No Child Left Behind

Dec 10, 2010 Editorial

Seeking to address the firestorm precipitated by Mr Cleveland Thomas’s (Principal of the Wismar/Christianburg Secondary School) refusal to enforce the Ministry of Education’s “no retention” policy, Minister Baksh finally bluntly pointed out that this was not an aspect of any “no child left behind” programme. “We have no such stipulated policy in the Ministry of Education, this is an American policy initiative of the Bush administration.”
We are pleased that he has offered this clarification. The US launched its “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB – “nickel B” to the initiated) with great fanfare in 2002. Our own Ministry launched a series of reforms – starting with the assessment tests in the primary schools – around that same time. Our reforms have continued unabated in the nursery, primary and secondary departments of our education system.
The “no retention” policy, which dictates that children cannot be “left behind” if they score below any prescribed bench score, is only one – albeit quite visible – facet. As best as could be discerned, the goals were coincident with the US programmes, and over the years, many educators and bureaucrats have been interviewed about the local innovations with the “NCLB” tag mentioned, without any demurral from the Ministry.
The NCLB mandates a number of programmes aimed at improving U.S. education in elementary, middle and high schools by increasing accountability standards. The approach is based on outcome-based theories of education that high expectation goal-setting will result in greater educational achievement for most students. It was the result of a rare coincidence of views of the right and left wings of the US political establishment – that the US was falling behind the rest of the world in educational achievements – and was jointly sponsored by President Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy.
Because of the intensely decentralised nature of the US system, there were no universal standards for evaluating the educational product. This fact and vast disparities in wealth in individual communities ensured that schools in low-income neighbourhoods – and this is highly correlated with race and ethnicity – were graduating students en masse, who were ill-equipped for the demands of the modern world. Standardized testing throughout the country was demanded and school-districts were threatened with loss of funding if they did not comply. The US always had a “no retention” policy and it is interesting (for us) to note that the introduction of NCLB meant that the standards of every school had to be brought to the level where the graduates could score competitively.
In practice, this meant providing resources to schools – including trained teachers, regardless of wealth, ethnicity, disabilities or language spoken. For the inner city schools, dominated by poor minorities, at long last there was now a democratisation of education. While the US programme has not been an unblemished success, the complaints have mainly been centred on the weaknesses of standardised testing, especially teachers “teaching to the test” – which has always been our norm. We should at least follow the debate.
More to our point is the reality that the majority of our schools – especially in certain inner-city neighbourhoods and rural and hinterland areas – are akin to the schools found in their analogous areas in the US environment. Standardized tests measure little more than socioeconomic status, and teachers and administrators should not be held responsible for that or should a fourth-grade teacher be held accountable for her students’ test scores when those scores reflect all that has happened to the children before. The insight that educators have the duty to help students break hereditary and environmental barriers must be taken onboard here. Mr Thomas’s comments on community mores, mentioned in our editorial “Lagging Students”, must be taken onboard.
We recognise that as the subject Minister noted, we do not have the resources of the USA – and even there 1 million children still drop out of school annually. But what NCLB has highlighted is that we have to customise our schools for the reality of our human and social diversity. We need to bring our lagging schools up to scratch resource-wise.

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