'A nation at risk,' 40 years on (Gettysburg Times op-ed)
When I taught school in Virginia, the saddest moments of the school year happened during what should have been the most joyous occasion: graduation ceremonies. Every year, the program had to be printed ahead of time, and the list of graduates always included a handful who hadn’t yet passed their English state test but were still trying. As those names approached in the list of students marching to get their diploma, we’d wonder if the name would be called. Usually it wasn’t and one more senior who had passed all her classes and finals left without a diploma because of a standardized test.
It has been more than 40 years since the Federal report “A Nation at Risk” first ignited the national obsession with school “accountability,” and nearly a quarter century since the “No Child Left Behind” legislation created the punitive system of standardized tests and the concept of “failing schools,” identified by a single measurement. The damage to our educational system and a generation of students is incalculable.
The most immediate impact of our national obsession has been the thinning out of the curriculum. Conservative voices love to complain that “they don’t teach history in the schools anymore,” with the inevitable suggestion that this is a malign result of “woke” administrators and diversity initiatives. In fact, it’s the result of Republican “accountability” policies, which told administrators, teachers, and students that their scores on English and math tests were all that mattered. (Inevitably, instructional hours for social studies declined precipitously.)
A second effect is to shorten the instructional year. In the Virginia school system where I taught, the calendar said the last day of school was in mid-June. But to allow enough time for retakes, the first round of state testing had to happen in early May, which meant instruction stopped in April – two months before the end of the school year! – to allow time for reviews and retakes.
Third, the state tests distorted teaching from the first day of school. Teachers are forced to waste limited class time covering how to take tests, reviewing special types of questions, conducting test reviews, and administering “practice tests.”For example, near the end of my time teaching, the test writer Pearson decided that “NOT” questions were a good way to test “higher order thinking.” Instead of the conventional, “Which of these was a cause of the American Revolution?” the question was “which of these was NOT a cause …?” Students accustomed to finding the one right answer now had to learn to pick the one wrong answer from a list containing three right answers. All the time taken teaching test taking strategies was time lost for projects, enrichment, and other activities that can make school fun.
But perhaps the worst impacts flow from the fact that the weakening of the curriculum and the punitive aspects of “accountability” fall disproportionately on the most challenged students and schools: schools with a high percentage of English language learners, students from low-income families, at-risk students, Hispanic students, African American students, etc.
What happens when a school is labeled as failing? Do we rally round, give them additional resources? Make sure they have a strong admin team and the best teachers in the district? Perhaps put in a special program, like a robotics team? No, in big suburban districts, the good teachers are allowed to flee these schools, they are routinely assigned the weakest admin teams, and the white, middleclass students often are allowed to flee for a specialty program in another school. As the “failures” (all tracing their way back to these highly suspect standardized test scores) mount, the school is basically dismantled.
And now, Pennsylvania is succumbing to the same temptation of so many other states. Voucher programs are expanding despite abundant evidence that this is a failed policy. The Economic Policy Institute notes that vouchers “are diversions of public funds to private and religious schools.” Vouchers are key parts of “the relentless and enduring campaign to defund and then privatize public education.” Its study concluded that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes and likely worsen them. Worse, vouchers redistribute “public funding to private entities that leads to fewer funds available for public goods.”Although voucher programs are rationalized as a solution for failing schools, they actually “benefit the wealthy at the expense of low-income and rural communities.” Vouchers mostly fund students who are already attending private school, and wealthy families are overwhelmingly the recipients of school voucher tax credits.
The most bitter irony is that while vouchers are often justified because of highly questionable “accountability” measures, the private school voucher programs themselves lack accountability and oversight. Pennsylvania’s school funding program was found to be unconstitutional by the courts. Expanding vouchers will only make this problem worse.
Leon Reed is a former U.S. Senate aid and a U.S. history teacher living in Gettysburg. He is co-chair of Gettysburg DFA (www.gettysburgdfa.org).