CHAPTER 16
COMMENTARY ON THE RHETORIC OF REFORM

A Twenty-Year Retrospective

Sandra Jackson

The Legacy of “A Nation at Risk”

Educational policies in the United States have been integrally related to social and economic policies, with domestic and foreign interests linked inextricably. During the twentieth century, education and schooling in the United States have functioned to increase efficiency of work and labor, select and channel individuals within differential education and training programs according to national manpower needs, and sort them into desired slots in the labor force. Testing and measurement of intelligence, skills, and abilities have been the instruments of this sorting and ranking, which has taken place within a discourse of education purported to serve citizens in enhancing their individual development and individual interests, as if they were autonomous and disconnected from any national agenda. From a competing perspective, in an overview of post-1950s phases in national public policy regarding education in the United States, Spring has identified the following uses of schools: to end poverty in the 1960s; to establish law and order and end unemployment in the 1970s; and to solve problems of international trade in the 1980s.1 Beginning with the mid-1940s, he argues that military, corporate, scientific, and political leaders have struggled to have the federal government play a decided role in shaping educational policies, which were rooted in “containing communism and protecting the interests of American corporate expansion into foreign markets.”2 With the demise of the former Soviet Union, the impetus to dominate the global market remains, and schools in the United States have a mission to produce a workforce and future leaders to further consolidate power.

Today for the United States in the realm of public policy, matters that relate to the public good, social welfare and social services are the subject of intense debate, often contentious, regarding what is good for the nation and its citizens. Education, particularly that of children and youth, is at the heart of polemical exchanges among different constituencies, especially those who desire a greater federal investment and commitment to efficiency, and those desiring greater state and local autonomy, also in the name of excellence. The question I pose is, in whose interests and who will benefit from the propositions?

In response to the launch of Sputnik (1957), with the United States in the race to be number one globally, nationally there was a massive infusion of money to enhance the curriculum of high schools, with greater emphasis on math and the sciences as well as foreign language instruction. This same appeal to be number one was the impetus for the report, A Nation at Risk (1983), commissioned by Terrell Bell, secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan as well as No Child Left Behind (2001) by President George W. Bush. Though the language and tenor of these two reports are different, I will argue that the underlying assumptions and arguments are the same: to make an apparent case for change, while proclaiming broad social benefits for everyone, which will in reality sustain the status quo because the matters of structural barriers to equity in opportunity—access as well as outcomes—go unacknowledged and thus unaddressed, unexamined, and hence undisturbed in perpetuating inequalities.

The militaristic and nationalistic language of A Nation at Risk served as a clarion call, sounding an alarm that the United States could no longer take its position of worldwide preeminence for granted. Whenever I reread this document, I hear bugles resounding and the drum corps beating in the background, summoning us to march as if going to war. Indeed, the very premise of the report is that the nation will soon be under siege with the dust blown or kicked in our faces if we do not act now. Consider the following quote from A Nation at Risk: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This 63-page report proposed sweeping changes for American high schools, colleges, and universities, private and public, which would ostensibly reinstate the United States to the position of number one, first among the most developed nations of the world.

The language is one of economic and military competition and the specter of losing ground in the face of powerful foreign countries whose economic engines are propelling them to success: Japan, South Korea, and Germany, singled out as primary targets engendering angst. The underlying logic of the report is that America’s economic crisis is primarily a symptom of the failure of public education. The effect of focusing upon schools as the locus of deep-seated problems in the United States is to turn public attention away from economic and social policies and practices that undermine job security of American workers and send thousands into poverty, unemployment, under-employment, and financial ruin.

While A Nation at Risk asserts that no nation approaches the United States in terms of the preparation of youth completing high school and going on to higher education, it claims that we have fallen behind.3 To remedy these symptoms of desuetude, antidotes in the form of standards, accountability, pluralism, competition, and choice are proposed. Bush’s No Child Left Behind plan is rooted in the same kind of reasoning, outlined in ten sections: Achieving Excellence through High Standards and Accountability; Improving Literacy by Putting Reading First; Improving Teacher Quality; Improving Math and Science Instruction; Moving Limited English Proficient Students to English Fluency; Promoting Parental Options and Innovative Programs; Encouraging Safe Schools for the Twenty-First Century; Enhancing Education through Technology; Providing Impact Aid; and Encouraging Freedom and Accountability. Except for allusion to literacy and reading skills among inner-city fourth graders, there is virtually no evidence presented regarding educational problems or their gravity; instead they are assumed as givens. Hence, the report is written much like a business plan with goals of the policy and steps that will be taken to improve the quality of education in American schools.

No Child Left Behind outlines seven performance-based objectives to close the achievement gap: improving the academic performance of disadvantaged students; boosting teacher quality; moving limited English proficient students to English fluency; ensuring that all children can read by grade three; promoting informed parental choice and innovative programs; encouraging safe schools for the twenty-first century; increasing funding for Impact Aid; and encouraging freedom and accountability. Bush’s educational blueprint vows “to increase accountability for student performance by focusing on what works, reducing bureaucracy and increasing flexibility.”4 Because he believes that “the federal government does not do enough to reward success and sanction failure in our educational system … and that it has not asked whether or not programs produce results or knows their impact on local needs,”5 he has asserted his intentions of reforming the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), limiting federal dollars to specific programs and goals to ensure improved results.

Believing that the United States is behind, Bush proposes that to close the achievement gap, accountability and high standards must be imposed through the following means: annual academic assessments, consequences for schools that fail to educate students, specifically the loss of Title I funds to be transferred to higher-performing public or private schools or accountability bonuses for states and schools in reward for demonstrated success in closing the gap; annual reading and math assessments (grades 4 through 8); a focus on reading in early childhood and the early grades; curricular emphasis on math and science; reading instruction and increased funds to schools for technology on a need-based formula; consolidation of overlapping and duplicate categorical grant programs; new state and local options in the form of charter schools that would operate on a five-year performance agreement; mandatory school reports to parents; and exemption from federal requirements for home schools and private schools.

Details regarding his program for rewards and sanctions include the following: provision of discretion to states and school districts to have the freedom to reform teacher certification or licensure requirements; provide alternative certification programs; reform of teacher tenure and implementation of a merit-based performance system; differential pay and bonuses to teachers in high-need subject areas and mentoring programs; excellence in teaching awards; shields from federal liability for teachers, administrators, and school board members regarding actions against students who are defined as disruptive, disciplinary problems, so long as they do not engage in reckless or criminal misconduct; tax deductions for teachers up to $400 for out-of-pocket expenses for school supplies and professional enhancement; and parental disclosure regarding the quality of their child’s teachers as defined by the state.6 On related matters, Bush’s plan promotes the establishment of science partnerships between states and institutions of higher education.

Promises to bring about swift change through the pervasive implementation of high-stakes testing, the rooting out of bad teachers, threats of reduction of resources to be followed by school closure, with an implicit notion of social Darwinist survival of the fittest in the market place, thus driving out of business bad schools, are at the heart of the Bush plan. Charter schools, vouchers, subsidies to private schools, as well as home schooling, are intended to fill the void and provide choices to those ill served by the bad public schools. There is virtually no commentary about the consequences of this plan for the overwhelming number of poor, working-class, and children of color in particular who will be trapped in troubled schools, starved of resources, with teachers and staff under siege, without adequate funds to make up the difference between vouchers and tuition for highly prized spaces in private schools or charter schools.

Accordingly, teacher education also comes under sharp scrutiny and is labeled as “low status and lacking in rigor,” when in reality teachers “are starved of life space, robbed of funds, and generally ridiculed.”7 Again, teachers and teacher education institutions, primarily those at research institutions, come under assault as the culprits responsible for the poor performance of students, and hence schools throughout the nation.

Testing is posited as the remedy, the litmus test for assessing and guaranteeing quality regarding students, schools, and teachers. The idea of focusing on what works (to improve student test scores) is based on the assumption that test scores and results are reliable indicators of student learning, achievement, development, and growth. The faith in testing persists even though research indicates that “testing often lacks objectivity, validity, or fairness and appropriateness and is rarely apolitical … is seriously flawed, with various tests incompatible and incomparable, with transfer problematic—that is the relationship between tasks and tests and actual performance with very little consideration of cultural differences.”8 Furthermore, there is a seduction of simplicity regarding problem solving in that learning and achievement are purported as easy to identify and quantify, and that they can be accurately measured and reduced to numerical scores, the basis upon which students, teachers, and schools will be judged as succeeding or failing and, consequently, rewarded or punished.

According to the diagnoses and prescriptions of A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind, the remedies for school improvement and the achievement of excellence in student achievement and teachers’ instruction appeal to common sense in that they argue that the matter of quality education is an easy thing to address, and that results will be readily achievable through testing, testing, and more testing, complemented by a system of sanctions and rewards. It will be merely a matter of shaping up or shipping out for bad students, bad teachers, and bad schools.

Situating Proposals for Reform in the Broader Context for Schooling

Very few of the major reports and educational reforms proposals that have emerged over the past two decades (A Nation at Risk, Task Force on Education for Economic Growth, the Education Commission of the States, the Twentieth-Century Fund, the Carnegie Commission for the Advancement of Teachers …) pay any attention to the world in which children and youth live today—the quality of life in their homes and communities, whether or not their parents are employed and making a living wage, and whether they have medical coverage. Most of those reports and the proposals that follow them are very quick to lay blame, particularly on children and their teachers. If children and teachers are not the objects of blame, then it’s parents who are remiss, particularly those parents who are of working-class, poor, black, Latino/a, and immigrant backgrounds, and especially those parents for whom English is not their native tongue. With issues of educational achievement made the particular problem of these populations, and with the persistent discrepancies in testing results in reading, math, as well as college entrance exams, between them and white middle-class youth, the reforms that tout high-stakes testing and a return to basics take on the aura of ethnocentrism9 and exhibit a xenophobic creed.10 To achieve in America, one needs to speak English, jettison any other languages, take on particular behaviors, embrace particular values, leave cultural baggage at the door of the school, work hard, and consistently pass a barrage of tests, with high scores. According to this version of achievement, teachers need to spend more time preparing students to take tests and school districts need to invest more money in administering testing and scoring results. Furthermore, according to such thought, there needs to be a sharp pendulum swing from the past, the 1960s and 1970s in particular, an era blamed for the moral and cultural decline and relapse, because of “permissiveness and looseness,” as well as loss of coherence in a sense of national character given influences of the Civil Rights Movement, student protests and anti-war campaigns (Viet-Nam in particular), the Women’s Movement, the Gay and Lesbian Movement, as well as the continued influx of immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere.

Within the proposals for reform, “there is no mention of the largest and fastest growing sector in the world economy, military production and trade, and no mention of the costs regarding the health of the nation’s economy and the corresponding neglect of our social and individual well being.”11 Further, “there is no mention of democratic citizenship and what this entails in terms of critically examining pervasive problems and issues of our times; no critique of the tenuous partnerships between business and schools and the dismal failure of earlier programs.”12 That which is really promoted is a closer linkage between education and the needs of businesses, instead of a discussion of what we need for the twenty-first century in terms of communication and higher-level cognitive and problem-solving skills, scientific and technical literacy and thinking tools to understand the world order go unmentioned. Further, while schools are strongly encouraged to function more like businesses, there is virtually no mention of the high numbers of businesses that fail, let alone the practice of government bailout of particular corporations and commensurate consequences for schools.

Yet, testing is purported as the antidote to school reform and improved student learning, in spite of that fact that many of the widely used tests are seriously flawed in several major respects, with the “testing juggernaut moving on, crushing logic and reason, no matter what researchers say.”13 One of the things that distinguishes Bush’s plan from earlier ones, A Nation at Risk in particular, is that it specifically claims that “one of America’s greatest attributes is our diversity,” and goes on to comment on the importance of “addressing needs of children and youth from minority backgrounds.”14 Regarding students whose first language is other than English, this plan asserts the need for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students to “master English as quickly as possible,” to be assured “through the streamlining of ESEA Bilingual Education programs into performance-based grant funding to states and local districts” who would exert control that would bear upon the continuation of such programs. As a part of ensuring local control, Bush’s plan would also “free school districts to select teaching approaches that meet the needs of students,” with a “prohibition of regulations on funds mandating particular instructional methods to educate students.”15 While this proposition appears, on the surface, logical and commonsensical, it contains an underlying intent to eliminate those bilingual programs that support dual-language development and maintenance. Inherent criticisms of multiculturalism are infused herein, in that curricular transformation that is based on principles of including ideas, issues, and material from children’s diverse experiences is seen as undermining literacy, knowledge of and respect for a romanticized notion of Western civilization, diluting the curriculum into sensitivity experiences, working on attitudes and feelings, and not intellectually defensible, thus political and ideological, or educationally sound. The deeply embedded values of individualism, competition, and alleged meritocracy infused in the predominant world view, decidedly Eurocentric and yet presented as universal, are presented as objective and value-free, whereas other perspectives are characterized as biased, limited, particular, and therefore catering to special interest groups and not the general good. While on one hand teachers are to be scrutinized and regulated with their performance assessed in relationship to the test scores of their students, they are promised that their interests will be protected and that they will be supported by being “granted control over their classrooms regarding the removal of violent or persistently disruptive students, through the implementation of zero-tolerance policies for curricular and extracurricular activities, to facilitate crime prevention and prosecution, through federal and state partnership programs to identify, prosecute, punish and supervise juveniles who violate state and federal firearms laws.”16 To complement this initiative, there will be increased funds for character education. Who will decide what character means, according to whose cultural frameworks, and who will develop the curriculum and decide upon the instructional materials and methods of assessment?

These provisions are designed to provide easy remedies and create safe schools and playgrounds, which any parent would want for their children. What is missing from the discussion is any attention to the implications of the proposal, the following considerations in particular: Which children will be targeted as those “at risk” of being disruptive and violent, given past practices of racial profiling and discrepancies in school discipline practices regarding punishment and suspension, which have resulted in Black and Latino youth, primarily males, as most likely to be the objects of discipline and exclusion from school? They have also experienced stiffer and swifter disciplinary actions and punishments than have white youth. Where will there be correctives for this? When one looks at the public’s response to the violence in inner-city urban schools, white flight, fear and justifiable outrage as the carnage and loss of life that has resulted because of weapons in schools, gang-related conflict, and the loss of life of innocent bystanders, one sees that the violence that has erupted in suburban settings like Columbine in Littleton, Colorado, and other similar communities, predominantly white and middle class, the treatment of students, and the way in which their parents and communities have been portrayed are distinctly different. While there have been numerous eruptions of violence ending in death and carnage in such communities, these things are still treated as anomalies, exceptions to the rule, warranting compassion and understanding of individual troubled youth. These communities are not stigmatized as hotbeds of violence where dangerous groups of youth are out of control. But schools and school districts populated by children of color, Black and Latino in particular, wherein the majority of teachers are white and middle class, are portrayed as under siege, with teachers needing combat pay and protection from dangerous and unruly children and youth. What will result from these aspects of the Bush plan is that more children of color, males in particular, will be put out of school for one reason or another with nowhere else to go but to the street, marked as not worth the investment of time and energy, so that when the numbers are turned in regarding attendance and test scores, things will look much better and be used as indicators of school improvement. Meanwhile, such youth will be consumed by the machine of the informal economy, with many ending up as wards of jails and prisons, effectively written off as beyond hope and redemption.

To remedy the problem of student troublemakers, disruptive elements, and miscreants, school districts will be “granted unprecedented flexibility regarding how they may spend federal educational funds.” Here again is the seductive language of control and choice, but by whom and for whom? Who constitutes the members of school boards, public and private? How will priorities be established? Whose interests will be served? In this era of high-stakes testing and the need to show results, with better numbers, where are the assurances of access and equity, due process, pledges “to increase funding for individuals with disabilities,” to provide additional funds for technology, and to increase funds to improve the quality of public school buildings and facilities, notwithstanding? Where are the assurances that students who would be stigmatized as likely to bring down classroom and school test scores will be given the instructional and other support to enable them to stay in school and succeed? With further reification of testing and test scores, what will be put in place to put the breaks on reinstating tracking and official practices allowing for differential curriculum for those designated as needing remediation? When schools can be excluded from federal guidelines, and make choices based upon expediency, what and who will assure that, given necessary costs, investments for students with learning disabilities will continue, when there will clearly be other options for uses of valuable funds?

As with A Nation at Risk, the Bush plan proposes reforms that do not address the consequences of the sweeping initiatives and their implications for ordinary children and youth. They both allege that the issues are clear, that solutions will be simple, and that things must be done now to bring about desired change. They promise quick fixes to complex problems. Yet, as reflected in Albrecht’s commentary on A Nation at Risk, “the fascination of the public and the media has blunted and obscured the carefully researched, thoughtful, and imaginative reports of Ernest Boyer, John Goodlad, and Theodore Sizer” and others.”17 Steeped in the language of argumentum ad hominem, A Nation at Risk engages in negation and denial, espousing that there is such a thing as a typical American high school and, rendering a judgment of unfitness, suggests imperative correctives through the use of incantatory language such as should, ought, rights, and obligations.18 According to Lehr, critical responses of this report from various scholars and professional organizations have gone unheeded.19 For example, scholars of the English language arts profession have raised criticisms regarding the limitations of the arguments as well as the recommendations regarding the curriculum, standards, expectations, time use, the teaching profession, educational leadership, and support. In particular they question the following: the wisdom of a uniform curriculum that does not include consideration of personal experience; the emotional, intellectual development of individuals, the development of lifelong learners, readers, and writers; long-standing discriminatory practices in schools; challenges to testing and measurement that rely on multiple-choice questions that stress knowledge of discrete facts rather than understanding; lack of attention to issues of censorship of instructional materials and textbooks; absence of estimation of costs to be incurred as a consequence of a longer school day and longer school year; matters of leadership and other kinds of support; an overall failure of will and a desire to preserve the status quo, cloaked in the rhetoric of change.

Common shortcomings of A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind include a “lack of attention to the broader context of schooling, the need for structural change, and a recognition that schools cannot go it alone and that other institutions must also change, and that schools must increasingly stress the goals of self-fulfillment and social education.”20 Among critics of A Nation at Risk was a consensus that it had failed to address not only the broader purposes of education, but also the needs of disadvantaged students, any accounting of the financial costs of the proposed reforms, or any analysis of systemic problems [social, political, economic dynamics] that affect schools.21 The fetishization of testing and test scores as a part of this web of deception meant that the public was presented with a program that purported to solve the problem while obscuring the reality that intelligence could not be easily quantified and “that intellectual qualities cannot be measured in the same way that linear surfaces are measured.”22 Students who scored low were castigated. So were their teachers, who were labeled as the least academically able of college students with the lowest college entrance exam scores using survey data from high school seniors and not students who were currently enrolled in teacher education programs or those who had completed them.23 The consequent assault on teachers, who were subjected to evaluation systems fraught with questionable and outrageous practices, has resulted in demoralization, with devastating effects on teacher morale. Hence, the deskilling of teachers who often feel under siege of having to teach to tests, profiteering of test preparation materials, and resultant resistance and defensiveness in cheating by teachers as well as administrators who wish to escape the web of disciplinary actions, such as school probation, staff transferals, and threats of budget cuts, and more seriously, school closure.24

In the two proposals for reform of American education under examination, the sharp and severe criticism on American schools, especially in A Nation at Risk, is couched in accusatory and condemnatory language. To counter the argument, Hunt and Staton assert that “Our nation is indeed at risk [but that] the roots of this risk however, lie not in our educational institutions but in other realms, for example, in the sorts of contradictions between democracy and capitalism.”25 On one hand there is the impulse to educate citizens for active participation in government and public life of the country, by the provision of education through high school along with opportunities for post-secondary education and/or training, to virtually everyone to ensure not only literacy but also the development of independent and critical thinking for the exercise of one’s own informed opinions. Yet on the other hand, there is a desire to ensure privileges and the commensurate power to sustain them by perpetuating a system that ensures inequalities invoking individualism, competition, exclusion of not only individuals but also groups on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender, class as well as other dimensions of difference. In a postindustrial society wherein information technology is the new fault line regarding knowledge and work, where things are becoming increasingly automated, and where knowledge professionals are among the most employable for lucrative jobs, individuals with poor or limited skills, will be increasingly relegated to either low-paying jobs in the service sector or the dustbin of surplus labor, forced to survive in the informal economy, become predators or prey in the world of the street, or be subjected to recidivist or long-term residence in penal institutions where redundant labor is housed.

According to Albrecht, “‘A Nation at Risk,’ contains the seeds of mischief, in its unequivocal indictment of U.S. schools, high schools in particular, in that if its prescriptions were followed blindly we could adopt [its] recommendations and mislead ourselves into thinking that much [has] been accomplished when [very] little has.”26 Instead of bringing about improvement in the learning and achievement of all students, the proposed reforms will “legitimize chasing kids out of school and will only hasten the disenfranchisement of students already unsuccessful and demoralized, because those who will be unable or unwilling to meet the new rigorous standards will be put out with schools absolved of any further responsibility.”27 As a consequence, the inequalities between racial and ethnic groups as well as social classes will be exacerbated, with students of color continuing to experience high and disproportionate dropout rates and poor preparation for college, with teachers teaching to the test(s) and a curriculum focusing on test preparation.28

The sensationalist and nationalistic language of A Nation at Risk, struck a chord and served as a rallying cry for those who had become disaffected with the performance of public schools, those who sought alternatives and wanted out because of the presence of others—minorities and immigrants—were wary about the curriculum and its straying from the classics and inclusion of multiculturalism and were concerned about raising taxes and loss of real wages and hence were persuaded by the rhetoric of the report that instead of supporting the investment of more money in failing public schools, other options like private and religious schools, home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers were the solution. Essentially this meant that public school systems, especially those in large urban areas, would be deprived of much needed funding, effectively siphoned off and made available to other entities, and that the privileged and those able to exercise choice, further encouraged by government subsidies, would be able to go elsewhere, where the Others were virtually absent. Such prospects appealed to the middle-class, predominantly white, as well as upwardly mobile working-class families who had developed a cynical view of public education that had been undermined by years of inadequate funding to support quality education. Conservative political forces, with their maligning of the federal government, an appeal to civil libertarianism, and a refusal to invest in social welfare and public institutions, vowed to reduce taxes and not to support new ones, with a consequent adverse effect upon public education. In this kind of climate, it is no surprise that the language of efficiency, control, standards, choice, rewards and punishment became the hallmark of the rhetoric of reform: make do with less, fund alternatives, and unleash experiments at public expense by funneling funds through private interest initiatives. Let the market sort things out as the final arbiter.

With this came the emphasis on testing and measurement: testing students and their teachers; dissemination of testing results in the name of informing parents of the quality of their schools and teachers; and thus making good and bad schools easy to identify. The real keys to improving education (e.g. involving students more actively in the learning process and cultivating their higher thought processes) are now difficult to get into the public agenda, which is now cluttered with the detritus of A Nation at Risk and its companion No Child Left Behind. Because these two proposals to reform American education focus on surface matters, they attempt to reduce a complex matter to one of unidimensionality and simplicity. Thus, they mislead the public into thinking that the solution is simple and clear— test and measure, label and categorize students, teachers and schools, reward and punish. These policies deliberately oversimplify the issues in order to divert public attention from more substantive issues.

Many Questions Unanswered and Consequences Unexamined

When we look at the gross inequalities in quality and kind of education experienced by different students in the nation’s schools, we must turn our attention to such things as the way that schools are funded in the United States—based on property taxes. For example in the state of Illinois, in a newspaper article comparing the experiences of students in different school systems, the author reported that per capita expenditure per pupil ranged from as little as $3,987 to a high of $17, 911.29 These vast differences translate into sharp distinctions in the quality of a school’s facility, library holdings, instructional materials, the presence or absence of laboratories for science classes, number and kind of computers available for classroom instruction, and teachers’ salaries. Without a change in policy regarding funding, how will no child be left behind, when many of them start virtually several laps behind others who are advantaged? Then there are additional dimensions of the funding problem: class size, number of support staff, and so forth. How will one address the differences in instruction in contexts wherein some students are in schools with class size averages between 15 and 20 and those that have class size averages of between 25 and 30? Implications of these differences for student learning and achievement elude attention and these kinds of details are neither examined nor explained in either A Nation at Risk or No Child Left Behind. Without attention to such matters, how can one believe that all children will be able to participate in viable educational initiatives in the name of excellence?

Then there is the matter of high dropout rates among students of color—African American and Latino/as in particular—with males experiencing disproportionately higher numbers as well as different strands of immigrant populations. Again one must ask, how will students who experience widely different educational programs, for example in elementary schools, catch up to those who enter with advantages that have accrued over time? As a case in point, in the literature on reading and literacy, the third grade is the fault line of divergent scores on reading tests that continue to widen as students matriculate through the upper elementary levels as well as high school. What will be the intervention at this point to forestall continued divergence in scores? Once students are tested and found to be behind the others, below grade level, or below the national average, what kind of instruction will they experience to improve their learning? What will be the nature of the prescribed curriculum? Once such students are tested again, even if they show improvement, will they, their teachers, and their schools be deemed worthy of further investment? According to Bush’s plan, after a specified amount of time, approximately three years, has elapsed, and a school has not shaped up sufficiently in producing students who pass the requisite tests, money is withdrawn and routed to alternative institutions and entities. As individuals take advantage of these options, what will happen to those left behind in these schools? Further, when the lemming flight from troubled schools is in full swing, and teachers and administrators move to other schools—private, charter, magnet, and alternative—what will happen to those educators who remain? Those who are stigmatized as well as their students as losers?

As for the schools that are successful, many of which succeed as the result of the social class of their students and the privileges that they bring to school and that receive bonuses for their “excellence,” will these rewards not ensure further inequality between them and other schools less endowed? With the resultant concentration of high-achieving students in high-achieving schools, with highly paid teachers and administrators, will not others most surely be left behind? How will the resultant inequalities be remedied? Neither A Nation at Risk nor No Child Left Behind addresses these matters.

Even if one were to accept the idea of vouchers and charter schools as viable alternatives to public schools, how would one ensure broad access for students of color, students for whom English is not their first language, immigrant students, working-class students, as well as students with disabilities? When it comes to admission to the alternative institutions and choice initiatives, particular students, specifically those in flight from troubled or stigmatized schools, will be suspect and therefore not identified or treated as ideal candidates for acceptance. Given historical practices, I believe that such individuals will be excluded. With the prospect that alternative and choice institutions will be exempted from federal requirements, what policies, procedures, and practices will be put in place to ensure that individuals perceived and judged as different will be treated fairly and gain entry into the highly prized schools? With the emphasis on test scores and placement, what will ensure that a diversity of students who could benefit from quality education would be admitted? Would such students not be screened out so that they would not be able to have an opportunity to bring student achievement test score averages, school scores, and school ratings down? Where will these students go? How will they be advised or steered to consider other options?

From a more sanguine perspective, suppose that some students of color, some working-class, some immigrant students, as well as those with disabilities who were in search of options to the public schools to which they had been assigned were given vouchers to attend a school of their choice. Would these students and their families have the same options as those more financially privileged? What would happen when the tuition of a school that one selects is significantly greater than the value of the voucher? How will the difference be made up? Scholarships? Loans? Regarding the latter, what would happen for those who would not qualify given limited family income, indebtedness, and so forth? Will students in this situation be eliminated solely on the basis of economics? What about the options of those who are unable to raise the necessary funds? Where will they go? To their second, third, or fourth choices? Back to an impoverished public school? Will they not be left behind?

Let us consider prospects for teachers and administrators as well. After those who have scored high on for example a national teachers’ exam have gotten jobs ostensibly at the best schools, most likely increasingly privatized, where will the others go? Charters, magnets, alternative schools? How will they be sorted out among the remaining spaces? The same must be asked regarding school administrators and principals. According to the Bush plan in particular, those who have gotten the best results in raising and maintaining high test scores for students will be the most sought after. They would receive bonuses. What will be the plight of principals and others who have been in schools where students have presented challenges in terms of their achievement as demonstrated on test scores, but who have nevertheless made improvement and grown let us say a few grade levels within a year, but who remain below the averages that count? What will be their fate? And for those who have administered schools in which student achievement persists below the indicators for success, what will their choices be? On a related matter, what will be the consequences for morale among teachers, forced into competition with one another because of the rush to dash across the finish line in testing to beat the others? What will come of collaborative efforts and collegiality among teachers? What will come of the relationships between schools and their feeder schools, when one is designated as behind or failing?

Issues related to curriculum and pedagogy also raise matters of concern. In terms of the former, there are serious implications for the content of the curriculum and the nature of courses that students take. With a return to the five new basics as proposed by A Nation at Risk, there is an assumption that this will ensure that students get the knowledge they will need to pass tests and be successful in life. Furthermore, I can foresee a movement to return to the good old days of the Western civilization focus with a homogenizing intent, as a corrective to the drift to cacophony and as a consequence of multiculturalism and issues of diversity and difference, which are cited as responsible for lowered standards and low literacy scores. In this regard, Stotsky specifically argues that multicultural classroom instruction has undermined our children’s ability to read, write, and reason.30 To restore curricular order, is this assault on inclusion of diversity and difference not a harbinger for a return to a more classic and traditional curriculum wherein Eurocentric perspectives and values will be recalibrated at the core?

In the wake of an attempt to establish curricular control, a focus on teachers will be a next logical step. When one considers that becoming an educator, a teacher in particular, is not based on training and the transmission of strategies, tactics, and internalization of best practices, but rather academic and professional preparation to understand and negotiate the complexities of teaching and learning as well as working within complex and dynamic organizations that have particular cultures,31 then one has to question what will be the future for those who see education as holistic, intended to engender intellectual, affective, ethical, aesthetic, as well as physical development of others, and not merely to pass tests? Will schools be able to retain a corps of educators who will make teaching their career, if they must be perpetually tested, regulated, disciplined, rewarded, and punished based on the test scores of their students? Will teachers who believe in education for creative, transformative, democratic ideals, stay and not be turned away or driven out by policies and practices designed to deskill them and render them mere extensions of the testing industry? If they stay, where will they be? In the successful schools? The alternatives? If they choose to stay in failing schools, how long will they last? What will sustain their spirit in schools on probation, under threat of closure and eroding funding? And when they leave, who will remain for the students left behind and what kind of education will be provided for them?

The same questions need to be posed regarding school administrators, principals in particular. Perhaps for some, maybe many, there will be an inevitable lure of prospects for increased funding and bonuses for success as rewards for increased and high test scores of students. Their own survival will depend upon this. In this kind of climate, what kind of education will they promote and advocate? What educational goals and objectives will they seek to achieve? What kind of leadership will they provide regarding curricular design, courses, requirements, and electives? Which teachers will they recommend for retention? For dismissal? For probationary status? How will they reward and sanction particular pedagogical practices? How will they respond to and deal with differences between themselves and teachers regarding the aims and purposes of education? Will those who challenge the testing juggernaut be stigmatized, silenced, and drummed out of the profession? And for those in educational leadership positions, what will become of those who themselves question the wisdom of reducing assessment of school success and failure, teacher success and failure, student success and failure, to the matter of test scores? Further, regarding the distribution of leadership, which schools will be able to attract the “better” and “most qualified” principals and other administrators? And consequently, who will be left to administer the less successful and failing schools?

Conclusion

Taken collectively, the questions that I have posed above regarding the implications of the proposed educational reforms and their effects upon students, teachers, and individuals in administrative roles such as principals, address issues that warrant serious consideration and reflection, given their short- and long-range impact on education in the United States. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon for testing, testing, and more testing, and a reductive approach to education and learning, individuals and groups who question the assumptions of the proposals for educational reform and their consequences should engage in discussion and debate that challenge the direction that is being chartered, and work to forge a new direction. In my view the United States needs to develop a new culture of education, learning, and achievement that is based on situating the local within the context of the global, with an appreciation of what it means to live within an increasingly interdependent system. We as a nation need to participate in a serious dialogue in which we revisit what it is that we believe should constitute our vision of an educated person for the twenty-first century: what kinds of knowledge, skills, dispositions, habits of mind, and values do we think are important and necessary to prepare individuals as citizens of not only this nation, but also the global society? The dialogues need to take place in homes, communities, schools, and other public forums, between and among educators, policymakers, parents, and other constituents of educational institutions.

It is for these reasons, along with a glaring lack of attention to the implications of the above issues that I have raised, that the proposals for school reform such as A Nation at Risk, and No Child Left Behind are empty rhetoric, indeed ruses, which while claiming to be in the nation’s interest and thus in the interest of everyone, are really designed with the intent to perpetuate the given order of things, sustain privileges, provide additional funds to the haves and therefore widen the gap between them and the have-nots. This is what makes the proposals suspect in that once implemented, they will support the existing racial/ethnic and class differences, domestically, and at the same time work to enforce the existent global order: the overdeveloped postindustrialized, information-age societies on one axis, and the underdeveloped, marginally industrialized, poor, struggling economies, many of which remain agrarian, producing subsistent goods and products, on the other. The educational policies and complementary role of educational institutions in the United States will serve to reinforce a hierarchy with increasingly differential opportunities for quality education, quality of life, and active participation in the public life of the nation.

The implications of such proposals for educational reform being enforced are startling. They will result in not only many, many children left behind, in the nation, but also many countries and societies in the world left behind, given the consequences of an educational system that stresses competition, winners and losers, rewards and punishment, the desire and need to be number one, the drive to consume even more resources and monopolize access to them, and a resultant callous disregard for the welfare of others emanating from a belief that one has earned and indeed deserves privileges at the expense of others.

Notes

1 Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited (New York: Longman, 1989), viii.

2 Ibid., 2.

3 Daniel Tanner, “The American High School at the Crossroads,” Educational Leadership 41, 6 (March 1984): 6.

4 George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind (Washington, D.C.: Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2001), 2.

5 Ibid., 2.

6 Ibid., 13.

7 Doran Christensen, The Politics of Educational Reform: What Vested Interests Are at Stake? (Chicago: American Educational Studies Association, 1987), ERIC Reproduction Service ED 290735, 5.

8 Melvin Howards, Testing: Illusions of Measurement, ERIC Reproduction Service, 1987 ED300393, 1.

9 See Abdul A. A-Rubaiy, Current Voices of Reforms in American Education: Ethnocentrism Or Globalism (Houston, Tex.: Comparative and International Education Society, 1984); ERIC Document Reproductive Service, 1984, ED265646.

10 See Gerald W. Bracey, “Why Can’t They Be Like We Were?” Phi Delta Kappan 73, 2 (October 1991): 104–17.

11 Tanner, “The American High School at the Crossroads,” 7.

12 Ibid.

13 Howards, Testing, 17.

14 Bush, No Child Left Behind, 16.

15 Ibid., 17.

16 Ibid., 20–21.

17 James E. Albrecht, “A Nation at Risk: Another View,” in Phi Delta Kappan 65, 10 (June 1984): 684.

18 Clifford Adelman, War and Peace among the Words: Rhetoric, Style and Propaganda in Response to National Reports on Higher Education (ERIC Document Reproductive Service, 1985), ED264758, 46.

19 Fran Lehr, Responses of the English Language Arts Profession to A Nation at Risk (Urbana, Ill.: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1984); Springfield, Va.: ERIC Document Reproductive Service, 1984, ED250690, 1.

20 William E. Gardner, “A Nation at Risk: Some Critical Comments,” Journal of Teacher Education 35, 1 (January–February 1984): 15.

21 Sandra L. Hunt and Ann Q. Staton, “The Communication of Education Reform: A Nation At Risk,” Communication Education 45, 4 (October 1996): 9.

22 Howards, 2.

23 Christensen, The Politics of Educational Reform, 11.

24 W. James Popham, The Truth about Testing: An Educator’s Call to Action (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001).

25 Hunt and Staton, “The Communication of Education Reform,” 12.

26 Albrecht, “A Nation at Risk,” 684.

27 Ibid., 685.

28 Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic 4, 1 (2001): 10.

29 Stephanie Banchero, “Equity Not in School-Funding Equation,” Chicago Tribune (December 30, 2001): sec. 1, 19.

30 Sandra Stotsky, Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason (New York: Free Press, 1999).

31 Gary Griffin, ed., “Changes in Teacher Education: Looking to the Future,” The Education of Teachers. The Ninety-Eighth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago, Ill.: Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 1999).