MCLB Chapter 3 Summary

Many Children Left Behind Chapter 3: NCLB’s Selective Vision of Equality: Some Gaps Count More than Others
--Stan Karp

Some of the most-publicized aspects of NCLB are the sanctions it imposes on schools and students with low test scores. These include mandated school-funded transfers for students at low-scoring schools, required but unfunded tutoring services, staff replacement, and even restructuring of schools who fail to meet targets for five years running. Unfortunately, none of these strategies have any record of success as school improvement strategies. Instead, they are “political strategies designed to bring a kind of ‘market reform’ to public education.” (p. 55)

Schools that are obsessed with test scores are schools that fail to appropriately address students’ real needs for learning. Bilingual education classes, foreign languages, art classes, and field trips are discarded in favor of developmentally inappropriate practices that people hope will ratchet up test scores. Special education students and other disadvantaged subgroups get blamed for missed score targets, building resentment against those who need extra intervention. At the same time, the underlying social factors that are shown to cause unequal performance are actually increasing in strength. Rather than address the causes, our country’s social and educational policies perpetuate the conditions which create those gaps in the first place.

So why would our leaders support an initiative in which an estimated 75% of all schools are predicted to be labeled as failures? Karp infers that it is political posturing, whereby the worse things seem, the more politicians have to work with to get themselves reelected. As he says, “it becomes clear that NCLB is not a tool for solving a crisis in public education, but a tool for creating one.” (p.65)