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Harsh Words for Bush Education Program Posted: November 6, 2007 Educator and writer Jonathan Kozol addressed a standing-room-only crowd November 2 in Gamble Auditorium, lamenting the desperate situation in our nation's public school system. Kozol's talk was part of the Weissman Center's Bearing Witness series. Kozol spoke on his latest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, about his relationship with a young first-grade teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and her students. The teacher, whom he calls "Francesca," invited him to her classroom, and immediately involved him with her students. He continued to visit her classroom throughout the year, watching "the chemistry of love and trust" between students and teacher build there. "They come as little strangers, and you cry when they leave at the end of the year," he said. While pockets of hope remain in the school system, Kozol said that President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program has devastated our public schools, particularly ones in poor neighborhoods. In these schools, there is no place in the classroom for the chemistry of love and trust. Teachers are forced to abandon creative, constructive teaching methods in order to "teach to the test," or in academic jargon, "deliver proficiencies" in various areas. This amounts to "passing along little chunks of Balkanized cognition," he said. The underlying principle of NCLB is accountability; teachers are being told that they must be accountable for their students' performance on standardized tests. "They are terrorized by this," Kozol said. "They try to follow the rules so they won't be fired." He praised Francesca's courage in refusing to "robotically drill" students to inflate test scores, and her determination to expose her students to traditional literature, including poetry by Auden and Yeats, and children's classics like Eric Carle's A Very Hungry Caterpillar. He stressed that her children's test scores were good, despite her unwillingness to knuckle under to the methods of the testing authorities. Kozol observed that although there are hundreds of thousands of idealistic and thoughtful young teachers in the country eager to work in poor schools, half of them become so disheartened by the testing system that they leave their jobs within three years. He pointed out that the tests are not even useful as a diagnostic tool and that the results aren't reported to the teachers in time for the teachers to take any remedial measures the tests might indicate. Kozol believes that the program was never truly intended to improve the quality of education, but is instead a "shaming ritual" to discredit the legacy of public education in America. He believes its true purpose is to pave the way for a voucher system, so that families of moderate means will be able to buy their way into private schools, leaving the poorest to fend for themselves. Citing alarming figures about the disparity between pre-kindergarten resources for rich and poor children, Kozol decried the unfairness of having all children take the same standardized test. This sets poor children on the road to failure, where they will be labeled as "developmentally challenged," and held back. If you rob children of pre-K, he said, that's an "irreversible theft. The child will never have that opportunity again." Kozol said, "There's something deeply hypocritical about holding an eight-year-old girl accountable for her performance on an exam but not holding the president or Congress accountable for their programs." Kozol observed that there is nothing in the NCLB program "about pre-K or class size or decrepit buildings or construction money or critical thinking, curiosity and delight, emotional health, racial segregation, or the dignity and moral leadership of principals and teachers." He described the law as "an instrument of irrational punishment and terror, which is increasing the racial divide in our schools and driving the best teachers out of the public schools." Kozol is working hard to persuade Congress to change the law, and will meet next month with Senator Edward Kennedy, who cosponsored the legislation and continues to defend it despite growing evidence of how harmful it has been to our schools. "He's a decent man. He's championed poor kids throughout his career. He's made a bad mistake, but he can say he's sorry and correct it." He closed his remarks by urging the audience to write to Senator Kennedy expressing their concerns about NCLB. Related Links: Listen to
the audio clip (5.5 MB, Time: 8 minutes)Bearing Witness Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts
Education Action
Permanent link to this story: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/story/5478390
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