No Child Left Behind--A Fantasy

One of the things Obama recently suggested doing is making major revisions to the “No Child Left Behind” act that Bush and Kennedy put through early in Bush’s presidency. Not a bad idea. The bill was flawed in many ways.
For one thing it assumed that a teacher, no matter how good at teaching he or she may be, is actually capable of motivating children. In many cases this is false. First of all, a child’s primary motivation—or lack thereof—comes from parents. Peers come in second and the teacher is, at best, a poor third.
I can tell you from bitter experience that if the parents don’t see any value in school and they communicate that notion to the kid, there is very rarely any way you can reach him or her. Parental indifference—or hostility—is often an insurmountable barrier to an education. If you’re in a school where a substantial number of parents feel that way, you’re dead.
I’ve sat in too many classes where the kids look at an assignment, sneer, and leave it untouched on their desk. Ask them to pick it up and they will agree—and then put it down on the other side of the backpack. Federal laws aren’t going to make him or her pick it up.
Remember, you may no longer paddle a child or threaten him in such a way as to make him feel humiliated—so what do you have to work with? Nothing. Throw the kid out of the room because he is disrupting everyone else and he’s happy to leave.
Hard core recalcitrants do not respond to positive motivation, promises of a brighter future or appeals to the better nature. Ask the prison guards who will one day superintend them—and there are, year by year, more and more of this kind of kid.
There’s another issue. “No Child Left Behind” demanded that all teachers have class hours or certificates to prove their competence in a field. That has its dicey aspects as well. I’m thinking of a very good middle school history teacher I knew.
He’d majored in music, but he’d switched to history years ago. He was very, very good at it (I enjoyed talking history with him when I was in that school.) Under “No Child”, he was booted from history and sent back to find a music job—where he had academic credits but hadn’t worked in decades. “No Child” allowed no exceptions, not even sane ones.
The worst example I knew of concerned a man who spent twenty-three years developing a course in video editing. He bought cameras and equipment himself; he spent hours and years setting up a huge lab, and he mastered—and taught—all manner of arcane software. His class was hugely popular; kids almost stood in line to get in.
But back when he was in college, there were no courses for teachers in this subject. He had no academic background. “No Child” declared him unfit to teach video editing or filming or anything else to do with cameras and computers.
He was sent to the middle school to teach a subject he had once taken courses in. (He took his own equipment home with him.) They hired a young woman who had taken a course or two in video; her major was art.
She had no idea what he did or what the stuff in his lab did. They eventually broke up the lab; she went back to Detroit to teach art the next year—and the course is no longer offered at that high school. No one else had any idea how.
To bring “No Child Left Behind” into the real world will require a lot more than a glance at some transcripts. We’ll have to look at what a teacher can actually DO—and we’ll have to figure out how to motivate an awful lot of indifferent parents.
Baring that, you might as well burn the dollars as waste them on schools—which were never designed to do what we’re asking of them. And cannot.