An Open Letter to Margaret Spellings and Congress

Some tough questions from Marion Brady --

An Open Letter to Margaret Spellings and Congress

"Human history," said H. G. Wells, is "a race between education and
catastrophe."

If we stay the course with No Child Left Behind, catastrophe
is a sure bet.

You'll soon be deciding the fate of this well-meant but appallingly
simplistic piece of legislation. Continued failure to answer the legitimate
questions of those you expect to carry out your mandates will further erode
trust in your leadership.

Here are some of those questions:

1. NCLB reflects the views primarily of leaders of business and industry
rather than of active, working educators. Does this make sense?

2. Did at least some of those who originally helped shape NCLB hope to
discredit public education as a step toward privatizing the institution?

3. On critical, instruction-related questions, NCLB removes local educators
and school boards from the decision-making loop. Does the history of
top-down, centralized control of complex institutions suggest this change
strategy works?

4. Will manipulating the curriculum to "maintain America's competitive
position in world trade" be more likely to ensure America's future
well-being than helping the young come to love learning because it allows
them to pursue their abilities and interests?

5. Management experts say that poor institutional performance almost always
indicates a "system" problem. NCLB blames poor performance not on "the
system" but on the people in the system. Are the management experts wrong?

6. NCLB relies on market forces to improve schools. Does this mean that
learning is unnatural and won't take place unless teachers and students are
threatened or bribed?

7. Do NCLB-mandated subject-matter standards, based as they are on an 1892
curriculum design, adequately address present and future individual and
societal needs?

8. If there are problems with the present, same-thing-for-every-student
curriculum, don't "raising the bar" and "rigor" make them worse?

9. NCLB is rapidly pushing "frills" out of the curriculum. Has research now
established that art, music, physical activity and so on have nothing to do
with scientific and mathematical reasoning ability and workforce skills?

10. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are being held back
because of poor reading and math skills. Is the ability to interpret written
symbols the only way the young learn, and therefore sufficient reason to
retain them in grade?

11. Education is supposed to teach kids to think for themselves, not merely
recall what they've been ordered to remember. Are the centerpieces of NCLB
(corporately produced, machine-scored tests) able to judge the quality of
complex thought processes?

12. Should life-changing decisions for the young hinge on the results of a
single test?

13. Attempting to avoid the "failing" label, schools use myriad strategies
to "game" the system. For example, knowing which students are likely to fail
and which will succeed on high-stakes tests, schools give "marginals" the
most attention. Is it possible to anticipate and counter all such
strategies?

14. Has provision been made for coping with NCLB's unintended consequences -
increased drop-out rate, loss of teacher autonomy and professionalism,
negative student reaction to excessive rote instruction and drill, increased
costs of testing and test-related materials, the destructiveness of the
"failure" label - (just to begin a list)?

15. Are NCLB-related contracts entirely free of conflicts of interest?

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author.]

Marion Brady Cocoa, Florida 11/18/2006