Senator Kennedy- Why Don’t You Believe in America?

Why Don’t You Believe in America?

Senator Kennedy,

Your op/ed in yesterday’s Washington Post indicates a serious misreading
of what is going on in America’s classrooms. While your goal of helping
all children is noble, the way you have chosen to go about doing so harms
children of all races and socio-economic levels. For example, over the
past five years dropouts have increased and segregation approaches
pre-1954 levels.

Testing will not solve these problems.

You argue that “before NCLB, few states had standards, assessments, and
accountability procedures.” This is simply not true. As everyone who has
ever been to public school knows, good teachers have all three. If public
schools had not been doing an excellent job teaching and assessing, this
country would not be the sole, global super-power.

Do not, I repeat DO NOT, mention China or India.

Should you do so, you will sound as foolish as the individuals who, in the
1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” claimed we would be speaking German or
Japanese if we did not radically change our schools. To be clear, we did
not radically change our schools. Schools look and feel painfully similar
to how they felt in 1983; we are just spending billions more on tests and
good teachers are leaving the profession earlier.

Parenthetically, for those of you who are interested, it was the authors
of “A Nation at Risk” who convinced Reagan NOT to shut down the Department
of Education…

Domo arigato.

Senator Kennedy, you argue that we need to “strengthen our academic
standards and assessment methods so that we can compete in the global
economy.” I am all for competing in the global economy, but that economy
is one driven by innovation, risk taking, and creative problem solving. In
essence, the masters of the global economy will be those who hone their
unique gifts and integrate them into a complex web of production,
services, and transformative ideas.

Standardizing the schooling of Americans will not, CANNOT, prepare
students for such an economy. Are we to believe that forcing all children
to think the same things, the same way, at the same time, is going to lead
to a workforce capable of the innovation, problem solving, and risk taking
required by economies across the globe? The curriculum we have in place
now, the one reinforced by NCLB, will (at best) produce workers capable of
doing the jobs we now offshore.

You write that “local control means nothing without the resources for
improvement.” This we certainly agree on, and again it sounds as if you
are channeling Reagan. But it is also where we permanently part ways. The
A-Plus legislation that you belittle requires accountability and
responsibility, but, unlike NCLB, the legislation favors giving
communities the opportunity to implement forms of accountability,
responsibility, and transparency that fall outside of the narrow, and
simple, measures enforced by NCLB.

If you believed in communities, and if you believed in the power of
democracy, you would clearly see that school systems around the country
have the ability, the people, and the will (but not, in many cases, the
money) to help all children develop into critical, caring, persistent,
engaged, and reflective adults.  Our present trajectory, the one you favor
keeping us on, guarantees a nation of  “Yes-Men,” individuals capable of
jumping through higher hoops, but not capable of asking why they should be
jumping in the first place, or, for that matter, designing better hoops.

If you want children to stay in school, if you want a challenging type of
schooling, if you really care about this country’s position in the global
marketplace, and if you care about that noble dream called democracy, then
you must empower communities. Many Americans see education as a civil
rights issue, and rightly so. If that is the case, it is time for
champions of civil rights to free students, teachers, and communities from
federal constraints and to support us as we pursue multiple paths of
learning.

The A-Plus legislation introduced two weeks ago marks the beginning of
that process, and I would think that you, a civil-rights champion, would
endorse it.

Philip Kovacs is a former high school teacher, an assistant professor, and
the Chair of the Educator Roundtable. www.educatorroundtable.org.