The Destruction of Public Schools
Thursday, October 20, 2005
By Marty Solomon

What would you think if our schools were told that every student must be able to dunk a basketball and if not, the school will be termed a failing school? The No Child Left Behind law is just as ludicrous. While most people think the No Child Left Behind law was intended to identify and assist children who need extra help, the law also contains components which are carefully designed to dismantle and privatize public schools. How?

NCLB assumes that the schools are solely responsible for the academic achievement of every child, not parents and not students themselves. NCLB assumes that if children have vision or hearing problems and perform poorly, the schools alone are responsible. That if children refuse to finish homework assignments, only the schools are responsible. That if children have brain damage or cannot understand English, the schools must magically produce excellent test scores.

In 1990, under the elder-Bush, voucher advocates planned for government to pay for private school tuition. However, the voucher concept died for lack of support. In 2000, under George W. Bush, they tried again, but once more, there was insufficient support. So the voucher advocates dreamt up a new scheme. Create demands on schools that are so impossibly high, that few public schools could ever achieve them. Strategists assumed that this would prove so humiliating that the public would lose faith in their public schools and turn to vouchers for private schools tuition.

Under the NCLB scheme, there are four levels of academic accomplishment: novice, apprentice, proficient and distinguished. Novice is a level that was originally intended to be one that all children should be able to achieve. Apprentice was for average students, proficient for excellent students and distinguished for the cream of the crop.

To achieve maximum embarrassment for schools, the NCLB designers inserted some big-time gotchas into law. Each year between now and 2014, requirements increase, until every child in grades 3-8 in every school with federal aid, must score proficient in both math and English. This goal has generally not been achieved even in private schools that select only good students. We know that all kids are different. Some are smarter than others. Some have different interests. Some are good at math, others English, but many are not excellent in both. NCLB requires that every subgroup (Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, disabled, non-English-speaking and poverty) achieve excellent scores by 2014 which would be like Lake Wobegone where all children are above average. If any single subgroup fails in either math or English, the entire school is labeled failing. This provides 14 ways for a school to fail but only one to meet these bloated criteria. In short, NCLB is all about failure.

Another gotcha, is that any school that fails is required to divert classroom funds to provide transportation for students to other schools, reducing money for teachers, making it even more impossible to meet their goals. To insure loss of public confidence, this provision will especially shortchange highly gifted students.

Then the NCLB killer endgame---that repeatedly failing schools could be reconstituted as private schools. Finally, the decades-long dream of voucher advocates could become a reality.

We can already see how impractical it is for all schools to achieve purposely inflated requirements. Today, excellent schools and great teachers are being castigated because sometimes a small subgroup does not meet these exaggerated goals, identifying the entire school a failure. Good teachers become discouraged, being asked to do the unimaginable and school administrators are being unfairly labeled as inadequate, trying valiantly to do their best to make all children dunk the ball.

Instead of the vacuous , one-size-fits-all, factory-type NCLB approach, we need to allow teachers to help each child achieve his or her maximum potential, even if that is not always excellence in every subject, especially if excellence for that child would be too high to jump. Yet maximum potential would be a great gift for that child. As it is now, NCLB will likely tear apart our communities, destroy teachers' morale and mark most kids as failures, just as the voucher proponents' plan dictates.

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Dr. Solomon is a retired University of Kentucky Professor and can be reached at mbsolomon@aol.com