Every Child Left Behind

The report cards are in for Ohio schools. So what did we learn after paying to test Ohio’s 1.8 million students from 1998- 2007? (find out who is getting rich from testing ) We learned that students who come from families where parents are wealthy and educated, on average, do better than children who come from homes where there is poverty and parents are less educated. We learned that African American and Hispanic children, on average, get lower scores on a particular type of test than Caucasian children (perhaps because more of them come from families where parents are poor and less educated). We learned that children with disabilities test lower, on average, than children who haven’t been identified as having disabilities. We learned that if we really push teachers to concentrate on teaching to high stakes tests, they can raise the scores of most children on the tests by a few percentage points. I don’t know about you, but for me none of this information came as a great surprise.

So why have we spent millions of dollars, hours and hours of valuable instructional time, and reams of paper to find out what most of us already knew? Underlying the testing are certain assumptions or perhaps hypotheses that some education pundits and politicians are trying to prove. They are rarely stated in their naked form, but are instead couched in some political slogans and educational jargon. (Educational accountability, no child left behind, outcome based education, standards based assessment, etc.)

The assumptions:

1. All children can learn what they need to get into college and become a “white collar” professional worker instead of doing manual labor if only they have the right (school, teacher, method, opportunities).

2. The reason American children fail to do as well on standardized tests of math and science as their peers in other developed nations is because our schools are failing to give students the basics they need to compete in these areas. (Most countries modify instruction in the higher grades based on career interests and aptitudes of the students. There are more vocation specific opportunities available)

3. The reason many American students are not prepared to enter training for high skilled jobs is because they go to schools where teachers do not set high standards, do not try to involve the parents, do not try to be creative in their teaching methods, etc., etc. If only they had better schools and more qualified teachers, the under performing low income, disabled, ethnically different students would be doing as well as their peers in the rich suburban schools. They would become doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists, computer software engineers, etc. (There is no genetic component to intelligence,and aptitudes. Parental interests do not influence their children's interests)

5. A society where every child is qualified for, desires and competes to enter employment in a job that demands a high level of academic skills is desirable. (Who will do all those other jobs?)

4. Children are like bars of metal and can be molded or shaped into whatever we want them to be if only we use the right methods. This assumption looks to a factory model of education. Students of whatever age are the raw materials, and the educated person is the finished product. The school and teachers are the factory, the machines and the employees. If you aren’t getting the kind of product you expect, then you look for the problem in the manufacturing process. (We can produce the product we want regardless of the student's aptitude, interests, and motivation to work in the occupations society deems most worthy and needed at this particular time and place in history)


There is only one problem with this line of reasoning; children are unique, living, thinking beings capable of acting independently, not identical bars of metal. They enter the world with differences that transcend unique fingerprints, and interact in their own unique way with the thousands of variables in their environment both inside and outside the school. The staff members at the school are also unique, living, thinking and independently acting humans who are impacting and reacting to each other, the students, parents, the community, etc. While we collect data in a futile attempt to understand student outcomes based on our faulty mechanistic factory model, our ability to impact the modern complex educational system continues to elude us.

It is my contention that every child deserves a “special education” because every child is special; just ask a parent. High stakes testing does not make education better; it makes it mediocre, and it is that aim for the “average” that all parents and students find so objectionable in today’s schools.

Alfred Binet did a great disservice to society by creating a construct he titled intelligence. He then created a measure of it using tests that divided persons into below average, average, and above average groups based on their performance on a few samples of behavior. Ever since society adopted this construct, students have been subjected to standardized tests that take the mean performance of a group of individuals on certain supposedly representative tasks and label that “normal”. Our lockstep grade level curriculum is based on “normal”. Students are placed in “special” educational environments when they fall too far from “normal” in either direction from the mean. Based on a production construct, I suppose unusual blocks of steel must be given an unusual production process to be turned into products that fit a particular mold society deems desirable, but the average widget can just be stamped out from the die.

Today’s ( 8/28/07) Plain Dealer had an excellent op-ed titled “The Gifted Children: Left Behind” The authors correctly point to the damage this mechanistic approach to education inflicts upon students with exceptional ability and interest in academic areas. But it is also as damaging, perhaps more so, for the students who have interests and abilities in areas not tested by these academically oriented standardized tests. What about the student who would like to fix your automobile when you get stranded on the highway or repair the bridge that fell in Minnesota? What about the empathetic and caring student who wants to work in a day care center or care for your aging parent? How about the student whose father or mother is a truck driver and hopes to drive a big rig some day? Are these the “average” students the tests are seeking to prepare for the future? Take a look at the questions asked on the exams released by the state and ask yourself if they are testing knowledge that is vital for these students to make their way in the world. How much does the manner in which the questions are asked and the vocabulary used to ask them influence the student’s ability to answer? Are there test items that concern personal finance? Will the students be able to protect themselves from predatory lending? How about reading road maps? They may be able to write a five paragraph essay, but do they understand their right to a safe work environment? Can they report an unsafe work environment to OSHA? Does the test ask questions about child development? From my perspective, this test offers little for the student who is going to make his or her living in an unskilled or even a skilled job. You know, those jobs Americans won’t do, so we have to import the workers from other countries to do them.

Is it any wonder that students who are having difficulty passing these tests drop out either mentally or physically? Can you understand their reluctance to study probability or the Marshall plan for the fifth time when their bellies are hungry, and their goal in life is to drive a truck or build a house, not attend college. It isn’t their fault that the jobs they would find interesting and have an aptitude for doing are going overseas or do not pay a living wage.

There are no average kids. Every parent wants an education that meets his or her child’s individual needs, interests and abilities. Isn’t that what the parents of gifted students and students with disabilities are demanding? Doesn’t every student deserve that, an education that will help them find their own unique place in our society? Maybe we should spend some of that testing money on a living wage for everyone who is willing to do one of the many and varied jobs we need to have done.
Maybe we need to promote respect for all our children instead of standards based education and academic sorting. Maybe we need to grade our schools on their ability to connect with individual students and provide them with the educational experience that they need right now even if it doesn't fit the norm. The emphasis on high stakes standardized testing leaves every child behind.