In this SpeakOut post, Marion Brady interviews Susan Ohanian on the unintended consequences of the No Child Left Behind Legislation.
MARION: Susan, I taught in four different high schools—one, rural; one, small town; one, urban; and one on a university campus. They all served the general population in their immediate areas, so there were no cherry-picked students. None of the four high schools had even one reading teacher. That was then. This is now. The three high schools here in Florida with which I’m now most familiar have TEN reading teachers. Ten EACH! That’s big money. What’s going on here?
SUSAN: I was a reading teacher in five different urban schools-elementary, middle, and high school, and I admit to being stunned by the idea of ten reading teachers in a school. Surely this is the triumph of test prep. Since from the get-go the imposition of a national test has been the point of thuggery masquerading as school reform, I guess this is no surprise.
MARION: You were THE teacher?
SUSAN: In a school of 1,500 middle schoolers, there were three of us. Special reading instruction for “those” kids was a band-aid approach for confronting the issue of the rigid curriculum we’ve faced for decades. Starting in kindergarten, schools are consumed by “getting ready for” the Carnegie units and Harvard. Another teacher and I pushed the administration into trying something different. We scrapped corrective reading and introduced Language Arts Tutorial. Listed as LAT on the report card, some parents expressed astonishment that their kids, who had always had a lot of trouble in school, were doing so well in Latin. I wrote a book about this: “Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum.”
MARION: Over the last 40 or so years, I’ve written a couple of million words about how that curriculum is wasting time and talent, but nothing important has changed.
SUSAN: No, you’re wrong. It’s gotten worse. The Common Core State (sic)* Standards are locking that creaky curriculum in rigid place, draining away any possibility of kid-friendly approaches.
MARION: Let’s talk more about that later. Right now, I’d like to know what explains all those new high school reading teachers. It’s true there are more non-native English speakers enrolled than when I was teaching, but from my observation, most of the kids stuck in reading classes know perfectly well how to read. In fact, some are honors students enrolled in advanced classes. They’re just failing the reading tests. Something’s wrong here.
SUSAN: Any high school that puts honors students into remedial reading because of failing state tests has made a hoax of reading help. Why don’t they call it what it is? Test prep.
Now that the news is in that over 70% of Vermont schools are failing to meet NCLB standards, I wonder if we will see that explosion is reading teachers that you report in Florida. When Vermont went after the NCLB money and was forced to administer DIBELS in all Title 1 schools, I suggested that the $700-$800 per child budgeted for the federal Reading First requirements could be much better spent by giving it directly to Title 1 families. What the families of children living in poverty really need is a living wage. But since schools can’t provide that, let’s redirect those federal dollars—giving families a stipend to buy books, subscribe to newspapers, attend concerts, visit museums, and participate in many of the other niceties which children in middle class families take for granted.
Since schools have proven themselves incapable of changing a moribund curriculum, let’s divert the extra funds earmarked for foisting “scientific reading” on children living in poverty. Instead of funding more middle class jobs (in this case, reading teachers), let’s scrap the billions going to Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other testing giants and give the money directly to families and see how that changes the reading scores.
*Orwellian. The fifty states didn’t have anything to do with developing the Common Core Standards. They were paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy