President Joe Biden will have his work cut out in repairing the damage done to U.S. education caused by Donald Trump and his one-time Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. But Biden and his Secretary of Education nominee, Miguel Cardona, must also reverse at least twenty years of federal education policy, starting over with measures that allow teachers to teach and children to learn without fear of federal sanctions.
Since the enactment of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002, the nation’s public schools have been required to administer standardized tests in reading and mathematics to every student in grades three through eight, a practice unknown in any high-performing nation. These tests have high stakes for students (who might fail to be promoted), teachers (who might be fired if their students’ test scores don’t rise), and schools (which might be closed if test scores don’t go up).
We have poured billions of dollars into that fake corporate-style reform and achieved little other than demoralized teachers.and students.
In addition, three successive presidential administrations—Bush, Obama, and Trump—have pressured school districts to accept privately managed charter schools. Educators and parents have tried to fend off a powerful and well-funded privatization movement that promotes privately managed charter schools and vouchers as the cure for low test scores (which they are not). This so-called reform movement has paid little attention to the need for adequate and equitable resources.
U.S. education began a long slide into an abyss of testing and privatization in 1983, when the administration of Ronald Reagan issued a sensationalized report called “A Nation at Risk.” The report asserted that U.S. education was experiencing a “rising tide of mediocrity” and blamed the public schools for the loss of industries to Japan, South Korea, and Germany. The report relied on cherry-picked data to create a false sense of crisis that demanded solutions.
Governors across the nation met with business leaders and decided that education was too important to leave to educators. What was needed, instead, was corporate thinking. And the remedies they came up with were standards and accountability, based on data derived from annual tests.
The new “reform” movement conveniently ignored the responsibility of short-sighted corporate leaders for the flight of industries to other nations. It was easier to blame schoolteachers and “low standards” in elementary and middle schools. The governors and corporate leaders also ignored the tight correlation between student test scores and family income, which would have led to unwanted discussions about income gaps, wealth gaps, and opportunity gaps—instead of test score gaps.
Six years after “A Nation at Risk” appeared, President George H.W. Bush sought to establish his credentials as “the education President” by calling a summit of the nation’s governors to fix the nation’s allegedly faltering public schools. The governors, led by Bill Clinton of Arkansas, came up with six national goals for the year 2000. President Bush loved the national goals, as did President Clinton after his election in 1992 (he even added two more).
Goals cost nothing, and they give the illusion of activity. In his “Goals 2000” program, Clinton encouraged every state to write standards and give more tests.
George W. Bush topped his predecessors during the 2000 campaign when he claimed that his education plan had produced a “miracle” in Texas. Test every child every year, he said, and honor schools where scores go up and embarrass schools where they don’t. This simple, almost cost-free program, according to Bush, would lead to rising test scores and shrinking gaps between different races. He took office as President with a twenty-seven-page proposal for a new law called “No Child Left Behind.”
By the end of 2001, Congress had passed his law, expanded to more than 1,000 pages, and Bush signed it on January 8, 2002. A new era began. Henceforth, every student in grades three through eight would be tested in reading and mathematics every year. By 2014, the law said, every child in the nation would score “proficient” on standardized tests. Schools that failed to move toward that goal would face escalating punishments, with the ultimate punishment of being closed or turned over to the state or private management or a charter operator.
Twenty years later, we know that there was no “Texas miracle.” The law produced a bonanza for the testing industry, inspired districts to concentrate on test preparation and testing, and squeezed out untested subjects like the arts, civics, history, and even recess.
By 2014, few U.S. schools were on track to reach the law’s demand for 100 percent proficiency for their students. By then, Barack Obama was in office, and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, offered waivers to states from the law’s requirement. But Duncan had no objection to the principles behind NCLB; in fact, his own program, Race to the Top, was built on the foundation of NCLB.
Duncan’s policy invited states to compete for a share of $4.35 billion in federal funds but only if they met certain conditions: They had to agree to increase the number of charter schools in their state, to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students, to adopt common national standards (which everyone understood was the Common Core), and to take swift punitive action against schools that did not raise their test scores.
The NCLB annual tests became even more consequential under Duncan and Obama. When civil rights groups, including the NAACP, objected to Race to the Top because it was a competition among states for untried policies, rather than a commitment to support early childhood education, experienced teachers, and adequate resources for the neediest schools, Obama and Duncan refused to change anything.
After nearly fifteen years of NCLB and Race to the Top, Congress revised the federal law and called it the Every Student Succeeds Act, a clever rephrasing of No Child Left Behind. But left intact was the regime of annual testing, despite the lack of any visible signs of improvement. For the past decade, scores on the federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been stagnant.
The challenge for Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Secretary of Education, will be to abandon two decades of high-stakes testing and accountability and to remove any federal incentives to create privately managed charter schools, which are typically no better than the democratically controlled public schools they replace and often far worse.
Cardona should begin by offering blanket waivers for the 2021 testing cycle. As the pandemic continues to rage, this is no time to require that students—who may have spent months learning entirely remotely—take a standardized test whose results will not be reported for four-to-six months. Teachers are not allowed to see the questions or to review their students’ answers. They learn nothing other than their students’ scores, which are of no practical value.
Instead, teachers should write their own tests, because they know what they’ve taught. Cardona should oversee a revision of the law and eliminate the requirement of annual testing, which serves no purpose.
Biden promised to eliminate federal aid to for-profit charters, but the larger question is why the federal government is funding charters at all. They receive regular funding as if they were public schools, and many of them also snared hundreds of millions of dollars from the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program, which public schools were not allowed to apply to. Charters are amply funded by billionaires, including the Waltons, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, and dozens of others who believe in the efficacy of the free market.
Most of the money in the federal Charter Schools Program, which was launched in 1994 by the Clinton Administration to help start mom-and-pop or teacher-led charters, is now spent to enlarge corporate charter chains and help them dominate urban school districts. So why should the federal government spend $440 million each year to start new charters?
Instead, Cardona could help urban schools, which are underfunded, by ending the pretense that competition will make them better (it doesn’t). It starves them of needed resources.
Urban districts don’t need testing, standards, accountability, and competition. We have poured billions of dollars into that fake reform and achieved little other than demoralized teachers and students whose test-centric education robs them of motivation.
Why not try a radically different approach? Why not fully fund the schools where the needs of students are greatest? Give the schools that enroll students with disabilities the resources that Congress promised but never delivered. Make sure that schools that serve the neediest students have experienced teachers, small classes, and a full curriculum that includes the arts and time for play.
Now that would be a revolution!