Left behind by 'No Child Left Behind'…
We have reached a critical crossroads in our educational and
national history. As No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB’s) reauthorization or
expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care
about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard.
Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather,
one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every
grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our
own students who enters the schoolhouse door.
While [the Secretary of Education] and legislators from both parties
stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working [or has been beneficial] —despite of all the empirical
evidence indicating otherwise — and as politicians boast that no child
is being left behind, let us pause
to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think
about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been
pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in
the school day.
Now if your school still has some of these things, I say
congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware,
because the unattainable goal of 100 percent proficiency that is the
bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years,
your school will join the 30 percent [now 60 percent] of schools today where these
crucial elements of school have already been left behind.
As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our
democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the
social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states,
social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for
social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.
The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less
geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how
public decisions are made or where their community fits into state,
national, and global contexts — or even that there is a context beyond
their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on
lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their
voices heard in ways that make the world listen.
History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this
next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes
and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a
democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the
test, either.
And economics? While children in wealthy communities — the ones
without AYP worries yet — play stock market games and learn about hedge
funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing
gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags
of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose
significance remains a mystery to them.
Health and physical education have been left behind, too,
leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with
obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark
about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the
kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor
neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of
a never — ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds — because that’s not
on the test, either.
Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing
wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an
aesthetic gap — a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement
gap that parallels a widening economic gap — despite years and years of
increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic
gaps are at their deepest points.
Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in
failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are
collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a
single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially
eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.
Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool
for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science
survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains
is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind
that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct
experiments, and make good decisions.
Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of
reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by
the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured
mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension
responses that the children who utter them do not understand.
Recess has been left behind in a third of all American
elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases,
we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left
behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think
as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what
if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?
Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in
pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice
time for a future of testing.
Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind
unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after
the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return
to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.
The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in
so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide
and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led
discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to
learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where
the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results
of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.
Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional
discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same
page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor
should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the
same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to
the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as
they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary
straightjackets.
Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is
the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and
sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of
what it means to be the teacher of children. With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as
expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot
do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to
a success that is increasingly elusive. Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools
to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the
obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach.
When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals
fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be
reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability,
poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher
can never compensate for.
Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the
failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because
there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus,
school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and
treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political
end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people
who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to
understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.
So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington,
please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good
sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book,
Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror
that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a
success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in
the thirty percent [now sixty] of American schools that are now labeled failures.
Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up
on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant
today: “What was once educationally significant, but difficult to
measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure.
So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value.”
Call and write and visit your school boards and your
Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you
believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know
that now and finally must to be left behind.
Jim Horn
October 2007
A similar version of this speech was delivered September
27, 2007, at Monmouth University's Pollack Theatre for the Central Jersey chapter of Phi Delta Kappa.
Dana Goldstein is a widely read journalist and a fellow of the 
