Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Back in 1961 President Kennedy announced his aspiration to land a man safely on the moon by the end of that decade. Since at the time we’d managed to launch only one astronaut on one very limited suborbital flight, and since we’d been lagging behind the Soviet Union since Sputnik, making it to the moon and back could have easily seemed as unlikely as, well, making it to the moon and back.
The fact was, though, that the president and his advisers, including scientists at NASA, had determined that this objective, while extremely challenging, was an aspect of the “space race” in which the United States might have an advantage over our Soviet rivals.
In short, while landing an American on the moon was, as the dictionary defines aspiration, a “lofty, ambitious desire,” it was also feasible. Nobody was promising that we’d make it to Mars in 10 years because they knew we couldn’t. Nobody was promising the moon but secretly winking that we’d never make it. Nobody was using the moon as ploy to goad us toward some less dazzling, more realistic goal. Nobody was suggesting we fly in space on waxed wings like Icarus.
They honestly thought we could get to the moon, they were right, and we did. As taxing in ingenuity, courage and money as the moon mission was, it was an objective that could be achieved.
The same can be said for other monumental achievements, from the Normandy invasion to the polio vaccine. The objective, however challenging, first needs to be something that’s possible. The mission then needs the commitment of the direct participants in the project, their minds, their sweat, and in some cases, their lives.
Compared to walking on the moon, educating America’s children should seem less daunting. After all, adults have been educating children for a long time, and up until the closing decades of the 20th century, America’s schools were regarded around the world as doing a world-class job, to borrow a phrase we like to throw around these days.
Those closing decades marked the rise of the present education reform movement. Reformers, often aligned by party and political philosophy, have been warring with each other ever since. They’ve alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, catered to and ignored changes in American society, families and children. They’ve recycled their own follies, heaped additional social, economic and personal responsibilities on schools and teachers, and at the same time stripped schools and teachers of the power and discretion required to do their jobs.
From conservatives’ obsession with testing to liberals’ predilection for touchy-feely, student-centered learning, I’ve had enough. More to the point, my students, whether they realize it or not, have had enough. More than enough.
From conservatives’ obsession with testing to liberals’ predilection for touchy-feely, student-centered learning, I’ve had enough. More to the point, my students, whether they realize it or not, have had enough.
Forty years spent ricocheting between dueling extremes aside, both reform camps have shared a common aspiration. The slogans varied from place to place. “Success for all students – no exceptions, no excuses” was our expert-imposed, official state motto here in Vermont. Wherever you lived or taught, though, it came down to this: “All students will succeed.”
No, they won’t.
Federal education policy is laid down in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Elevated sloganeering reached new heights when President Bush revised the law under a new title, No Child Left Behind. According to NCLB, and its many champions on both sides of the political aisle, all American students would be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014.
They weren’t.
Woe to any teacher, however, who questioned that impossible goal. Mr. Bush’s secretary of education, Rod Paige, explicitly stated that if you didn’t support No Child Left Behind and its mandated universal proficiency for all children, you signaled that you “want to leave some behind.” His statement of faith was echoed by countless NCLB expert supporters and school officials. These are the same experts and officials who now describe NCLB’s goals as “unreachable.” How could anyone, they now wonder, have ever endorsed a law that was so “unrealistic”?
Gee. I don’t know.
Their wonderment, of course, hasn’t prevented their bleating endorsement of the Common Core, which replaced NCLB’s impossible mandate of universal proficiency in reading and math with a guarantee to render all students “college and career ready.” In 2010 President Obama’s target date for this Common Core associated aspiration was 2020, but he allowed that it wasn’t “an absolute deadline,” which is good because we won’t be reaching that impossible objective either.
In case you think I’m wondering how President Obama could hope to accomplish something in 10 years that NCLB failed to accomplish in 12, you’re right. But time isn’t the principal problem with either timetable. The fatal flaw is the expectation that every student will successfully satisfy any standard that’s worth setting.
We can’t even make all students attend school. How can anyone with a brain possibly expect teachers to make them all succeed there?
That’s not to say that any particular child or group of children should be written off on the basis of race, or that the disadvantages associated with poverty can’t be overcome, though there’s a reason they’re called disadvantages. But it’s absurd and deceitful to expect me to pull success out of a hat for every student when their mothers, fathers, and Congress can’t.
Congress is currently engaged in renewing the federal education law. The Senate’s five-year ESEA reauthorization bill does a duplicitous tap dance around universal proficiency. On the one hand, states would still be required to “ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation.” On the other hand, there’s no awkward deadline. That’s because our leaders know their aspiration is unachievable, but they lack the courage to say so. Exhaustive, expensive, federally-mandated annual testing would continue, however, which will continue to result in most schools annually being declared failures, not because they’re necessarily doing a bad job, but because they aren’t accomplishing the impossible.
A century ago a casualty of the World War’s shell-shocked trenches wrote a poem that assailed the ancient homily that death in battle is “sweet.” He called that delusion “the old lie.”
The sweet deceit of universal success may not look as grisly. But it’s every bit as much a lie. It’s killing public schools, and it’s driving good teachers from their classrooms.
Until we stop founding education policy on that lie, until we accept that every student won’t succeed, we’ll continue to pervert and weaken our schools so that fewer students do.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Lies and aspirations appeared first on VTDigger.