No Child Left Behind? It's more like, Every Child Robbed of Critical Writing and Thinking Skills in Favor of Rote Memorization

Okay, that's a long title, but it pretty much sums up what we've experienced here at the UI over the past few years. The students have gotten progressively worse at writing, and I can only attribute this to the increasing implementation of No Child Left Behind's impoverished standards of so-called "accountability." I'm sure all teachers in the history of the world have experienced those students who only want to know what they need to know to pass the test and not a thing more. But, I would argue that these types of students are now the rule, and not the exception.

Yes, this is anecdotal evidence. I have no statistics to "prove" my observations. But I have plenty of personal experience with my students and I have watched the past six semesters as they turn in papers of poorer and poorer quality and require more editing than before.

Case in point: for the past six semesters, I've graded the same term paper assignment. It's ten pages long and requires minimal research and news analysis and understanding. What I've learned, however, is that punctuation is extinct these days. I graded a series of papers this morning full of run-on sentences. I had to comment on one student's papers that she needed to learn the difference between a period and a comma. Forget proof-reading. Forget concise sentence construction. The mechanical errors in these papers were so bad, I couldn't grade the content, and I told these students so in their comments.

A better example: we give essay exams to our large lecture class. When meeting with students to discuss their grades, every one who had a lower grade than expected remarked that they had NEVER taken an essay exam before. Yet, students expect As- but how can you succeed on a test format you've never taken before?

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that No Child Left Behind teaches rote learning and not critical thinking. I try to emphasize to my students to trust their ability to reason through problems, but inevitably it comes back to the question, "What do I need to know for the test?"

It makes sense, though, that a presidential administration that forged a legacy of groupthink and a mantra of "Dissidence is unpatriotic" would encourage a generation of children rendered incapable of thinking for themselves. Why ask questions, when someone can tell me the answer? Why do the intellectual work, when someone will do it for me? Why think for myself, when someone will tell me what to think? It's clear we live in a time unwilling to question the lies spewing from the White House and all of it's talking heads; you need to look no further than the alternate reality to which Bush cronies like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney defiantly cling (or perhaps that should be reversed: Rove and Cheney's crony, the president?). These people persist in adhering to their message that our way of life, our freedom, couched as it is in consumerist subtexts, relies on a perpetual militarism that has literally attacked foreign governments who did not agree with us. Why would they want a citizenry, in its basic definition?

African slaves used to be denied the right to education based on the fear that they would learn to think for themselves and overthrow their masters. Keep 'em blind, keep 'em dumb: this is hegemony in action. So education is publicly available, but that's just it. Hegemony expands and subsumes subaltern viewpoints in it's service. It is in the interest of those in power to appear to offer basic rights to all sectors of society, to appear as if it has conceded; the questioning may end after that. But it is exactly this capability of those in power, to soothe the masses through seeming acts of generosity and benevolence, that necessitates critical vigilance. This is why we MUST ask questions of those in power.

Maybe that's not the overt goal of NCLB, and maybe our First Lady really did care that every child received a good education. But on that line of thought, placing the blame solely on the schools reveals yet another hole in the logic of family-centered, compassionate conservatism. NCLB locates the problem of poor student performance within the schools; more to the point, it places teachers solely accountable for student success or failure. It does not account for the myriad of other social and cultural factors that may contribute to a student's success; it does, on the other hand, penalize these students and communities for their inability to meets dogmatic standards of education that are better suited for those in well-funded facilities with stable and nurturing home lives.

My graduate director asks a good questions posed by her doctoral advisor: Are you here for a degree, or an education? There is a difference, and NCLB fosters a degree mentality that looks to schooling as a means to an end, or rather, better test scores. It keeps students from asking question in the classroom- questions other than how to ace the exam. Ultimately, if you don't ask questions while receiving your education, is someone is always providing the answers for you, and the goal of an education is to receive knowledge to be applied elsewhere, why would students then leave the university and begin to ask questions? Why would they suddenly engage when all their life, they've been allowed to fly in auto-pilot?

Sadly, I see this lack of curiosity and apathy in the papers that I grade. It's not that students don't want to succeed- they want that grade, alright. But they want the answers supplied for them. Unfortunately, this sets the stage for power-hungry demagogues like our current presidential administration who would rather keep us dumb and uneducated than thinking for ourselves.