John Goodlad has written an essay — “Judging the Bush Years: Well-Educated or Much-Schooled?” — that analyzes and criticizes the No Child Left Behind campaign of the Bush administration.
Goodlad says that although NCLB is obcessed with testing, it fails to measure and therefore fails to encourage key human attributes such as perseverance, honesty, good problem-solving behavior, ability to work alone and with others, compassion, dependability, creativity or any of the other traits we associate with a democratic people.
Goodlad says we will not have the schools we need, “until community leaders, educators and policymakers agree on the democratic purpose of public schooling and work together toward its advancement.”
Excerpts from the article:
- There is plenty of blame for the past eight years to spread around. George W. Bush just happened to be our leader in chief at a time when, to borrow from communications scholar Neil Postman’s book, “The End of Education,” the god of economic utility was at the top of his game in guiding the purpose and conduct of our schools.
- A clash of major proportions occurred in the mid-1950s when so-called progressive education was attacked severely by prominent critics as threatening solid learning in the traditional school subjects. Their speaking and writing reached a wide audience. Publications such as Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” brought debate to the public.
- Suddenly, in 1957, two small satellites, Sputnik I and II, circled the globe and ushered in a new top priority for schools — ensuring the nation’s global supremacy in science and technology. Schooling quickly appeared on the agenda of policymakers in Washington, D.C. Although the influential book, “The American High School Today,” by the much-respected James Conant supported the concept of a comprehensive secondary school available to all students, Conant recommended a much heavier curriculum in mathematics and science for the academically able. The hard and tough was moving toward ascendency in the curriculum for advancing the nation’s agenda of leading in the global economy.
- In 1965, Congress passed an Elementary and Secondary Education Act quite different from that of 2001, providing the largest budget ever for research and development pertaining to schools to support President Lyndon Johnson’s vision of the Great Society.
- Sociologist James Coleman was commissioned to lead a research team that would bring out within a year a report on the critical factors in classroom learning and guide funding priorities. The most significant and controversial finding stunned the president and Congress: The primary factors are not teachers and curricula but the social and particularly the educational capital students bring from home and communities and encounter in their fellow students.
- Unfortunately, we have never made clear to policymakers, teacher educators, school board members and school personnel what that game should be. Had we done so even a quarter-century ago, we might now be a long way along the road to the renewing system of schooling our democracy must have.
- Several educational leaders saw instead the need for comprehensive renewal and discovered a readiness for it among school principals and teachers nationwide. A fascinating flurry of innovation, funded by philanthropic foundations, arose late in the 1980s and continued into the late 1990s. Then it largely perished, like plants without water, during Bush’s first term.
- Where do we go from here? That is another story in the making, not of further tinkering I hope. Two major lessons emerge out of the past half-century of misguided school reform eras. First, we will never have the schools our democracy requires until primary responsibility for them returns to their community contexts. Second, we will never have them until community leaders, educators and policymakers agree on the democratic purpose of public schooling and work together toward its advancement.
