The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is making the problem of
cheating, low academic standards, and public schools lying to
parents, even worse. Under this Act, the Department of Education
now requires students to pass standardized tests. Failing
schools will lose federal funding and other perks if their
students consistently turn in a bad performance on these tests.
Holding schools and teachers accountable, and expecting students
to demonstrate what they’ve learned, sounds like a good idea.
But this Act means that badly-taught students, victims of
dumbed-down texts and bad teaching methods like new math and
whole-language instruction, now have to pass difficult
standardized tests they are not ready for.
As a result, millions of students may fail these tests, not
because they are dumb, but because the schools never taught them
to read properly or solve a math problem without a calculator.
Millions of high school students with low reading and math
skills now risk not graduating from high school until they pass
these tests.
It is important that parents know the unvarnished truth about
their children’s real academic abilities, but many parents are
now frantic because they see their children’s failing grades on
these new tests. As a result, they complain to school boards
that they do not want their children taking these tests or not
graduating from high school because of low test scores. To
protect their children, many parents are now demanding
dumbed-down tests to make sure that their kids graduate from
high school and go to college.
The No Child Left Behind Act is now forcing many parents to
condone schools that dumb-down their tests and standards,
instead of blaming these schools for their children’s failure to
learn. This is a typical unintended consequence of more
government laws that try to fix problems that a
government-controlled school system created in the first place.
State lawmakers in New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and other
states have yielded to parent pressure. They have scrapped or
watered-down high-stakes graduation tests that proved too tough
even for students in the so-called better schools in the suburbs.
In Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high
school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents
from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself
“Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would
not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in
the schools.
Critics of the graduation tests were worried that the tests
would put too much pressure on the children. Suburban parents
lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators
eventually scrapped the graduation test before a single
high-school student had taken it.
Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to
pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new
graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of
education have backed away from graduation tests that were too
tough for even the so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of
schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of
10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.
In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30
percent of the city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to
graduate if the English language standard that will take effect
next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of the
Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New
York’s public-school system She estimated that in some
neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would
qualify to graduate under the new standards.
Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take
heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not
graduate because they can’t pass the new tests.
In Chapters 8, 9, and the Resource section of "Public Schools,
Public Menace," I explore how you can circumvent these serious
problems by finding real education alternatives outside the
public schools.
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