Leave behind ‘No Child Left Behind’

I’ve been preparing for the Graduate Record Examination. That’s right. I’ve purchased the GRE prep book and signed up for word-of-the-day e-mails from Dictionary.com. Sometimes I even read them.

My plan of attack for the GRE looks strikingly similar to my earlier SAT strategies: never mind learning the covered material, just get to know the exam — very, very well — and manipulate it. Anyone who has sat through a Princeton Review SAT prep course is familiar with this plan of action.

The point is, when preparing for a standardized exam, often the most efficient strategy is to narrowly focus on methodology and material for that specific exam. This test cramming does little to benefit the test-taker after the test.

And no standardized test is immune. However, while preparation for the SAT or GRE very rarely affects coursework or teaching priorities, the Adequate Yearly Progress assessments mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act have reshaped the classroom.

Psychologist Donald Campbell predicted this effect 35 years ago: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making,” he concluded, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Indeed, states, which are allowed to devise their own standards and testing methods, have lowered the bar for proficiency while schools have devoted more and more time to narrow test preparation. For an increasingly large part of the school year, the elementary classroom has morphed into a Kaplan course for third graders.

The results? The “meaningful assessment” NCLB sought has been muddled, and we’re left with incomparable scores ranging from Florida, where 71 percent of schools failed to make AYP in 2006, to Wisconsin, where only 4 percent of schools missed the AYP mark.

Perhaps the lack of success resultant of NCLB is part of the cause of Dr. Diane Ravitch’s gradual 180 on almost all of her previously staunch positions. Ravitch, who served in the Department of Education under George H. W. Bush, used to be an advocate of the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools. Now, however, she refers to these strategies as “faddish trends” and said she discovered they were undermining public education.

As Dr. Ravitch has recently conceded, the most important lessons don’t easily translate to a Scantron. In fact, looking back on my academic career, the skill I have most often relied upon is writing. Arguably, the ability to communicate exactly what I mean and to truly understand the meaning of others’ communication has enabled my learning and contributed to my academic success more than anything else.

Of course, each individual is different. And, by definition, standardized testing cannot accommodate that. When we place so much emphasis on standardized testing, the result is that the classroom can no longer accommodate that either.

Dr. Ravitch once supported NCLB but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. She’s right. As NCLB comes up for rewrite in Congress in the next few weeks, legislators should follow Dr. Ravitch’s lead, admit that No Child Left Behind has been a relative failure and work on a new method of school reform.


E-mail: akames@indiana.edu