Time Lag in Educational Assessent: Contemporary Political Trends Create Unintended Giant Step Backwards
Educational practice in public schools has trended from modernist practices toward the symbolic-interpretive. The reduced tendency to rely on standardized testing for all grades, and to attempt more individualized instruction is an indicator of this trend. The advent of the IEP (individual education plan) to modify instruction and expectations for students with recognized disabilities is a clear example of altered educational practices in favor of more allowance for individual student differences.
The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 was a significant milestone in the attempts to make public education in the United States more effective. The principle mechanism of improvement put in place by No Child Left Behind (hereafter NCLB) is systematic testing of student academic performance in math and reading. Punitive measures are taken against those schools that repeatedly fail to show improvement in less-than-satisfactory test scores.
The political support for NCLB was initially bipartisan; it was the first major proposal of the George W. Bush presidency, based upon a program in Texas during the Bush governorship of that state which was reported as truly successful in improving educational performance there. The political attractiveness of NCLB was undeniable: it promised results in simple modernistic terms through a plausible-sounding system which seemed to make provision for fostering improvement. Friends of education without first-hand experience in the field could find much to like in the description of the program.
Some problems of the theory of NCLB can be interpreted in terms of organization theory, as a conflict between modernist theoretical underpinnings of NCLB and the symbolic-interpretive current educational practices.
The theoretical basis of NCLB assumes the plausibility (and desirability) of educating all students to a given level of proficiency in certain basic academic skills, in reality at the expense of other academic areas. This theory is firmly rooted in modernist thinking, with objective testing to determine progress toward the standard, and with insufficient account being taken of students' individual differences and factors such as local economic influences which affect the students' performance. Strict NCLB enforcement eventually denies funding to low-performing schools. The highly idealistic goal of NCLB flies in the face of practicality, and in the face of the current pragmatic symbolic-interpretive approach to public education.
The flaws of imposing this modernist program onto a more individualized symbolic-interpretive educational system are several. First, common sense tells the reasonable person with experience in education that the concept that all children in so large and diverse a population as the United States can be made to perform at the same level on a given time schedule is unrealistic. From the modernist perspective, the verbal description sounds simple and plausible enough, but it does not look beyond the surface plausibility of the description to the many factors that affect a child's academic performance. In the modernist "top down" organizational plan, there is an assumption that setting a goal and telling the administrators and teachers to achieve it, or else, is sufficient to bring results, or else. To educators accustomed to working with diverse students in a system that has come to recognize their differences, it is a throwback of philosophy to make demands that require returning to the more factory-style pedagogy of modernism.
The ultimate result of the emphasis on the objective test results for the survival of the school leads to the practice of "teaching to the test," at the expense of individual student differences, enrichment and enhancement of the subject matter, and the blind alley of grinding students down with constant emphasis on those skills that may be their very nemeses.
Like other aspects of contemporary society, public education has moved from the modernist to symbolic-interpretive and may be wending to post-modernism. No act of Congress can turn the trend back to the relative "safety" of modernist assumptions. The hands on the clock only move in one direction.
Sources
Hatch, M. J. and A. L. Cunliffe. 2006. Organization Theory: Modern, Symbolic, and Postmodern Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml
2 comments:
NCLB has not worked because it was never funded by Congress, some states have changed their standards, and parents blame teachers and schools. All parties need to work together. The tests need to be more representative of classroom work and all fields of study need teaching and assessment.
Since I my blog was also on No Child Left Behind, I was interested in what your conclusions where being a teacher.
I found it interesting that you state that "educational practice in public schools has trended from modernist practices toward symbolic-interpretive". I'd like to hear more about why you think this is so. It seems like to me, that with NCLB, this has forced/pushed teachers into having to use a more of a modernistic model, then starting to lean towards a symbolic interpretive.
It seems like the educational tests of how students learn support more of a symbolic approach, such as recognizing the fact that all children have various preferred ways to process new information (visual, kinetically, etc. ).
I agree with you that public opinion seemed to dangerously accept the concept of NCLB. Perhaps because of it's simplicity into saying, if you don't get this score on a test, you failed -- and making the results for each school public.
I agree with you 100% about this process failing to take into account individual learning styles, and in the end teaching the child to pass a test, but not to think.
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