‘No Child Left Behind.’ ‘Every Student Succeeds’: superficial changes to education will never resolve the central problem, that intellectual abandonment is designed into the deepest fabric of our schools.
Intellectual abandonment: how can we continue to support a system that forces us to throw away kids?
No Child Left Behind
In 2001 the US government implemented the ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiative, to great bi-partisan acclaim. Congress repealed the law in 2005 and replaced it with the ‘Every Student Succeeds Act.’
Both are tributes to the sad idea that if you just give a thing the right name, everything will work itself out.
Below Average
There have been many critics of both laws, but let me add a deeper question: How are we to insure that no child is left behind, and that every child succeeds, with a system built entirely upon the idea that half of them are not good enough?
Because that’s exactly what ‘below average’ means; inherent in our system is the idea that half the kids are below average, that they are not good enough. The statistical average, and the value of being above or below that average, is the central concept in how we grade students, teachers, schools, districts, and states.
The Grading Curve
The central concept is the grading curve: 10% A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s, and 10% F’s. Granted, a ‘C’ on the curve means we will accept 20% of the class who is below average. But first, that still leaves 30% of students with unacceptable grades. Second, if you give kids enough tests in enough classes, the grades will be averaged, and half will end up below the required 2.0.
It’s intellectual abandonment.
Intellectual Abandonment
Granted, in most schools the curve was replaced by the grading scale, but that’s just window dressing, a bureaucratic dodge. The fundamental idea hasn’t changed.
This is not some theoretical concern: 25% of the 2010 U.S. high school freshmen dropped out of education before graduating with the 2015 class. The number may be much higher; Bill Gates says it’s 30%, and he notes in his TED talk that we’ve hidden the true numbers for years.
The problem is inherent in the system. Rather than argue that point, let me simply offer a simple question: If all of our students, in all of our schools, suddenly learned all of the information and passed all of the tests, would we celebrate?
Or would we decide that ‘clearly’ something is wrong, and simply raise the bar again to guarantee that half are below average? Our system is prejudicial, and damning to half of our children.
Required Failures
Do we even have a concept in our mental tool-kit that could envison a system where every child passes every course? Given our blind ideology, is ‘No Child Left Behind’ even a possibility?
It is not. We have no paradigm of education that will permit us to even consider a system where no child is left behind, it is outside of our mental framework to create a system where every student succeeds.
The idea that some will fail, some must fail, is one of the legacies of our medieval educational mindset. Our schools were born a millennium ago, a time when the world was exclusively designed around the king, and the rest of humanity was disposable. After all that time, even within a democratic system, we are only interested in making sure that those at the top – i.e. ours, and those like us – succeed.
The rest are intellectually abandoned on the roadside.
A, B, C, D… F
It’s right there in the grading scale: A, B, C, D… F. Whatever happened to ‘E’? We all know what ‘F’ stands for, it means ‘Fail’, the child is a ‘Failure.’ If grading is supposed to be an impartial, scientific scale, it’s bad enough that we relegate some children to the lowest tier. Why do we also need to label them, and blame them because they fall short?
We make sure that our children know they are failures. We’re not failing them; they are failing us. The grade of ‘F’ pours salt into the very same wounds that we inflicted upon them by following a toxic educational system. Look at my earlier post about intellectual Darwinism to see how scholars abuse science to blame children, and absolve schools. Then consider the Bill Gates comment above; if our real concern is making sure very child succeeds, why do we hide how bad things are? The obvious explanation is so that we can pretend it is not intellectual abandonment.
It’s so that we can escape accountability.
Blame the Victim
We have inherited a system which not only mandates that some children be thrown away, but one which also insures that they are blamed for being losers. Better them than us, eh?
How can we accept a system which mandates failure for so many of our children?
How can we accept a system which mandates failure for any child at all?
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‘Lost Child’ courtesy of José Morcillo Valenciano via Flickr under the CreativeCommons Attribution 2.0 License.
I completely disagree with the above! As a teacher I would be delighted if all my students made As, but they don’t – no more than all children are good at playing music, or gymnastics, or sports, or singing, dancing etc. Why would all of a sudden be uniformity in academics??? And you speak of the bar being raised all the time to ‘fail’ students? You should spend time in the public school system – the bar is lowered rather than raised and we pass students at the elementary level who are not ready for the next grade!!! Your view may sound intellectually valid – it is not however based on facts!!!
“You should spend time in the public school system – the bar is lowered rather than raised and we pass students at the elementary level who are not ready for the next grade!!! ”
I see.
Why do you do that?
Before community colleges, UL had to accept any student who graduated high school. Many had to take remedial classes especially in math and English. What amazed me was that many of those students turned out to be great design students. My conclusion was that they were bored in high school – mainly because they learned in a different way than the way they were taught. It is like the left brain kids got it and the right brain kids did not. We educated with a lot of hands-on exercises – drawing and building. These poor high school students loved it, understood, and excelled.
I would give a freshman intro class a little exercise – answering questions and making a graphic image based on their answers. It showed that many of the were more apt to learning by doing than by reading and memorizing. I would have employers come to the School and ask to interview students for hiring them. They were not interested in the students with the most knowledge of using a computer, but a student who grew up working on taking his bicycle apart and putting it back together, or a car or truck or tractor. It was the creative side they were looking for in a student. I had one parent tell me that to be patient with their son because he was not “college material”. This kid excelled in the design field.
I think the first thing our educational system needs to know is how do these young people learn. Once that is understood, then an education system can be developed to give these students information in a way that they can process it and turn it into knowledge.
I would like to believe that if we could raise and educate them, and simply preserve their curiosity, they would all be life-long learners. Because really, they are. They just stop learning about things that can help them build the complete life…