In May of this year, more than 160 students in the South Bronx staged an insurrection by refusing to take a three-hour practice exam. Rather than submit themselves to yet another diagnostic test, the students turned in blank exams. As one of the eighth grade students put it, “The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”
Today on GRITtv we talk with teachers about why students are rebelling, what’s wrong with our public schools, and why they’re under-funded. Megan Behrent, an English teacher at Brooklyn New York Public High School, says that no child left behind has “flattened education to what can be testable.” A typical third grade class can expect to fill out 46 bubble tests a year. In such a climate it is increasingly difficult to teach kids to like books and literature. But that’s exactly what Behrent and our other panelists, Brian Jones a public elementary school teacher in Harlem and Martina Meijer, an elementary school teacher in the Bronx do day in and day out.
It’s not easy and attrition rates are high. And the federal government isn’t helping. This past weekend the National Education Association endorsed Barack Obama. But they criticized his support for merit pay, an often divisive policy that pits teachers against one another and encourages teaching to the test. They also made it clear that the problems public schools face go much deeper than money or books.
So school’s out—at lest for now. But the corporate model corrupting our public schools, a testing mandate, and crowded classrooms will all be back in the fall.
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Thanks, Laura, for addressing this situation. What some people forget when they tout merit pay is that someone will be teaching the least able students (and, let’s recognize that average means half the students will be below that middle mark!) — those teachers are often most able but may not be able to produce results that testers want. “Merit” must be calculated by someone…..and it will never be as easy to assess as it might seem.
“NCLB” started out with the wrong fuckin measurs- so it’s a doomed concept.
It gives the teacher no credit for helping bright kids to perform better- nor do they get any credit for improving the performance of slow kids who still end up short of the standard.
They only get credit for taking those kids who are just below standard to just above standars…which may be not much of an accomplishment…
The program ignores the very slow and also the brightest kids who have a chance of becoming the mathematicians and scientists of the future—
We’ll might get more literate plumbers out of this program- but not a hell of a lot else.
Merit pay can also lead to cronyism, especially if principals determine which teacher deserves it or not…
In my day, education was a “States Rights” issue —– where did that get stuffed?
My 2 cents worth is that NCLB is doing exactly what it was designed to do- ensure a dumbed-down, uninterested, unengaged workforce that has no ability to challenge the status quo on any issue of complexity or importance. In essence, a permanent underclass.
Good on those kids for speaking truth to power.
NCLB belongs on the trash heap of history.
Whatever NCLB’s flaws are, exactly how is getting rid of the testing process going to improve education? We had all of the problems in education well before anyone starting testing on this scale. And if improvements are implemented, how will we know they work without some sort of empirical measure of progress? I would argue it is a fairly credulous statement to say that removing the one of the few elements in public education that is measurable is going to improve teaching.
And remember folks, NCLB is just a name. We used to call it ESEA, and it was, and remains, a civil rights law aimed at addressing education inequities. That’s why NCLB data is broken out by race, since school districts and states have been adept at hiding the scores of lower performing students. I’m not suggeting NCLB is beyond criticism, I’m simply pointing out the status quo was not working, and replacing NCLB with platitudes about letting teachers teach is not a step forward.
Oh let me add my sunshine from California:
Right now, our guvernator wants to take the lottery money earmarked for education and steer it over to prison reform!