Back to School with Trepidation

Dear Deb,

Yup, back-to-school time. I too get that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, especially when I find myself wandering the aisles of a stationery store, looking at spiral notebooks, pens, and the other accoutrements of starting school and hearing the voice in my head saying that it is time to get ready.

This was not a great summer. I spent most of it trying to get a diagnosis and appropriate care for my beloved 10-year-old dog Molly, who became sick in early July. One vet said she has congestive heart failure and has six months to live; another said she has lymphoma and was hopeless; I am now working with a homeopathic vet who is giving her herbal capsules, and she is looking very well. So I begin the fall with hope.

I am sorry to say that education henceforth will be on the agenda in Congress for a long time to come. Having worked in the federal government in the early ‘90s and lived in D.C. for four years, where I watched the federal education agenda grow, I see nothing hopeful about this. When it comes to reforming the nation’s schools, Congress is possibly the worst qualified institution to do it. First, they are very far from the schools, in every possible definition of the word “far,” and second, they don’t have a clue about how to reform schools. But typically they think that if they pass a law and give it the right name, they have solved a problem. As we can see from the travails of NCLB, our well-intentioned but out-of-touch Congress has only created new problems.

Now the presidential campaign has begun in earnest, and we will hear more glib promises about fixing the schools by passing the “right” program. The candidates, and the leaders of Congress (in both parties), think that the way to fix the schools is to micromanage them from Washington. They want more regulations, more mandates, more obstacle courses for principals and teachers. If you remember, the report by the Gates-funded bipartisan commission on NCLB offered dozens of recommendations for such things. It seems that we should change the name of the federal program from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to No Adult Left Unregulated (NALU).

I think you are quite right that we must be suspicious of any school district or state that makes extravagant claims about the results of its tests. One thing that I learned while serving on the NAEP governing board was that changes in scores—whether up or down—occur slowly and incrementally. Occasionally a student may make extraordinary progress, perhaps because he or she decided to study harder and more consistently, or a student may see a dramatic decline, probably because of personal problems, but it should ring an alarm bell for parents, the public, and the media when test scores for a district or state show huge changes in a year or two.

Unlike you, I am not opposed to testing. But I don’t support testing as the primary means of educating kids, which seems to be the new business-style way to “reform” education. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum, and testing is not a substitute for instruction. Test prep may help raise test scores, but a cohort of students who have had little more than a steady diet of test prep have been cheated of a real education. In medicine, a thermometer is a valuable tool. But anyone who thinks that they can cure illness by constantly inserting a thermometer and preparing to have one’s temperature read is...ill-informed at best and should really go into a different line of work.

Thanks for sending me the Pring letter. Too bad The New York Times did not see fit to print it. I expect that a lot of parents and teachers would want to know that there is another side to Sir Michael Barber’s account of his grand successes in Britain (subscription or fee required). It is unfortunate when our newspaper of record prints a puff piece about a controversial figure without permitting the contrary voices to be heard. (I am appending a copy below of the Pring letter, which is now akin to samizdat, the underground publications in the Soviet Union that circulated from hand to hand.)

My guess is that the business leaders who think they have the cure for the schools are likely to emerge from this era of faux-reform looking like Enron educators. They may get the scores, and they may pull the wool over the eyes of the press. But eventually the day of reckoning will arrive when their incredible test score gains will prove to be ephemeral, indeed in-credible, as in not credible; when the students discover that they never got an education; when educators find their collective voice and say loud and clear: “Enough.”

May that day come soon.

Diane