the real problem with no child left behind

now, i like no child left behind as much as the next guy. maybe even a little more than the next guy (since the next guy is a lifelong union man). i LIKE the disaggregation of test score data (despite its unintended consequences, including emphasizing race as a predictor for low achievement), and i like the fact that it requires all schools (not just those receiving federal $$$ (though not including ALL schools that receive fed. $$$, like private schools)) to report their scores.

it's got problems - i won't get into them here. lots of problems. but at heart, it's a good and necessary piece of legislation.

still, there's always been something that's bothered me about no child left behind, and i could never articulate it until yesterday when someone did it for me. and he did it very simply. he said:

"Standards and accountability is a proxy for trying to solve urban problems."

this was larry cuban, an education researcher from stanford who was speaking at a conference i attended yesterday. he was basically saying that the underlying agenda of the standards and accountability movement, of which NCLB is a part, is to fix problems of race, class, and poverty without really acknowledging that these problems exist. it's to hand these real, hard problems over to public education, and public education alone, to fix.

sound familiar?

sound anything like faith-based initiatives? don't get me wrong, i like faith-based initiatives, probably more than all the next guys in this building. but it too, at heart, is a way to pass on the responsibility for dealing with issues of race and class without admitting the problems exist.

this is why people are so resistant to NCLB, cuban argues. teachers know in their guts that they're being handed a weight they cannot possibly bear, being told they must bear it alone, and also that if they don't bear it they're subject to punishment.

no child left behind should stick around. it should be fixed, but still should be a fixture of american education. and maybe it's the case, like the people at eduwonk argue, that while only a republican could pass NCLB, only a democrat can make it work. maybe that's because only a democrat can know that NCLB is about more than the business model of standards and accountability, which justifies doing it on the cheap - it's about something much deeper, which requires real, ballsout, long-term investment.