NCLB A Great Idea Gone Astray

No one who cares about the future of our nation can dispute that education is important. And no one should dispute the fact that each child has as a birthright a good education that will allow each child to find a path through life that is meaningful and productive. But how to provide, implement, sustain, and assess such an educational system has proven to be extremely difficult. In part, of course, this difficulty arises from the fact that different individuals, communities, and generations have often very different ideas about what constitutes a sound education. Should public schools seek to educate citizens or train workers? Instill creativity or a work ethic? Urge conformity or individuality? And, even when schools and their stakeholders can determine exactly what it is that they are trying to do, how are they going to be able to assess whether or not they are effectively doing it?

The trend over nearly the last decade in response to this last question has been to require public schools to put their students through the paces of frequent standardized testing as a way of ensuring that schools and teachers are conveying the basics to each student. The federal law, implemented by George W. Bush, that coordinates the setting of standards for schools across the nation and that governs the testing process is No Child Left Behind. And in the years since its implementation, it has proven to be increasingly problematic. This paper examines some of the most serious of its pernicious, if unintentioned, effects.

No Child Left Behind, which is seeing its tenth anniversary this year, is the capstone to the concept of standards-based education, which is in essence simply the idea that there should...

Standards-based education advocates argue that there should be clear, measurable standards for every aspect of a student's performance. And standardized tests are the way to ensure that each student is improving in performance at the expected, acceptable rate.
Initially, it might be hard to see a problem in the above description. It seems eminently reasonable: Children need to learn certain things to be successful in life, and so schools must be able to teach them these things. Lost in the haze of such an admirable overview of the concept of standards-based education, however, is the fact that between this idea and the implementation of it a great deal of mischief can occur.

One of the most serious problems, and one that has been noted by many critics of the law, is that some skills are much more easily tested than are others. And because standards-based education is really education keyed toward standardized testing and the fate of teachers and principals lies in how well their students do on standardized tests, only those subjects that can be easily tested end up on the standardized tests. This would be fine if the subjects that can be tested most easily were also the most important. Since the consequences of test scores are so important to schools, whole curricula are designed to help students do well on the narrow set of subjects that are easy to test.

This does not seem to have occurred to those who designed the law: The standardized tests that are now the currency of school districts have had the effect of dramatically narrowing the course offerings of schools at all levels. The two subjects that are…