Freedom Socialist • Vol. 25, No. 3 • August-September 2004

The hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind

Education act grooms students for life as digital wage slaves

by Steve Strauss

When it comes to acquiring the academic skills needed to find a good job in the digital economy of the 21st century, Washington boasts that no child will be left behind. This is the high-minded goal professed by backers of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the 2001 update of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

NCLB proponents want to standardize the public school curriculum in reading and mathematics. The law requires that students demonstrate "adequate yearly progress" as measured by rigorous tests. Each year, the performance of the student body as a whole, as well as specific subgroups, must improve.

NCLB holds schools "accountable" by allowing the government to withhold badly needed federal funds, or even to close schools, if test scores are not high enough.

These draconian measures enjoy bipartisan support. The legislation was a joint project of the Bush administration and congressional representatives, with Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy in the forefront. Today, Bush’s rival for the presidency, Senator John Kerry, offers only the criticism that Bush isn’t supporting the program with enough funding.

Despite the official cheerleading, however, No Child Left Behind doesn’t deserve a passing grade.

A lesson plan for failure. The testing requirements of the bill have drawn special fire, with good reason.

Among other stipulations, NCLB mandates that students in grades three through eight take annual reading and math tests and that their scores improve every time. Many classroom teachers see their profession devolving into mere test preparation.

More and more parents, too, are questioning the high-stakes tests that can single-handedly decide the academic fate of their children.

Leaders of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry attributed recent increases in the incidence of childhood depression and anxiety to the stressful new testing climate in the classroom. The National Association of School Psychologists pointed out that being held back in school has now replaced losing a parent as a child’s number one fear.

Despite the broad questioning, federal and local bureaucrats are pushing ahead. Recently, for example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg set out to implement new testing requirements for children to be promoted from third to fourth grade.

Bloomberg’s plan highlights the hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind. Estimates are that about 15,000 third-graders yearly will not pass his exams. They will therefore be literally left behind — and being held back a grade or grades is one of the leading predictors of whether a student will drop out of school.

Moreover, as a direct result of the performance anxiety caused by NCLB, more and more states are adopting stringent exit examinations for high school graduation. Thus, more and more seniors will be ready to graduate, only to find themselves left behind at commencement.

But testing rules are far from the only problem with NCLB. One of its features is a grant project called Reading First, which is only available to programs that use a specific, intensively phonics-based type of reading instruction, one that many educators pan. Among the critics of this "government intrusion" into the classroom is the 70,000-member National Council of Teachers of English.

Finally, the effort to meet NCLB standards is costly. So, since the focus of the act is on reading and mathematics, subjects such as art, music, and physical education are increasingly on the chopping block in schools already trying to cope with budget cutbacks. Students interested in these areas can just leave their aspirations behind.

A big shiny apple for corporations. Teachers, students, and parents may not love NCLB, but big business gives it an A+. The Business Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs of the nation’s largest corporations, announced that "we consistently supported implementation of this law."

No Child Left Behind is, in fact, the culmination of about a decade of efforts by the Business Roundtable, and the class it represents, to transform the U.S. public schools into what it calls a "workforce development system."

Fearing competition from corporate Europe and corporate Asia for control of the planet’s markets, raw materials, and cheap labor, the Business Roundtable identified "21st century skills" that, when taught to the next generation of students, are designed to produce the world’s most competitive workforce.

These skills revolve around a new type of literacy, a fluency in creating and troubleshooting the digital language of software and hardware. The Business Roundtable has even expressed its concern that U.S. students are deficient in their ability to read instruction manuals. This is the so-called literacy crisis, as popularized by the corporate media.

In sum, No Child Left Behind is corporate America’s scheme to kidnap the public schools in order to manufacture a workforce with the qualities that will help it to maintain a competitive edge in the global, imperialist economy.

As Norman Augustine stated, "Competition in the international marketplace is, in reality, a ‘battle of the classrooms.’" Augustine is the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, past head of the Education Task Force of the Business Roundtable, and education advisor to George W. Bush.

Creating a labor pool for Microsoft and the Army. But No Child Left Behind is more than just a workforce development bill. The drive to maintain economic hegemony also demands an increased role for the Pentagon. NCLB accommodates this by requiring schools to give information about students to military recruiters (unless parents register an objection).

This is what we can anticipate under NCLB: a two-track public school system, with one track manufacturing future workers for big business, and the other future soldiers for the Pentagon. (Of course, students who fail at both of these vocations can always look forward to becoming part of the ever-growing prison workforce.)

If the present course of education is allowed to stand, students will increasingly become merely the new workers and the new soldiers in the same war for economic plunder. In its efforts to conscript U.S. public schools into this global economic war, corporate America aims to leave no child behind.

Steve Strauss, a Baltimore neurologist, can be reached at stevenstrauss436@hotmail.com. His book The Linguistics, Neurology, and Politics of Phonics: Silent e Speaks Out is due from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in September.

Return to Index page for this issue
Return to Freedom Socialist newspaper main page
Return to FSP homepage.