The Paradigm Trap
Getting beyond No Child Left Behind will mean changing our 19th-century, closed-system mind-set.
If you don’t like the federal No Child Left Behind Act, don’t blame President Bush, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Rep. George Miller, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, or her predecessor, Rod Paige. Well, not entirely anyway. And if you’re a supporter of the legislation, which the president signed into law five years ago this week, this is an opportunity to rethink your assumptions about its nature, purpose, and potential impact. As the nation’s premier education law heads toward its scheduled reauthorization this year, here are some thoughts on its history and impact to consider.
The No Child Left Behind Act is the natural extension of a paradigm that has defined, shaped, and sustained our public education system for over a century. The paradigm took form in the late 19th century, during the optimistic adolescence of America’s Industrial Age, and it embodies the leading ideas of that bygone era: a subject-structured curriculum, an age-based grade-level grouping and promotion structure, a time-based and time-defined form of organization, and a decidedly uniform pace of instruction, from September into June. All of these elements combined to mimic the much-admired factory assembly lines of the day, and within a few decades this industrial-age model of education became so institutionalized, legalized, internalized, and reinforced that it has been virtually impossible to change.
We simply know it as “school,” and most Americans have spent at least 12 of their most formative years in it. Most of their schools looked like huge boxes containing a host of structural and operating elements that placed literal boundaries around the thinking and actions of educators, parents, policymakers, and the students themselves. These tightly bounded and self-constraining “boxes” of school included the content-subjects box, the grade-level box, the time box, the requirements box, the role box, the grading box, the credentialing box, the opportunity box, the classroom box, and (now ascendant) the test-score box—all intertwined in a web of mutually reinforcing boundaries and limits, something we know today...
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