Marc Fisher’s article is appropriately biting, and as far as I’m concerned, he nails it.

He’s reporting Jack Dale’s refusal to administer standardized reading tests to recent immigrants. The standoff between Fairfax County and the federal government is creating a stir in the waters of the Potomac, and the stirring gives me hope that we just might rethink our assumptions about what education should be.

Fisher challenges the assumption that teachers pre-NCLB were just not interested in student success, and that NCLB will somehow magically inspire teachers to finally help students:

The theory is that somehow, when told the exact number of children who are lagging in achievement, teachers will agree to render the magic that they have thus far withheld and — poof! — those kids will become smart, cooperative and productive.

Fisher also attacks the one-size-fits-all assumption behind NCLB:

No Child Left Behind is built on a lie. Not every kid will go to college, no matter what you do. So you can either lower the standards enough to pretend that everyone is succeeding, or give up on the lie.

This last comment reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk, in which he asserts that “the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors” and warns us about our inattention to creativity in education:

… if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original … [but] we stigmatize mistakes … and we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make … and the result is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.

Dale isn’t standing up for creativity here, obviously, but for common sense: of course first-year immigrants are not prepared for English reading tests. However, I hope some progress on the common sense front might lead to more substantial sense in the future.

Related posts (auto-generated):

1. Response to “In Defense of NCLB” I found Dan Meyer’s blog post “In Defense of NCLB” through Chris Lehmann’s post “A Smarter Mind than Mine Takes on NCLB.” I wasn’t...
2. Testing Teachers From the CNN article “Commission urges tracking of teacher progress,” notes about a “special commission” involved in the revision of NCLB: Teachers should be...
3. Freakonomics Quorum on Testing The Freakonomics Blog (hosted by the New York Times) held a quorum on standardized testing and posted the contributions yesterday. The questions were: Should...
4. Educational Policy Recap Education Sector has posted the text of a presentation1 delivered by co-founder and co-director Thomas Toch. In it, Toch gives a brief but helpful...
5. NCLB Making Progress? A recent report from the Center on Education Policy suggests that students are improving on state reading and math tests. More than that: the...

| Print This