Your Federal Government is Ruining Worcester's Schools

Usually when people criticize the Feds, it's "the federal government" they criticize -- those folks in Washington, over whom you have no control -- as if you can't influence public affairs. You can. So read; then act.

The No Child Left Behind Act was a bipartisan effort -- Sen. Kennedy was among its many sponsors -- that has had profound effects on the schools in my hometown of Worcester, MA. By one measure, standardized test scores, the city schools are improving. But if you look closely at what teachers, administrators and students are actually DOING, I think you'll find that in many ways the schools are worse.

For example, administrators, to justify the actions of their teachers with respect to state standards (and driven by the need to demonstrate their efforts in the case of low test scores) have demanded that teachers reference the state standards on all their lesson plans. Lesson plans have become more and more over-written as a result, and teachers are either getting disgusted with the whole thing and faking it, or simply wasting time thinking about state standards rather than what they as teachers know their students need.

Another example I can pull from my own experience. When my school, the ALL School was placed on the state's list of underperforming schools, many state functionaries came in to examine the school improvement plan. They didn't like it, although it was the LAST group of state employees that had come through that had helped the administration write it. Back to the drawing board and the administration writes another one. Then another, because the state employees were still dissatisfied. Meanwhile, the normal administrative matters of running the ALL School were neglected. I didn't see an administrator in the classroom or the halls except in the case of an emergency. They were too busy gratifying their superiors from the Dept. of Education. The focus on documentation is typical of the bureaucratic mindset.

Another result of the focus on test results is that administrators develop tactics to focus on SOME kids who can be pushed over the threshold of the MCAS test into "Proficient" at the expense of other kids who might need more points to make it into "Needs Improvement" or "Advanced." Some students get the extra tutoring to bring them up on the basis of their test scores alone, with little regard for other factors (the child is homeless, the mother is a junkie, or an equally deserving kid is in the middle of his rank and less likely to get into the next one because he'll need more points).

Teachers, forced by their experiences in the classroom to be realists even as their idealism got them there in the first place, view these administrative responses with a mixture of disgust and anger. Forced to focus on documentation instead of their students, they burn out or make compromises they would otherwise eschew.

So here's my advice to the few Worcester citizens who really care about public education: Go to your neighborhood school and ask the teachers what they think about education reform and accountability and their effects on the schools. Then write Congress and tell them to nullify No Child Left Behind.