I was disturbed to see the Tribune defend the No Child Left Behind Act in the editorial “The school reform backlash.” Leaving aside the controversy about funding of this mandate, this piece of legislation was poorly conceived as a real solution to school problems.
No Child mandates that a school’s success be evaluated exclusively on the outcome of standardized tests. It is myopic to use these as the sole source of gauging academic achievement. If this were feasible, wouldn’t colleges ask only for SAT or ACT scores for admission rather than also looking at transcripts, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, essays and interviews? Colleges know that while standardized tests are an important component of evaluating student capability, they are grossly inadequate as the only assessment, despite the Educational Testing Service spending millions of dollars on revision. In addition, if colleges were only to ask for test scores, high-school education would transform from focusing on learning and critical thinking to teaching strategies on how to eliminate wrong answers from multiple-choice exams.
Unfortunately this has been the result of this act already. States and localities are forced to create standardized tests that are inadequate as the exclusive determination of academic achievement while lacking the resources the ETS can afford for revision.
Teachers are put under extraordinary pressure to cover tricks for passing these tests rather than teaching students traditional subject matter.
Valuable time for teachers to work with students to help them learn fundamentals is being replaced with weeks of additional testing.
It saddens me that the majority of the politicians in this country as well as the editorial staff at the Tribune have failed to consider these and other clear shortcomings in the No Child Left Behind Act before aggressively supporting this flawed legislation.
