NCLB, Part I

This entry is based on this New York Times editorial.

The way I see it? NCLB is addressing symptoms, not causes. And no matter what you call it (this Yahoo article says the name will change—good marketing move, Dems), only the foolish man builds his house upon the sand.

I’m not saying this is a hopeless cause. I think Obama is doing his best with what he has—he has NCLB, he has a problem, so he’s doing what he can to fix it. He’s repositioning the system’s priorities and its way of dealing justice. Okay. It’s a start.

But saying that “the quality of teachers assigned to schools with poor and minority children” is the real problem… sorry, bud, but I don’t think it’s so. Teachers aren’t priests. These guys are free agents, my friend. They apply for jobs where they want them—and if it was me, I would be looking for a job near a nice suburb, where I don’t have to put bars on my windows and where I can send my kid to the public school. If I have the resources and I can get hired, that’s where I’m headed.

And teachers are college-educated. Good teachers have the tools and skills to move to suburbia or get a job at a private school where kids are polite and want to learn. The problem is not that teachers are avoiding poor and minority students, per se; they are avoiding the environments in which many poor and minority students are found.

Maybe this is a hasty generalization. I grew up in small-town Ohio, after all. Ninety-nine percent of my entire county is white. The most intense thing that happened in Van Wert City Schools was a fake bomb threat in 2002. The entire ordeal lasted less than six hours. (I guess we also had a tornado. But that was probably not caused by students.) So what do I know about minority schools? Nothing, I guess. Just rumors. But my cousin went to public school in Indianapolis, and he got into some bad stuff. So rumors and family experience. Kind of.

In any event, that’s irrelevant. If you have a good teacher, he or she will want to teach bright children. If a school has bright students, it will attract better teachers. For good teachers, teaching bright students is their reward for hard work and skill in the classroom. This is the first flaw in the punishment/rewards idea. The reward is getting out of a school perceived in a negative light. No matter how much money you give that school, Obama, the teachers will still want to move to the system that has students who will do their homework and listen to lecture. Poorly-perceived schools will always have underqualified rookies. They are the ones who will take any job they can get their hands on to pay off student loans and to get a few years of teaching under their belts. But once those twentysomethings get married and start thinking about kids, they want to go where they can let their kids play outside and where they can feel safe.

That’s the real problem. It’s not about rewards and punishment—it’s about how things work. It’s not a problem that you can fix with a federal rewards/punishments program. It’s a social ill. I don’t know how you can fix that. (And in the history of civilization, no one, not even the Communists, have figured it out, either.)

I feel a little more confident in my ability to competently argue about curriculum. But since I’m out of time, maybe that will be NCLB, Part II.

In other news, check out this NY Times editorial. I like it.