When Kevin Rudd announced that in his future Australia would leave no child behind, I cringed at the thought. The idea is noble, but it was not so long ago that another ALP leader had a similar grand vision. Rhetoric may appear benign, but the practices Rudd intends to adopt are not so harmless.
Rudd’s ideas for an education revolution look very similar to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act 2001. This is hardly surprising, given the Liberal party would have you believe, Rudd’s revolution is actually the same policy the Howard government tried to implement. The major hurdle for the Howard government ended up being State Labour governments, the same governments who are still in power today. Are we to believe that Rudd’s great revolution is merely a recycling of a conservative policy already rejected by State governments?
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been plagued with controversy and criticism, hardly surprising from this President. Huge amounts of funding have been thrown at education by the US Federal Government. The funding is distributed to schools showing high performance and improvement based on the standardized testing of their students. Parents are also informed of underperforming schools and given the choice to take their students else where. Starting to sound familiar?
In a similar way to Australia, in the US education is largely a state government responsibility with some funding coming from the federal government. Because of the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution, the federal government cannot force the States to adopt NCLB, as long as the states are happy to lose all federal funding.
The tenth amendment also restricts the ability to implement a national standard testing procedure. States set their own standards and the testing procedure. The tests focus purely on the three ‘R’s’, Reading, *Riting and *Rithmetic. Evidence suggests that there has been some improvement in reading and maths scores, as well as reducing the learning gaps between white children and children from minority groups. However critics suggest that this evidence is flawed. States set their own goals and standards, learning has not improved, but the tests have become easier and pass scores have drifted lower. The legislation has affected a ‘race to the bottom’ in standardized testing so that states do not lose funding.
The focus on the three R’s has forced schools to emaciate students learning experience. The practice called ‘teaching to the test’ has forced classes in arts, the humanities and in some cases sciences to be reduced so that more time can be spent teaching the students to pass a test. The reduction in physical education classes is also being criticised by health groups for adding to the child obesity epidemic.
NCLB is motivating schools to ‘game the system,’ adjust test scores and reclassify drop outs. Schools and teachers are punished for students who have genuine learning difficulties, disabilities or who have English as there second language. Gifted students are only taught remedial subjects because there are no longer incentives for schools if they excel.
‘Transparency’ and performance based funding for schools and teachers are not the answer. In the US No Child Left Behind experiment, an unprecedented encouragement of mediocrity and manipulation has emerged in the education system. Students with talents outside of the three R’s are not considered and those with learning difficulties are not supported.
Is this really how Kevin Rudd intends to ‘close the gap?’
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