No Child Left Behind, a failing policy

The political season is winding down. The loudest shouting is now going on with everyone making mountains out of molehills and squealing about normally insignificant events. Political debates are interesting theater, but rarely have anything to do with real issues, important public policy, or actual decision making. Most political campaigns are about character, social issues, and morality. Most of the talking points are expressly manufactured campaign commercials only reflecting and sometimes obscuring the substantial issue imbedded deeply in the governmental agenda. It's one liner after one liner, one "gotcha" after another, real and manufactured "scandals" and hot-headed zealots from all parties trying to out-shout each other in the name of political debate.

Real issues put the general population to sleep. One must dig into public policy with research and astute observation to even find out what is really going on in the halls of government. How does a government operate, what has the government done, what are the real measurable effects of government policies. If you read a wide variety of reports, transcripts, and research you will find actual real policy debate going on. It's well hidden from the daily news and far off the beaten track, but can be found with a little digging. Only by looking beneath the superficial news reports, blogs, and political commentary of the local newspaper you can actually observe and measure the real effects of policy decisions made by folks elected by "we the people."

In education, of course, we have the policy known as "No Child Left Behind." As a music teacher in the Augusta County Public School system for 33 years, I saw first hand, and experienced "up close and personally" the dramatic effect this political morality play had on education in my district, my school, and my classroom. In Virginia, the real effects of NCLB were pre-dated by our own policy of "Standards of Learning." The SOL initiative came along several years before the ill-timed and watered down federalized version that came to be known derisively in our school as "No Child's Left Behind."

At Stewart Middle School, we tried mightily to "align the curriculum" to meet the "SOL objectives." Every classroom teacher was given a nice wall to ceiling poster with Virginia's specified "subject appropriate objectives" to be taught in each classroom. Special emphasis, teacher training, workshops, slogans, and administrative pressure were used to ensure that each teacher "aligned" their curriculum in such a way that their specific objectives were taught. An enormous amount of material now had to be covered so that each objective could be checked off. Teachers were held accountable for the performance of their students and were reprimanded or applauded as progress was measured.
Every year Students were tested on the SOL's. The results of the testing were published and written up in the news media. Of course this is all background. In the next blog, I'll talk about some of the effects of this testing program as it affected Stewart Middle School.