March 2, 2009
Now that there is a new President several pieces of legislation are getting a fresh look. One law in particular is the landmark piece of legislation “No Child Left Behind.” I say landmark of course because it was so incredibly unpopular with educators. In fact, I have heard that the Obama administration not only wants to reform the law, but rename it because it left a bad taste in so many peoples mouths. I understand the Bush Administration’s basic idea: make schools and teachers more accountable for their students’ failures and they will work even harder to educate even those students who might seem impossible to teach. Unfortunately, their plan was severely flawed. First, the Bush Administration failed to provide funding so many schools did not have the money they needed to make their classrooms more efficient, to make sure the students were adequately supplied, or even in some cases, to make repairs so that the school building met basic safety regulations. Still, the main problem with “No Child Left Behind” was much more fundamental. It made the mistake of basically saying that schools and teachers, not the students, were primarily responsible for a student’s success or failure. I know that this might seem presumptuous of me to say, but the fact is that I have spent the last year and a half working in and observing an educational system that resembles a W.’s educational wet dream. Here in Kazakhstan, a school’s funding and a teacher’s salary are at least partially dependent on how well their students do on state tests and exams. If students do well, teachers get a bonus, if students do poorly, teachers get a pay cut. Thus, teachers are encouraged both subtly and overtly to help the students succeed, even if that means helping them cheat. Teachers not only turn a blind eye towards “collaborative work” between students, they also sometimes give students the answers or even change grades and scores after the fact. This of course means that students are not actually learning the material, and though they might have good grades, they are actually being crippled. When they are adults they will not be able to perform the tasks that they “learned” how to do. Teachers of course should do their best to make sure that as many students are learning as possible, using a variety of teaching methods, and schools should do their best to remove socio-economic roadblocks, but at the end of the day it must be up to the student to learn.
