History, Do Not Repeat Yourself.
The fate of the grand narrative of the No Child Left Behind Act is upon us. As we reflect on education through this policy object we will, as a nation, evaluate its mission. But will we ameliorate its effects? Each one of us, inside and outside the classroom, must cleave through the fog of propaganda in search of truth. The public needs to know what an NCLB classroom looks like and what happens when policy determines curriculum and pedagogy. On October 9th, Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times Op-Ed column: “it’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.” I’d like to contribute to this discussion by sharing an experience from my first year of teaching. It’s a tale of pedagogical depression and the inability to negotiate between system pressures and best practices.It is usually through a vivid nightmare that I revisit the story: I am standing in the fourth grade classroom where I taught last year. It is any day between the months of October and March. A state test is looming ahead, and I have to ‘deliver instruction’ so that the children may score a 2 or perhaps a 3 out of ‘grade level’ 4 points. Most likely, I’ve been told, my kids will be “1s and 2s”. This is unsurprising given their classification as English Language Learners.
Research says they require at least 3 years to own academic language to comprehend a grade level text. It is no fault of their own.
Sadly, they’ve overheard his information (children are acute interpreters of reality!). They are slumped in their chairs and gazing towards the corners of the room to gain some perspective. They tell me that they know that they are 1s and 2s. So, to combat this malaise, I their teacher, will attempt to provide them with developmental literacy through lifeless texts, building testable ’skills’ such as ‘attacking tricky text’. My tools are curriculum consisting of branded books developed by the same company that trained me to take the SAT. Of course, I am reminded that I was fifteen when I took this course, on a Saturday. This is in sharp contrast to my students, who are nine years old and enduring it every day of the week, five months of the school year. Lesson after lesson, we will read along as a puppy from a clip art file with a distinct mid-nineties aesthetic, ‘explains’ the strategies that will help us be ‘good test takers’. I pretend to know more than the puppy as I elaborate on the ’strategy’. It is getting harder to breathe in the room. Inevitably, one of the students, gasping for air, prods me with the question: “Miss, when are we going to do Social Studies? We never get to do Social Studies!” This is the point where I usually wake up and set my curricular intentions for the day: teach history!
It has been said that dreams are wishes. I believe this to be true. I wish to never repeat this pedagogical nightmare – denying children the right to humanities. This is a difficult time to be a teacher in the public school system, but the teachers are not the victims. It is rather an entire generation of children who are being cheated opportunities for intellectual growth.
