure it thusly: “Teachers agree that no child
left behind is a laudable goal,” but that still will make any fan of the
English language cringe. But since we
are talking about legislators, not writers, I think we need to take what we can
get regarding language skills, and accept the flawed, passive structure and
make our peace with it.
But passive voice isn’t the real problem. However you structure the remaining sentence,
the phrase ‘no child left behind’ remains fundamentally flawed. Because by making the teachers the subject,
they turned every child in America (well, the ones in public school anyway,)
into mere objects.
Direct objects, but objects nonetheless.
So the children do nothing in this model. They have no input, no action to take, no
direct influence or effect. Even though
it is they who are in peril of being left behind, it is in no way up to them to
work against this fate.
By putting the onus entirely upon teachers, it absolves children of any responsibility in the process. If
a child finds him or herself being left behind, there is no pressure to run
faster, it is up to the subjects of the sentence to verb on over there and
prevent it.
And what has been the result of putting the entire burden
for children’s success upon teachers instead of students? We’ve seen an epidemic of teaching to the
test, tragic mass extinctions of arts education, elimination of
higher-order thinking skills and such a narrowing of the curriculum that what was
once a beacon of knowledge, casting beams of enlightenment to all who would
turn their gaze towards it into a laser, burning a tight pinprick of coherent
thought into our children’s flesh, all in an attempt to have them pass a single
test, at the cost of the rest of their lives.
We have torn down the rose lattices that allowed the bright,
the gifted and the talented to reach skyward, bloom and grow, and rebuilt them
into stands for rows of well ordered clay pots, where as long as each seed can
reach the rim of its terracotta prison, that is considered progress.
It’s 2014, and NCLB has not only not fixed all the problems
it was enacted to fix, it has created a whole host of new calamities, often worse
than what came before. It’s time to
scrap this sham of an act and go back to the blackboard with some new ideas.
I’m not saying we should not have laws, or that government
is automatically wrong and incapable of creating something that could actually
benefit our children’s education, I’m just saying that next time, let’s be more
realistic about what can be accomplished.
Maybe next time, ask an English teacher to name it, too.
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