As schools in Washington state get ready to start up for the 2014-15 school year, districts are sending out letters to families telling them that their schools are “failing.” These letters are a product of the widely hated George W. Bush era law known as No Child Left Behind. Under NCLB, by 2014, all schools were to have achieved 100 percent proficiency on state-mandated tests or be deemed failures, and sanctioned in a variety of ways, mainly with loss of funding (or control of funding) as well as having to send out these embarrassing letters.
I don’t know about you, but I remember hearing about this provision of the law back in the day and scratching my head. While it sounded like a nice idea, having 100 percent of students in every school pass a particular test by the year 2014 didn’t seem like a realistic goal. It’s not realistic, not because students lack the potential to learn, but because social inequality continues to devastate society at large, and plays out in unequal educational achievement for poor students, students of color and students with disabilities, in particular.
Of course, back when NCLB was the hot reform craze, if you pointed this fact out you were accused of practicing “the racism of low expectations” and told that educational problems will not be solved by throwing money at them. (Try telling that to rich people who send their kids to private school!)
As it turned out, a bunch of other people started coming to the same conclusion—that the NCLB goals were not realistic. President Obama campaigned on the promise to reform or modify NCLB, and the Dept. of Education under Arne Duncan has granted NCLB waivers to school districts, allowing them to avoid the consequences of failing to live up to NCLB’s ludicrous mandate.
The second wave of corporate education reform, spearheaded by the Democrats, was more subtle and complex than NCLB. While still relying on high-stakes standardized tests as the metric of educational success, the Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” more explicitly encouraged the privatization of public education through the promotion of charter schools, required that teacher evaluations be linked to the student performance on state tests, and celebrated the attacks on due process/tenure.
Last April, my home state of Washington became the first state to lose its waiver—because the legislature, under pressure by teacher unions and parent activists, did not pass a measure to link teacher evaluations to student test scores.
It should almost go without saying that linking teacher evaluation to student performance on high-stakes tests is patently unfair to students and teachers alike. Research conclusively shows that the best predictor of standardized test scores is parental income. In addition, students are tested in English, meaning that English Language Learners are at a disadvantage on the tests as are students with disabilities, who are expected to pass the same tests at the same level as typically developing students. The end result of linking these scores to teacher evaluations is that teachers are going to be judged, not on their teaching ability but on the kind of students they teach.
The federal government’s rescinding of Washington state’s waiver has now triggered the humiliating letters that must be sent to parents about how the school their child is attending has now been deemed a “failure.”
Some 28 districts have included a second letter in which they basically thumb their nose at the Feds and say that they do not believe their teachers, students or schools are failing—it’s NCLB that is the failure.
I have to say, it’s pretty unusual for district educational administrators to “talk back” to federal education bureaucrats in this manner. Administrators, especially those at the district level, tend to be rule followers, not rebels. How did superintendents at 28 districts suddenly grow backbones in the face of a blatantly unfair law?
One factor has got to be the teacher and parent rebellion against standardized testing including the teacher boycott of the MAP test at Seattle’s Garfield High. Parents are choosing to “opt out” of standardized testing for their kids, as they see the negative impact the emphasis on testing has on student mood and self-esteem. Teachers have marched on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle demanding an end to corporate school reform—and now even the Gates Foundation has issued a policy position calling for a two-year moratorium on linking teacher evaluations to the new Common Core tests.
Meanwhile, there is movement at the other end of the education struggle—not only are parents, students and teachers rejecting high-stakes testing, they are demanding full funding for schools, which is a prerequisite to educational equity, and this week, the Washington Supreme Court will hold hearings to determine whether to hold the legislature in contempt for failing to make progress towards fully funding schools in accordance with the state constitution.
Like the district letters, like the Gates Foundation concession on test scores, this move by the court is not a gift. It comes as a result of struggle. In 2007, the McCleary family, joined by teacher unions, took the state to court to demand full funding for schools. They won in Superior Court in 2010 and at the Supreme Court in 2012, and now it’s the legislature that must make “adequate yearly progress” towards the goal of full funding by 2018.
As a socialist, it seems nonsensical that so much energy must be expended just to prevent our public schools from being privatized, to prevent immeasurable harm from being visited on students and teachers through the abuse of standardized assessment, and to achieve full funding of public schools. Education is a right! It should be that simple, so simple a kindergartner can understand it. But under capitalism, we have to fight, and we will keep fighting, teachers and students and parents together, until we have justice.
