NCLB in ...England?

(Thanks to Tauna Rogers)

It's true.

In fact, as Steve Koss reports in a must read piece on the excellent NYC Public Schools Parents blog, England's 20-year experiment with "performance standards and school rating" is the "progenitor of No Child Left Behind."   The experiment has proved so disastrous that the English National Union of Teachers, with its 190,000 members, has decided to boycott the 2010 national standardized exams. 

More surprisingly, the "National Association of Headteachers appears set to follow in their boycott footsteps... ."  Headteachers are the equivalent of American school principals.

Boycott.  Where are the American teachers unions?  A refusal to administer the annual standardized tests would bring the misbegotten NCLB notion of school accountability to a screeching halt.

What are the people who run the schools going to do?  Fire all the teachers and replace them with Teach for America recruits?  I don't  think so.

How did an NCLB-type program end up in the United Kingdom?  For that we can thank --who else?-- Margaret Thatcher.  In 1988 she introduced something called the Standard Attainment Tests designed specifically to measure a Thatcher-conceived national curriculum.  Not only could these tests keep track of student progress, they were also used to rate each school's yearly performance.

Sound familiar?

Criticisms of the Thatcher program began almost immediately, but it took until the early 2000's for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to effectively drop out of the program.  But not England, which persisted in using the tests to rate schools AND to determine "teachers’ pay, headmasters’ continued employment, and schools’ reputations."

Sound familiar?

But criticism of the Standard Attainment Tests continued to grow:

"Educators throughout England were decrying the narrowing of curriculum, pervasive 'teaching to the test,' widespread demotivation of students toward learning, and impacts on students’ health due to intense pressure from schools and parents."

Sound familiar?

And then, inevitably, cheating to raise test scores reared its ugly head.  A teacher accused of helping her students cheat committed suicide.

Sound familiar?  (The cheating anyway.  As far as I know, no teacher has died as a consequence of cheating, at least not in the physical sense.)

American educators should learn the lesson of England's experiment with its version of No Child Left Behind.  So should Barack Obama and Arne Duncan.  Perhaps then it won't take twenty years to acknowledge the bankruptcy of NCLB's testing for accountability.  It shouldn't take that long to learn what British state school teacher Francis Gilbert finally came to realize:

"In practice, however, these tests have proved to be nightmarish failures. The Sats have not only led to a marked decline in standards, they have broken children's zeal for learning. They have alienated pupils, teachers and parents alike without making schools properly accountable. ... the Sats ... have bludgeoned out all enthusiasm for learning, leaving [children] lacking in initiative, floundering when confronted with unexpected challenges, unable to construct sustained arguments and powerless to think imaginatively."

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