Resistance to NCLB

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

It’s an odd coincidence that I encountered this line from Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” tonight. It was late—is late as I write this—and I am preparing to teach tomorrow by reviewing the assigned readings. After a day of meeting with advisees, I ran off to the School Governance Council meeting for my son’s school, at which we had two guests from the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE), including its executive director, Bob Reader. Then I drove across the state in the rain to attend a roundtable discussion in Meriden hosted by US State Representative Chris Murphy’s education aide Linda Forman, at which we discussed the reauthorization and overhaul of the No Child Left Behind act. This act has been unauthorized for four years now but we are still subject to its controversial provisions.

At both meetings we discussed the roles and rights of parents, community members, and classroom teachers in the education of students. Members of school governance councils have the right and responsibility to advise building principals on budget, hiring, and school policies, and act as a liaison between and among the schools, the boards of education, and the parents and community members. But we have no real authority. Our advice on these issues is in no way binding. And there’s no funding from any agency—town, state, or federal—to assist us in our efforts to communicate with the public.

The 5th congressional district meeting I attended was informative but also passionate. Not contentious, as most of us were in relative agreement, but the outrage against NCLB and its provisions was deep and sincere. I’ve always felt like a bit of a conspiracy theorist for thinking that NCLB, by design, was intended to dismantle public education, but I was surprised, relieved, and disturbed to hear building principals, a superintendent, board of education members, and a higher education board of trustees member say essentially the same thing. There were many calls to scrap the law entirely—which of course isn’t going to happen. But much frustration was expressed, in particular that it took several years before the unrealistic goals of the law affected wealthy school districts, and that only until gold coast schools and shoreline schools and Litchfield County schools started to make the Failing Schools list did everyone become outspokenly outraged and begin to challenge this law.

Implicitly or explicitly, the consensus at both meetings was that we in education are surrounded by unjust laws that hold us to unattainable goals, constant means of measurement, a perpetual threat of punishment, and woefully inadequate funding for the tasks at hand.

Windham and Meriden are both priority school districts. Both have struggled for many years with the myriad challenges of urban education, and both have been pressed upon by the provisions of NCLB. Both suffer from so-called white flight (which has become more class-based than race-based, but still occurs) and both find themselves castigated for their inability to ameliorate all the challenges of meeting the educational needs of members of educational subgroups, such as English Language Learners. At the Windham School Governance Council meeting, we discussed the challenge of reaching out to community members, particularly from the Spanish-speaking community. At the Meriden NCLB Roundtable discussion, we discussed the unfairness of labeling a whole school a failure because of the inability to solve the problems experienced by students from various subgroups. In both meetings we discussed the need for targeted assistance, in terms of public outreach, student enrichment, and teacher professional development.

The federal law as it stands now is punitive in nature. It presupposes that teachers already possess the means to fix these problems but that we lack the incentive to enact the solutions. If we fail to fix these problems completely within the short time frame of a handful of years, then schools lose funds, administrators can be fired, schools can be closed, and funds are diverted from the public sector to the private sector as students are offered the opportunity to receive tutoring services from any number of approved, private service providers, such as Sylvan Learning Centers, to name a well known one.

But what we really need and want is a federal law that helps us to identify needs and that provides the human and financial resources to address those needs—be they outreach, instruction, or professional development—without the stigmatizing and punishment that characterizes current law.

I drove home, still in the rain, after a long day. After ten PM, I graded essays, finished re-reading Thoreau, and then wrote. I know that most of us work this hard. If only we had the support and the respect we need and deserve.