JONATHAN KOZOL - This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial
fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at
the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal
education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of
legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands
of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.
The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing
it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded,
overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum
of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best
of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this
debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban
schools that they, themselves, attended.
The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant
determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the
most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific
teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and
threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students' scores
by using proto-military methods of instruction -- scripted texts and
hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking of
their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are
mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well),
but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into
classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into
test-prep factories.
The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of
thousands of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom
our urban districts struggle to attract into these schools. There are
more remarkable young teachers like this coming into inner-city
education than at any time I've seen in more than 40 years. The
challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep them. But 50% of the
glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from the nation's most
respected colleges and universities are throwing up their hands and
giving up their jobs within three years.
When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me
it's the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of
"state of siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods
that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend
with them in school.
"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective
first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and
anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education
courses -- "in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots,
denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all
the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to
ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class
white systems." At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more
segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school
I visit, out of an enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000 students,
there are seldom more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet
another factor of division between children of minorities and those in
the mainstream of society. In good suburban classrooms, children master
the essential skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired in
them by their teachers, in the act of learning in itself. They're also
given critical capacities that they will need if they're to succeed in
college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power to
interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the
nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give
pre-scripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in
society.
In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June
that prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of
school integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically
transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly
divided sectors of American society.
This, then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only small amounts
of mostly liquid foods each day, and, when I have stomach pains, other
forms of nourishment at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted
on in order to avert the risk of doing longterm damage to my heart.
Twenty-nine pounds lighter than I was when I began, I've been dreaming
about big delicious dinners.
Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who have told me, not
as an accusation but respectfully, that it was one of my books that
diverted them from easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into
teaching in the first place. Some call me in the evenings, on the verge
of tears, to tell me of the maddening frustration that they feel at
being forced to teach in ways that make them hate themselves.
I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them whatever good survival
strategies I can. I tell them that the best defense is to be extremely
good at what they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom grow
chaotic! A teacher who can keep a reasonable sense of calm within her
room, particularly in a school in which disorder has been common,
renders herself almost inexpendable. . .
I've tried very hard to convince a number of the more enlightened
Democrats who serve on the Senate education panel to introduce
amendments that will drastically reduce our government's reliance upon
standardized exams in judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and
attribute greater weight to factors that are not so simple-mindedly
reducible to numbers.
Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of assessment would not
only tell us whether little Oscar or Shaniqua started out their essays
with "a topic sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote
something with the slightest hint of authenticity and charm or simply
stamped out insincere placebos. (A child gets no credit for originality
or authenticity under No Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards.
Endearing stylistic eccentricity, needless to say, is not rewarded
either. That which can't be measured is not valued by the technocrats of
uniformity who have designed this miserable piece of legislation.) . . .