Checker Finn noticed that the words “No Child Left Behind” never even crossed the lips of Obama or McCain in their convention acceptance speeches.
In the education sphere, that’s roughly equivalent to talking about America’s foreign and defense challenges without mentioning Iraq. NCLB is the 800-pound gorilla of federal K-12 education policy and the foremost topic of conversation whenever this domain is touched on. In fact, as I roam the land, it’s the only federal education issue that non-educators invariably ask about. Yet in their major campaign kick-off addresses, both wannabee presidents managed to talk about education without disclosing that they’re even aware of its existence.
NCLB is a “damaged brand,” Finn writes, even while the public still supports standards, assessment, and school accountability. But the silence from the candidates has as much to do with “real and serious” internal schisms in each party, Finn says. Democrats are split over the role of teachers’ unions, and if schools alone can boost performance, or if problems beyond schools’ control need to be addressed first.
The GOP, too, faces a pair of big (and also overlapped) splits, both reverberating with past vs. present, of what might be called Reagan-era vs. Bush-era thinking about education priorities. One involves Uncle Sam’s role: forceful driver of reform or an undemanding source of dollars to states, districts and parents to do pretty much what they think best in the K-12 sphere. The other Republican schism is between supporters of school choice as the surest path to better education and advocates of standards, testing and results-based accountability, i.e. between reliance on the marketplace or on government-driven change.
The upshot: the less McCain and Obama say about NCLB the better. “Stick with the crowd pleasers today and save for tomorrow — some tomorrow after November 4 — any clear plans for what to do when statutory reality can no longer be avoided,” Finn concludes.
There’s a good, in-depth interview on ednews.org with Dr. Matt Davis, the head of the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in New York City this year. He talks about the two major strands of the program: a unique phonics-based “Skills” strand, and a “Listening and Learning” strand that enables very young children to build up vocabulary and background knowledge, through read-alouds of classic literary selections, fairy tales and poems, as well as a non-fiction selelctions in history, science, art, and music.
“We think the two strands together will be a great one-two punch. The Skills Strand should teach the students to decode fluently, while the Listening and Learning strand should help ensure that they have the breadth of background knowledge they will need to understand what the words they decode.”
Davis also makes a good, if little appreciated point about Core Knowledge in general. “Although people have been slow to see this, it is a curriculum designed for social justice,” he notes. ”The well-off kids, the ones whose parents read to them, teach them about numbers and letters, take them to New York and Washington, DC in the summer, visit museums, listen to public radio, and so on – those kids are going to tend to soak up a lot of cultural literacy in the home environment, and they will be able to make sense of a lot of what they read. But other kids are not as fortunate. These children need to get their cultural literacy in the schools. These are the children the Core Knowledge Foundation is looking to help, and they are also the children we are hoping to help with the reading program.”
What’s wrong with boys? Last week we learned that parents of nearly one of every five U.S. boys have sought professional help about their sons’ emotional or behavioral problems. Newsweek’s Peg Tyre thinks it has a lot to do with changing child rearing and education practices over the last ten years–overscheduling, instead of structured play. Learning Mandarin in preschool instead of playing Duck, Duck, Goose. Schools, says Tyre, have become increasingly terra incognita for boys
In many communities, elementary schools have become test-prep factories—where standardized testing begins in kindergarten and “teaching to the test” is considered a virtue. At the same time, recess is being pushed aside in order to provide extra time for reading and math drills. So is history and opportunities for hands-on activities—like science labs and art. Active play is increasingly frowned on—some schools have even banned recess and tag. In the wake of school shootings like the tragedy at Virginia Tech, kids who stretch out a pointer finger, bend their thumb and shout “pow!” are regarded with suspicion and not a little fear.
In short, the bar of our expectations for kids has been set higher, but the psychological and physical development of our children hasn’t changed. “Some kids are thriving in the changing world,” notes Tyre. “But many aren’t. What parents and teachers see is that the ones who can’t handle it are disproportionately boys.”
If you really want to reform education, Messrs. McCain and Obama, forget the unions, policy wonks and the business community, and heed the words of those who have skin in the game: parents. Elizabeth Green of the New York Sun has a piece about a new group trying to inject parents’ point of view on ed reform into the campaign.
Leading the charge are two groups, Chicago-based Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), and New York’s Class Size Matters. “There’s a complete disconnect between what we’re being told by the politicians and the businesspeople about what we should want schools to do, and what parents want schools to do,” PURE’s executive director, Julie Woestehoff, tells the Sun. ”But frankly what parents want schools to do is better for their children. They know best.”
Naturally, there’s a manifesto in which PURE offers its own ed reform ideas. Titled “Common Sense Educational Reforms,” it differs sharply from both the “Broader Bolder” group’s and the Education Equality Project, led by Joel Klein and Al Sharpton. The parents’ wish list includes increased parental involvement, lower class sizes, and a “rich, well-rounded curriculum.”
Sounds good so far. I’m all for giving parents the biggest, loudest megaphone on education issues. They are, after all, the consumer. On the other hand, the manifesto sounds suspiciously non-parental in its demand for kids to have ”project-based learning in a curriculum connected to their own lives and culture, with progress evaluated by high-quality, appropriate assessment tools that are primarily classroom-based.” The group is also decidedly anti-charter schools, which will be a hard sell to parents whose kids have been spared from a life of educational neglect by charters.
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