Those we leave behind

Generally speaking, it’s not wise to repeat bad ideas. Yet President Bush is pushing for Congress to renew his 2001 “No Child Left Behind” law that created universal standards and tests to measure student proficiency in reading and math.\nUnder the law, schools that fall below the government-mandated standards are dubbed failures. These schools must take corrective measures such as firing teachers and principals or closing schools completely. However, so many schools are failing that it would be impossible to close, overhaul or re-staff them all.\nMore than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are “chronic failures”; in Florida, more than 441 schools should be shut down; and in Maryland, 49 schools in Baltimore alone are below standards. But last year 87 percent of persistently failing schools avoided significant changes. There are simply too many “failures” to fix.\nFrom my perspective, neither the schools nor students and teachers have failed. The law has failed because it doesn’t account for or address issues like socio-economic status and racism. We do not live in a bubble where every child’s learning environment is identical; instead, we are arguably as far from educational equity as we were in the 1950s under legal segregation.\nThe impact of race and income on educational success is so severe that author Jonathan Kozol describes “America’s educational apartheid.” Kozol encountered a black student at a low-income public school in Harlem who expressed her fear that “if people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had died or simply left for somewhere else … I think they’d be relieved.”\nWith that kind of despair it’s no wonder students in poor, segregated schools aren’t motivated to crack the code of standardized testing. When you feel that the world doesn’t care about you, when you’re worried about financial woes and survival, why would you care about reading comprehension exams?\nA Latina mother in Los Angeles whose son attends a school in a low-income area where only 22 percent of students passed the standardized exams questioned the motives of No Child Left Behind: “Maybe the system is not designed for people like us,” she said.\nNot for “people like us?” Talk about an understatement. The system is not designed for people like her, in large part because the system was designed by people like me: middle-to-upper–class white folks (mainly men) with the arrogance to assume that what works for them works for everyone and with the narrowness to think that real problems of class and race are easily overcome by learning to pass a test.\nPeople like me have the privilege to disregard the lives of the “chronic failures” who don’t learn in ways we mistakenly believe are universal. Therefore, people like me make ill-informed decisions about other people’s lives and education. \nMy hope is that we soon do away with policies for the over-privileged and instead focus on the deeply rooted inequalities that we ignore.